The digital citizen as technoliberal subject: The politics of constitutive rhetoric in the European Union’s Digital Decade

Abstract

ABSTRACT Published on January 26, 2022, the European Declaration of Digital Rights and Principles (EDDRP) enshrined the European Union’s goals for Europe’s digital future, a document representing the policy agenda of the European Union’s Digital Decade 2030. This policy program and the accompanying declaration aim to expand digital services and outline digital rights. This essay deploys an ideological criticism of the EU’s Digital Decade, specifically in regard to its neoliberal vision of digital citizenship, situated in the context of constitutive rhetoric, neoliberalism, surveillance capitalism, and EU tech regulation. I identify three priorities of the Digital Decade that have declaratory and material manifestations. First, the value of innovation presents democracy as a practice improved through further technological advancement, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Second, the idea of connection to the “digital public sphere” exemplifies the neo-colonial ideology inherent in technoliberalism. Third, the cybersecurity imperative of the Digital Decade reveals the contours of acceptable and unacceptable expressions of citizenship. I situate these three technoliberal features of the Digital Decade as “weak” democratic promises that expose the material limitations of constitutive rhetorics. This essay concludes with a call to technoskepticism, a hermeneutic attuned to the challenges of declaring citizenship practices in digital space.