ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Sociological Theory
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1362848
This article is part of the Research TopicChanging Digital Relations between Science and Society: Implications for Democracy and Human RightsView all 4 articles
Coding the Future: Digital Technologists and the Constitution of the Next System
Provisionally accepted
- George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States
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Digital technologists are coding the world of our immediate future. Digital commoners are a subset of digital technologists who aim to expand the spheres of life held in common, strengthen mutual aid, and create the conditions for shared participation in power. Relying on an understanding of technologists as activists, of technology as a movement, and of digital code as constitutional design, we analyze the digital commoners and their movement. Relying on a theory of the constitutive powers of digital technology in the areas of design, affordance, and sovereignty, we examine platform cooperatives, peer production systems, data sovereignty initiatives, and digital governance platforms, and analyze how these initiatives align with broader movements for system change. We argue that digital commoners are producing the elements of a digital commonwealth, a new form of democratic economic polity. Finally, we call on scholars and academic institutions to intervene and support digital commoning efforts, amplifying technologists’ capacity to code the future towards shared goals.
Keywords: Solidarity economy, next system, Digital Commons, System change, Constitutionalism, platform cooperatives, commonwealth, economic democracy
Received: 29 Dec 2023; Accepted: 15 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Deepak and Manski. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Dhruv Deepak, George Mason University, Fairfax, 22030, Virginia, United States
Ben Manski, George Mason University, Fairfax, 22030, Virginia, United States
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