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I am delighted to make available my discussion draft of what had started as my contribution to the Session on Technology and International and Transnational Legal Subjectivity which was part of the International Symposium:The Technological Paradigm Shift in International and Transnational andEuropean Union Law;, Roma Tre, Rome, Italy 29 January 2026, organized by the inspirational Professor Fabio Bassan. A final draft of this contribution may be published with other essays in (Fabio Bassan (ed)), The Technological Paradigm Shift in International Transnational and European Union Law.
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The title of the contribution that resulted "From Vessels to Techno-Sovereigns in Virtual Spaces: Digital Platforms and the Dialectics of Legal Subjectivity in Operational Spaces" has as its object was consider the autonomy of platforms, and in that sense, their sovereignty, perhaps better put their techno-sovereignty, emerging from and perhaps despite the best efforts of traditional political sovereigns to enforce the objectification and instrumentalization of the form, even when these forms operate in and through machine systems that are increasingly detached from their creators. More specifically the contribution explores the transformation of digital platforms from passive legal objects into autonomous regulatory subjects that challenge traditional state authority. Using the biblical allegory of Samson, the text argues that as automated governance and algorithmic decision-making replace human oversight, platforms develop their own techno-sovereignty. While traditional frameworks treat these systems as vessels subject to international law, Backer suggests they are evolving into independent normative orders capable of defining their own internal realities. This shift creates a landscape of competing sovereignties where the physical power of the state clashes with the virtual autonomy of global tech infrastructures. Ultimately, the source posits that these advancing technological systems may eventually destabilize and replace human-centered legal structures.
Starting from Fabio Bassan's Digital Platforms and Global Law as a baseline, I attempt the argument that what is at stake is this: legal subjectivity has always been assigned to what rings a space or acts within it — never to the space itself. That premise held so long as platforms remained passive — market squares, vessels, the object-space Bassan rightly starts from. The claim this contribution tests is that automated and generative decision-making is dissolving that premise from the inside: as decision making migrates from the humans and institutions that once ran the platform and into the platform's own operations, that platform space begins to satisfy the classical tests for subjectivity — the capacity to hold, exercise, and answer for its own normative commitments — without having been granted that capacity by any sovereign act of recognition. It becomes a realized techno-simulation; a subject that constitutes itself rather than being constituted is, by definition, no longer merely a subject. It is what remains once law's old distribution of subject and object — the distribution the market square and the corporation both still honored — stops describing what is actually happening inside the temple. Let us briefly consider the parts of this analysis each in turn.
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The Abstract, Table of Contents, and introduction follow below. The draft may be downloaded HERE.
Larry Catá Backer (白 轲)[1]
ABSTRACT: This contribution examines the dialectics of legal subjectivity under conditions in which law is increasingly encoded, operationalized, and enforced through technological systems that exceed human cognitive capacity. It asks whether digital platforms have altered the fundamental vectors of legal subjectivity and sovereignty, shifting authority away from human-centered legal orders toward techno-mediated regimes. Using the biblical figure of Samson as an extended metaphor, the paper contrasts a traditional view—platforms as vessels subject to external sovereign control—with a more radical alternative in which the platform itself becomes both edifice and agent, exercising autonomous will. Building on Fabio Bassan’s Digital Platforms and Global Law (Bassan 2021), the analysis traces contemporary regulatory trajectories: transnational private ordering, state–platform production agreements, and intermeshing public–private norms. It considers the nature of the subjectivity of platforms by reference to the analogous problem of the subjectivity of the multi-national enterprise; each is both an object, a passive object-space defined by the actions and placement of traditional legal subjects, and the system for ordering those relations. While Bassan’s framework plausibly treats platforms as vessels embedded in evolving legal structures, this paper pushes further, suggesting that platforms may emerge as independent regulatory subjects, potentially sovereign in their own right. As automated and generative decision-making systems internalize governance functions, platforms may constitute their own normative orders, translating control back to humans only as needed. The result is a future of competing sovereignties that destabilizes traditional categories of law, authority, and subjectivity.
KEYWORDS: legal subjectivity; digital platforms; techno-sovereignty; automated governance; transnational private ordering; competing sovereignties
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction.
2. Platform Definition as cognitive starting points.
3. Signifying regulatory cages; virtual realities and legal fictions.
4. The enterprise of the human; the human in the regulatory machine; and efforts at self-control—data and data protection.
