Digital politics

Code is law: digital tools are not neutral. Our daily technological choices are political acts that shape the world. Here are concrete elements for personal and collective awareness and action.

The Choice of Hosting: A Masked Political Decision

We’ve all heard that our digital choices have political implications. This assertion takes on its full meaning when we compare the use of free software (co-developed by a community for the common good) with proprietary software, which makes us dependent on private industries to access our own documents.

Let’s take a concrete example: using Google Docs may seem innocuous compared to K-Drive from the ecological host Infomaniak in Switzerland, or a sharing system hosted on your own NAS (network attached storage at home, which allows access to documents while mobile). The service provided is similar and the efficiency comparable. The difference lies in the time needed to adopt it and, above all, in the resulting responsibilities:

• With Google, registration is almost automatic. Mobile telephony forces almost all of us to have a Gmail address, the gateway to all Google services. The illusion of free service persists until our storage needs increase and pricing appears.
• With Infomaniak, a few additional minutes are necessary: you must first know about the alternative, create an account, choose between free and paid versions. A minimal but significant effort.
• The third level involves purchasing a personal NAS. Despite configuration becoming simple, crucial questions emerge: how to backup against fire or water damage risks? Should one duplicate on an external drive stored elsewhere, or subscribe to a backup service at Infomaniak or elsewhere, not to depend on them, but to secure our data?

These three approaches create radically different relationships to autonomy and digital heritage. Entrusting your data to Google means accepting that an American multinational holds considerable power over our digital life. Despite encryption promises, dependence remains. Legally, this lack of sovereignty over our own data constitutes a concerning situation. Conversely, hosting your data at home restores a responsibility similar to what we had with our paper documents. The difference between the two is actually major.

The Invisible Architects of the Digital World

This question of tool choice is only a first level of political reflection. The leaders of major technology companies, whether Apple for hardware, Microsoft for software, or OpenAI and Google for services, are perfectly aware of their political impact. They know they are transforming the world.

What is politics, after all? It’s the set of rules and practices that structure social space, modulated according to the worldview of those who hold power. This power is distributed at all levels: State, ministries, local authorities, companies, associations, and even informal collectives. Each establishes its modes of social functioning. A simple schoolyard is a political space at several levels, governed by adults, but in which children negotiate the rules of their common games, that is, the politics of their specific social space.

Digital technology now constitutes a fundamental layer of our existence, on par with air, water, or land. The iPhone, designed by Steve Jobs and his team, perfectly illustrates this political dimension of technology: appearing in 2007, this revolutionary object redefined much more than telephony, a term that has become inadequate; it transformed our social structures, our relationships to time and space, the distinction between private and public spheres, our modes of travel with GPS, and even our ways of loving, for those who meet through these tools.

Jobs’ vision was clear: technical objects should be designed by designers, not engineers, according to the principle of experience design. Intuitive objects, without user manuals, a radical break with the sophisticated technologies of the time, for which reading a manual was necessary.

In 2013, Eric Schmidt (then CEO of Google) and Jared Cohen published The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business. Their book methodically outlines the future world through seven chapters: our personal future, identity and citizenship, states, revolution, terrorism, conflicts and interventions, reconstruction. These technology company bosses thus map all dimensions of our political future. At first glance, this was surprising—weren’t they just technology manufacturers?

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022 was surprising. Why would an automotive, rocket, and battery industrialist be interested in this social network? Twitter represents the global political agora, the international assembly where politicians and citizens debate constantly. Musk quickly lifted certain restrictions on far-right, “conspiracy theorist” and other types of censored content, transforming the platform according to his vision of a democratic space.

This approach teaches us a truth: digital industrialists necessarily have a political vision. The technologies they deploy transform our lifestyles, our relationships, our ways of debating. Technology is therefore political by essence, because it restructures social space.

Money, contrary to popular belief, is not their end goal but their means. Major industrialists use their profits to build the world according to their vision. Elon Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, and he has been deploying thousands of small satellites, Starlink, since 2019 to connect the most remote areas of Earth, a project not immediately profitable but structuring for the future.

