Against Procedural Fetishism: A Call for a New Digital Constitution.

Digital constitutionalism, to date, has been proceduralist; it has assumed that transparency and due process can temper power and attain justice for people vis-à-vis the automated state and powerful tech companies. So far, digital constitutionalism has also been very soft and blind to its own coloniality: Instead of deploying hard law, we are still looking for ways to pressure digital behemoths to self-regulate. We downplay US dominance, colonial exploitation, and environmental degradation caused by digital imperialism. Meanwhile, the power of tech companies has escalated. They now influence many aspects of our public and private lives, from elections to our own personalities and emotions, to environmental degradation. To be successful, the project of digital constitutionalism must resist a corporate agenda of procedural fetishism, a strategy to redirect the public from more substantive and fundamental questions about the concentration and limits of power to procedural microissues. Such diversion merely reinforces the status quo. To rectify the imbalance of power between people and tech companies, a new digital constitution must therefore try something different. It must shift its focus from soft law initiatives to tangible legal obligations by the tech companies. We must redistribute wealth and power not only by breaking and taxing tech companies, fortifying regulatory enforcement, increasing public scrutiny, and adopting prohibitive laws but also by democratizing big tech by making them public utilities and giving people a say how these companies should be governed. Crucially, we must also decolonize digital constitutionalism through recognition of colonial practices of extraction and exploitation and paying attention to the voices of Indigenous peoples and communities of the so-called Global South. With all these mutually reinforcing efforts, a new digital constitution will debunk the corporate and state agenda of procedural fetishism and will establish the new social contract for the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]