5. The platform from object to subject to sovereign.
6. Competing sovereignties.
7. Conclusion.
1. Introduction.
This contribution examines the dialectics of subjectivity in the face of tech, that is on the question of whether tech itself has upended the conversation about subjectivity in the context in which the text of law is now encoded in language beyond the capacity of humans.[2] In other words, has tech now changed the rules of the game of subjectivity in a way that changes the vectors of legal subjectivity. Within that interplay, one might presume, notions of sovereignty become critical in the sense that the sovereign object is now in play.[3] This play rearranges sovereign autonomy within and among states (for the human-centered conceptual universe in which we mostly operate consciously), the transnational (public internal structures/legalities and private law production/societal relations), and platforms as virtual territorializations within which subjectivity is re-arranged or confused.[4]
To those ends consider the following illustration of my point. The images reference the well-known story of the Israelite judge of the Book of Judges Chps 13-16, who having betrayed his own vows is betrayed, in turn, by the Philistine woman Delilah, his hair cut (his strength), his eyes are gouged out, and, humiliated, he seeks redemption, by bringing down the temple that served as the space celebrating his humiliation.[5] Redemption comes at a cost; he, along with the temple worshippers present, cease to exist, except as story, as narrative, as a virtual and eternal plating of his own story.[6]
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Consider the two stories that technology, and technological kompetenz, suggests. The first, on the left, is the conventional image, Samson, shorn of the outward elements that signify his power calls on God, the true source of that power to bring down the temple of the Philistines and die along with them. The second, on the right, suggests an alternative way of looking at this—here Samson is not shorn of his hair and it is he by the invocation of his own will that pulls down the temple of the Philistines. Samson is the platform, as well as its edifice and the force of change. The relevant question, then, focuses on the temple, its old ordering, the gods that shape and inhabit them, within which new embodiments of power with their own attributes, emerge. This invokes, in images, the essence of the competing sovereignties premise that is the object of this contribution one that invites but takes in different directions, the classical sovereignty literature.[7]
Professor Bassan suggests in his book, Digital Platforms and Global Law,[8] that our techno-kompetenz, our platform Samson, remains a vessel, the subject of legal ordering, the expression of which must change with the times in observable ways. That is plausible, from the perspective of the human. Nonetheless, it may be worth a minute to consider the alternative, that the only thing that survives into the future is the platform. It is the platform that will determine not just its own constitution, but also the language and cognitive structures within which it will forge its own reality. In that context, and at its most radical, I will put forward the possibility that platform, itself, remains a regulatory or legal subject, not merely its object.[9] However, its subjectivity will be bound by a different sovereignty, one that may well explode the old categories—law, subjectivity, connection, authority. . . . control, in favor of something new, something inhuman, that to the extent it is necessary to do so as it relates to humanity and its management, will be translated back to the human in forms that humans will be taught to understand, and perhaps to need.
To that end one ought to start with Fabio Bassan’s brilliant baseline—Digital Platforms and Global Law—around which I will wrap this examination. Professor Bassan posits that the complexities of legal systems and their structures have become all the more so in the face of the new generation of virtual realities and legal fictions that tech has made possible. This is all the more so with respect to that one corner of virtual realities and legal fictions that tend to affect the human communities more ostentatiously—virtual factories that create digital content or services—that Professor Bassan focuses on. He suggests trajectories of regulation that must break free from old categorizations, and perhaps also to come extent the old barriers of sovereignty embedded within states. These transpose the regulatory project inward, within platform systems, and outward within the spaces in which platforms engage with other and usually traditional forms of regulatory spaces. The essence suggests a transposition of the essence of the EU directive out into other regulatory planes—of traditional legislation (whether at the national, international or transnational level) as framing, leaving to its legal subjects the tasks of implementation and compliance. At the same time that arrangement must break the boundaries of traditional sovereign hierarchies precisely because platforms may not be merely autonomous but perhaps also increasingly independent of them—some of them anyway.
From that Professor Bassan can consider a three pronged supra-nationalization of legal ordering. The first touches on the transnationalization of contractual relations between platforms and their communities through uniform private law or the development of global standards and expectations. The second focuses on the globalization of production agreements between states and platforms—a reterritorialization from beyond the state and back into it. The third looks to the elaboration of intermeshing standards and rules and application protocols that suit all parties. The result, in Professor Bassan’s words is an “intricate interweaving between digital platforms, user communities, states, supranational and international organizations [that aggregates and rationalizes] a joint operation of national laws, transnational and international law, primarily private, secondarily public (as regards organizational rules), and also subsidiary (as regards regulation).[10] It is, in effect, the rationalization of structural coupling between autonomous but related subsystems—the legal orders of states and of platforms undertaken within the platform that is international public and private regulatory space.