As Ophélie Coelho shows in Géopolitique du numérique (2023), these industrialists finance Internet infrastructure: submarine cables and data centers. Beyond their own needs and renting to third parties, they become architects of the global political space. This structuring position guarantees them longevity comparable to that of a well-managed state or an appreciated mayor, re-elected regardless of their political affiliation.

Artificial Intelligence: The Political Revolution That Doesn’t Speak Its Name

Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, published in 2021—two years before the launch of ChatGPT—a visionary article reprinted in L’Empire de l’Ombre (Giuliano da Empoli, 2025). His predictions prove remarkably accurate:

“The world will change so quickly and so radically that an equally radical political change will be necessary to distribute this wealth and enable more people to lead the lives they want.”

He predicts that progress in the next hundred years will surpass everything humanity has accomplished since mastering fire and inventing the wheel. He envisions extending Moore’s Law to all areas: housing, education, food, clothing, which would become twice as cheap every two years.

His proposals are very concrete and worthy of a political candidate’s program: taxing capital rather than labor, universal income, a society where AI produces wealth while humanity finds other roles. He concludes:

“The coming changes are inevitable. If we accept and plan for them, we can create a fairer, happier, and more prosperous society. The future can be incredible.”

This techno-solutionist vision may seem naive. Yet our daily practices, smartphones, digital documents, ChatGPT and others, confirm that these transformations are underway and will generate major political upheavals that must be anticipated.

Our Collective Responsibility Facing Digital Choices

I will not provide concrete proposals here for future political organization. My goal is to emphasize that our current tool choices, conscious or not, are political acts that shape the world. Using Google, K-Drive or a personal NAS means contributing to three different constructions of the world. Believing in the political neutrality of digital tools is naive. A tool’s practicality does not guarantee its neutrality. I don’t claim that political virtue requires cumbersome tools, nor that we must renounce practical and shared tools. But our technological choices and uses create a culture we must be aware of.

Knowledge of technologies now constitutes political knowledge. Ignoring the economic, organizational and technological functioning of digital technology means accepting manipulation without even being aware of it. In democracy, no one is supposed to be ignorant of the law, not that one must know them all, but taking an interest in them allows for more informed choices for the community. Twenty-five years ago (1999), Lawrence Lessig, the lawyer behind Creative Commons licenses, wrote: “Code is law.”

Lawrence Lessig, with the expression “Code is Law,” means that in the digital world, it is no longer just the law written by States that regulates our behaviors, but also—and sometimes especially—computer code, that is, the software and technical architecture that structure the Internet and digital platforms.

In practice, code determines what we can or cannot do online: it can make it easy or difficult to protect privacy, censorship, access to information, or user surveillance. Thus, developers, by writing code, set the rules of the game in cyberspace, becoming in a way the new regulators, without being elected or subject to the same democratic controls as traditional legislators.

Lessig therefore emphasizes that code acts as a form of law: it regulates our actions, limits our freedoms or opens new ones, often invisibly and immediately. This poses major issues, as these technical rules can take precedence over traditional laws, and it then becomes crucial to think about digital regulation by integrating this reality.

Perplexity, 2025

This formula must resonate. Without all becoming specialists, we must discuss and share our digital practices. It’s as concrete a political action as sorting waste or choosing your mode of transportation. These choices impact our world, of which we are all participants.

This awareness is particularly crucial for political leaders and community agents, funded by our taxes. Their digital choices engage our collective future. The massive adoption of Microsoft tools and hosting public data with this American giant constitute practical choices for IT departments but politically inconsiderate ones.

The political and societal cost of this dependence will far exceed the investment necessary to create sovereign systems. Yes, it takes more time and seems more expensive in the short term. But the social, political and heritage gain would be immense. It’s about preserving our sovereignty and our ability to write our own history, without leaving it in the hands of financial powers. The stakes go beyond the simple technical question: it’s the future of our society that is at stake in these seemingly innocuous choices.