Right Constructions in the Digital Era
This piece grows out of my master’s thesis on digital rights and technoculture, where I focused on citizen labs and other technocultural initiatives in Brazil.
The story of digital technoculture is not simply a story of innovation; it is a story of ideology, power, and contradiction. Long before platforms became the infrastructure of everyday life, the roots of contemporary digital society were already taking shape in the ideological crosscurrents of the late twentieth century. In the years leading up to the dot-com bubble, what Barbrook and Cameron (1996) famously named the “Californian Ideology” emerged from the convergence of libertarian politics, countercultural aesthetics, and a burgeoning digital market. This worldview framed technology as inherently emancipatory: a tool not only for communication, but for personal freedom, democratic participation, and social transformation.
This ideology did not appear in a vacuum. It was cultivated in the Bay Area, a place already marked by the countercultural movements of the 1960s. The hippie experiments in communal living, ecological awareness, and alternative ways of being in the world bled into the ethos of early Silicon Valley. Rather than rejecting technology, many of these movements had reimagined it as a means of creative autonomy and cultural production (Roszak, 1986). Out of this milieu grew a technoculture that simultaneously celebrated individual freedom and communal innovation—a paradox that would later define digital capitalism.
Global network communications also brought to light diverse movements of resistance emerging across the world. As Penley and Ross (1991) and Hardt and Negri (2000) note, struggles that were once local began to articulate themselves at a global level, contesting not only political structures but the very architecture of power within what Hardt and Negri call the “Imperial Constitution.” In tension with the optimism of the Californian Ideology, critical technocultural movements—such as free software advocates, hackers, and digital rights activists—focused on challenging corporate control over information, surveillance practices, and the privatization of digital infrastructures (Coleman & Golub, 2008; Dafermos & Söderberg, 2009; Almeida, 2010).
These tensions became undeniably visible after the dot-com crash, when the lack of market logic of the digital economy was laid bare. Surviving platforms’ business models relied on user data mining—an extractive logic dramatized in The Social Dilemma (2020). Within this terrain, alternative digital cultures also flourished, as countercultural responses: makerspaces, hackerspaces, free software communities, and collaborative collectives that, to this day, seek to reclaim technology as a commons rather than a corporate asset (Menichinelli & Schmidt, 2019). These movements engage with technology by redesigning its meaning and ownership, while discussing its political implications.
It is against this backdrop that we must understand rights construction in the digital era. If digital technologies have become constitutive of contemporary politics—as Kirkpatrick (2020) argues—then they have also become constitutive of contemporary human rights. Society is increasingly reorganized around digital infrastructures, and with this shift, access becomes a central political and ethical question. Access is no longer merely technical; it is social, cultural, and juridical. It shapes who can speak, who can learn, who can work, and ultimately, whose voices count.
While rights such as privacy (UDHR, Art. 12) and freedom of expression (UDHR, Art. 19) are most obviously tied to digital communication technologies, the indivisibility of human rights means that a much broader spectrum of rights is implicated. In a world mediated by algorithms, platforms, and networks, the ability to exercise rights depends on access to technology, information, and digital literacy. Rights are not violated solely through direct repression; they are also undermined through exclusion, invisibility, and infrastructural inequality.
This recognition led to the emergence of a new international paradigm: the Right to Internet Access. In 2016, the United Nations affirmed that intentionally blocking or disrupting access to online information constitutes a violation of international human rights law (Mhlungu, 2022). This stance was formalized in 2018 with Resolution 38/… on the Promotion, Protection and Enjoyment of Human Rights on the Internet. At its core, this resolution asserts that access to information and the ability to disseminate it are fundamental rights in the digital era.
This connects directly to the rights of association and participation (UDHR, Arts. 20 and 27.1), and most centrally to freedom of expression (Art. 19), which guarantees not only the right to hold opinions but to seek, receive, and impart information “by any means of expression.” In a digital society, this implies that restrictions on connectivity, platforms, or communication infrastructures can amount to violations of fundamental freedoms.
Regional frameworks of the American continent echo this understanding. The Inter-American Human Rights system, for instance, emphasizes that freedom of expression (Art. 13) includes the right to seek, receive, and disseminate information “by any procedure of one’s choice,” while also warning against indirect restrictions—such as monopolistic control over media infrastructures—that can silence or limit public discourse (OAS, 1978). Here again, access becomes inseparable from rights.
The implications extend further. Resolution 38/7 explicitly links digital divides to the right to education, highlighting the urgency of digital literacy and international cooperation to ensure equitable access. In practice, this also implicates the right to work (UDHR, Art. 23), as employment increasingly depends on digital skills and connectivity. These are not peripheral issues; they are structural. In a digitized world, lack of access to technology translates into exclusion from economic opportunity, political participation, and cultural life—undermining the right to an adequate standard of living and personal development (UDHR, Art. 22).
At the same time, digital human rights cannot be discussed without confronting the politics of data and privacy. The dominant business model of the digital industry is not participation, but the monetization of personal information. Users are transformed into data points, behavioral patterns, and predictive commodities. While regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, 2018) have sought to curb corporate overreach, the logic of consent still places significant responsibility on users—often without genuine transparency or meaningful choice.
The 2023 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union against Meta further exposed this dilemma. Faced with stricter interpretations of consent, Meta offered users a stark choice: pay for privacy, or accept surveillance in exchange for “free” services. This arrangement reframes privacy not as a right, but as a privilege available to those who can afford it—deepening rather than resolving digital inequality.
Thus, even where legal protections exist, power asymmetries persist, and protections can be waived by consent (Mejía, 2019). Platforms design the terms of participation; users navigate within them. In this context, digital literacy becomes not merely educational but political: a prerequisite for autonomy, agency, and dignity in the networked society.
As a whole, digital human rights can be understood along three interrelated dimensions:
As conditions for both individual and social development—personal, cultural, economic, and political.
As safeguards for privacy and autonomy in a data-driven society.
As mechanisms to ensure transparency and informed decision-making.
The latter is particularly visible in European efforts to regulate political advertising. By requiring transparency around targeted political ads, the EU aims to make digital persuasion visible, accountable, and contestable—recognizing that democracy in the digital age depends on clarity about who is speaking, to whom, and why (Díaz, 2023).
Ultimately, technology does not simply accompany social processes; it reshapes them. Digital infrastructures reconfigure how rights are exercised, who can exercise them, and under what conditions. While the notion of internet access as a fundamental right is conceptually significant, it also reveals deep structural inequalities.
Technocultural initiatives often present themselves as democratizing, open, and participatory. Yet their emancipatory potential remains contingent. Without confronting the logics of commodification, surveillance, and exclusion embedded within digital capitalism, they risk reproducing the very inequalities they claim to transcend (Penley & Ross, 1991). The struggle over rights construction in the digital era is therefore not merely legal, but also cultural, political, and infrastructural. It is a struggle over what kind of digital world we want to inhabit, and who gets to shape it.