Democratic digital futures
Democratic digital futures is one of the four focal areas of research at the Faculty of Law. We investigate how digital technologies reshape law, affecting democracy, economies, and work. Our research addresses e.g. the regulation of AI and algorithmic decision-making, intellectual property rights, platform governance, and blockchain communities. We challenge the narratives of technological inevitability, emphasizing legal imaginaries that resist concentrated power, safeguard rights, and reclaim democratic agency in shaping inclusive and accountable digital futures.
Digital technologies reshape societies, transforming how we communicate, interact, work, and govern societies. The technologies cut across societies, affecting sectors such as healthcare, education, public administration, finance, and manufacturing. Technological transformations raise foundational challenges to democracy, individual autonomy and accountability, and organization of work and value generation. As e.g. AI and platform infrastructures increasingly mediate decisions, relationships, and access to resources, the technologies and the affordances they create shape the normative foundations of future societies.
We confront these transformations, asking not only how the law can adapt, but how it can contest and reshape the emerging digital order to deliver democratic futures. Our work interrogates the shifting boundaries of digital rights and constitutionalism, examines the coming shape of AI harms and AI regulation, charts the emerging forms of sustainable blockchain communities, maps the dynamics of algorithmic decision-making and explores the reconfigurations of access to and ownership and control of intellectual property rights by digital infrastructures. Across these areas, we challenge dominant narratives of technological inevitability, insisting on legal imaginaries that resist concentration of power, safeguard fundamental rights, and reclaim democratic agency in a digitized world.