We, the Replicated: Constitutional Revolutions After Digital Twinning and Cyber-Physical Social Systems

Abstract

This article examines how digitalization challenges the foundations of constitutionalism and, in particular, the notion of constitutional revolutions. It contends that Cyber-Physical Social Systems (CPSS), whose advent is already under way in industry, infrastructure, city management, mobility, and housing, have set a new logic in motion that relies on the replication of the social world through the so-called ‘digital twinning’. Drawing on societal constitutionalism and social theory, the article argues that this has significant consequences for how power is constitutionalized, since the emerging ‘smart’ governance tends to permeate society and to dissolve the abstraction necessary for constitutional revolutions. While contemporary proposals from constitutional theory, such as digital constitutionalism and cybernetic socialism, address these transformations, they fall short of reviving the radical dimension of constitutional change. Finally, the article looks at how to re-specify the revolutionary legacy and how the notion of constituent power could play out vis-à-vis the digital sphere.