Cyber-constitutionalism: Digital society among silicolonization, platform capitalism and constitutional reactions

Abstract

The rise of digital platforms and their private powers is radically changing the essence of the constitutional State: outsourcing of the guarantee of rights and freedoms, creation of a domestic jurisdiction, the building of autonomous and physically separated urban areas inter-connected via high technology. A web of networks which shapes and resembles some of the historical facts and events related to the first globalization, such as the rise of the East India Company, known as the first multinational society, and pathogens ready and able to penetrate in the core of the States, altering their form and constitutive elements. Starting from the notorious cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, the essay will focus on the main factors of crisis, on the essential nodes of the digital culture and the necessity of a constitutional reaction which will have to pass thru a mix between classical constitutionalism and cyber-constitutionalism.