From this orienting point I follow Professor Bassan’s pathways, but perhaps it will take me to a very different place. I have divided these into five categories: (1) platform definition as cognitive regulatory starting points; (2) signifying eco-systems and orders; virtual realities and legal fictions; (3) The enterprise of the human; the human in the regulatory machine; and efforts at self-control—data and data protection; (4) the platform from object to subject to sovereign; and (5) competing sovereignties.
What is at stake, put plainly and only once, is this: legal subjectivity has always been assigned to what rings a space or acts within it — never to the space itself. That premise held so long as platforms remained passive — market squares, vessels, the object-space Bassan rightly starts from. The claim this contribution tests is that automated and generative decision-making is dissolving that premise from the inside: as decision making migrates from the humans and institutions that once ran the platform and into the platform's own operations, that platform space begins to satisfy the classical tests for subjectivity — the capacity to hold, exercise, and answer for its own normative commitments — without having been granted that capacity by any sovereign act of recognition. It becomes a realized techno-simulation; a subject that constitutes itself rather than being constituted is, by definition, no longer merely a subject. It is what remains once law's old distribution of subject and object — the distribution the market square and the corporation both still honored — stops describing what is actually happening inside the temple. Let us briefly consider the parts of this analysis each in turn.[11]
[1] W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar; Professor of Law and International Affairs, The Pennsylvania State University, ORCID 0000-0002-7492-4527. This text derives from remarks originally prepared for International Symposium: The Technological Paradigm Shift in International and Transnational and European Union Law; Session on Technology and International and Transnational Legal Subjectivity, Roma Tre, Rome, Italy 29 January 2026. My great thanks to Fabio Bassan whose work as always is inspirational.
[2] Backer, Larry Catá and Jan M Broekman, 'The Soulful Machine, the Virtual Person, the "Human" Condition, and its Social Constitution — An Encounter' (2024) 37(3) International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 969.
[3] Consider generally Bartelson, Jens, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Weber , Cynthia, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge University Press, 1995):
[4] See, Bratton, Benjamin H., The Stack (The MIT Press, 2016); Floridi, Luciano, The Fight for Digital Sovereignty, (Springer Nature, 2020); Gillespie, Tarlton, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media (Yale University Press, 2018).
[5] A note on the deity: Judges 16 names the temple Samson destroys as Dagon’s, and it is to the temples of Dagon that Saul’s decapitated head was fastened and his armor exhibited (Chron. 10:10 (KJV). Yet the contribution will focus on Baal—whose temples remained even as Dagon’s are brought down. That merits disclosure and a note. In the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, Dagon is the god of the granary: a store of value fixed by a completed, sequential process (planting, growing, reaping) and drawn down thereafter in order — a fair figure for law's own temporality of precedent laid on precedent. Baal, by contrast, is a dying-and-rising storm god whose annual return is not a further increment on what preceded it but a recurring, total event that claims continuity of identity with the god who died the season before. Baal is sometimes described as the son of Dagon and sometimes Dagon/Baal is treated a s a composite; their temples were sometimes built near each other in similar forms and worship shifted. That provides the metaphor for the contribution’s examination: What follows treats the platform not as replacing one temple with an identical one, but as substituting Baal's temporality for Dagon's — versioning, deprecation, and relaunch in place of accretion and sequence — and asks what kind of legal order, if any, can be said to survive that substitution. That is the point that is elaborated in the text that follows above.
[6] Its semiotics is picked up again at Section 7.
[7] See, e.g., Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Richard Tuck ed, Cambridge University Press 1996; first published 1651) (on the sovereign as artificial person/'Mortall God'); Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (George Schwab tr, University of Chicago Press 2005; first published 1922) ('Sovereign is he who decides on the exception') and The Concept of the Political.
[8] Bassan, Fabio, Digital Platforms and Global Law (Edward Elgar 2021).
[9] Gallemí Albás, Jan, Digital platforms as quasi-sovereign actors: Influence operations and Global Security Law, Global Affairs, Universidad de Navarra (19 March 2026); available [https://www.unav.edu/web/global-affairs/digital-platforms-as-quasi-sovereign-actors-influence-operations-and-global-security-law].
[10] Bassan (2021), 143.
[11] Cf., Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation (Sheila Faria Glaser tr, University of Michigan Press 1994; first published 1981).
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