Technology and Code as Constitution

Discussion

Dhruv Deepak and Ben Manski:

"Digital Constitutionalism is a practice around digital technology that is oriented toward next system design.

The history of the development of the internet epitomizes technology’s constitutional capacities. While now dominated by corporate interests, networked computing originated with J.C.R. Licklider’s vision of technology serving democratic exchange and collective intelligence (Pelkey et al., 2022). Licklider advocated for demilitarizing research and foresaw many of the key developments we now associate with the digital age, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and the political implications of networked computing (Dertouzos and Moses, 1979; Licklider, 1963). The displacement of his vision by an internet increasingly dominated by global corporations occurred in constitutional contests over technical standards, protocols, and governance structures. The battle to determine the internet’s technical standards and protocols was ultimately won by the Cisco, AT&T, IBM, Netscape, and Microsoft corporations (Pelkey et al., 2022; Monsees et al., 2023).

Today’s digital infrastructure signifies that constitutional victory, yet it also remains contested terrain where alternative constitutional visions persist (Wolfson, 2014). Indeed, digital technologists and activists continue to reclaim spaces for expression of their values and priorities (Mattoni, 2013). They are designing and implementing technologies that challenge the centralized control of information, allowing communities to assert authority over digital resources, and generating collective identity and solidarity among users and developers (Diani, 2000; Bauwens et al., 2019). In these cases, technologists often join with broad social movements. In particular, technologists are aligning with the long-building cooperative movement and with the much newer solidarity economy movement (Gordon Nembhard, 2021; Scholz, 2023; Papadimitropoulos and Malamidis, 2024). As we will describe in depth further in this article, coders are working with other activists to build alternatives to the extractive business models of corporate tech giants. Platform cooperatives, constructed as alternatives to platform capitalism (e.g., Amazon, Alphabet Inc., Uber), enable workers and users to collectively own and govern the digital platforms they rely on (Scholz, 2023). Building these new digital systems contributes not only to technological innovation but also to the democratization of social and economic relations, tending, we believe, to a new form of commonwealth (Manski and Manski, 2018; Bühler et al., 2023; Papadimitropoulos and Malamidis, 2024).

And that is the intent of these coders. They are deliberately writing the rules for a new society directly into the digital worlds they code. As such, they are constitutional authors. Where the 18th century saw the first triumphs of political constitutionalism, and the 19th and 20th centuries saw the emergence of economic and societal forms of constitutionalism, the 21st is experiencing the rise of digital constitutionalism (Teubner, 2010; Teubner and Golia, 2023). Here, the ordering and internal relations of an entire system is articulated in and enacted from programming protocols and code (De Gregorio and Radu, 2022).""

(https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1362848/full)