Pablo Martínez-Ramil (Tallinn University of Technology (TUT) – Department of Law; Faculty of Law, Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic) has posted The Legal Construction of Homo Digitalis: How EU Digital Regulation Produces the Subject It Claims to Protect on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
European Union (EU) digital regulation is usually presented as a protective architecture for individuals. This article argues that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA) do not merely regulate a pre-existing subject; they construct one. Through rights, transparency duties, choice mechanisms and complaint procedures, the digital acquis presupposes a person capable of reading, understanding, choosing, contesting and switching across algorithmically mediated environments. The article calls this juridical artefact homo digitalis. Using a Legal Subject Extraction Protocol, it reconstructs the assumptions about cognition, agency, relations and structure embedded in each instrument and identifies four faces: the consenting data subject, the risk-assessed person, the governed user and the market actor. Together, these figures reveal a central contradiction: EU law presumes the same person autonomous at the consent interface, procedurally competent in platform governance and market-rational in digital ecosystems, while also recognising that digital environments manipulate, overburden and structure those very capacities. The article argues that this contradiction is not accidental: it enables EU digital regulation to sustain, within the same legal architecture, a commitment to fundamental-rights protection and the continued circulation of data-driven economic activity.
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