Reimagining Space and Place in the Digital Economy

How communities are producing terrains of collective empowerment

Last week, at an awards ceremony hosted by my department at George Mason University, our chair Dr. Temple — an anthropologist — shared insightful reflections about careers forged in uncertain times. He spoke from the perspective of someone whose career has navigated the turbulent waters of economic downturns and the pandemic. This resonated deeply with me, recalling my own professional experiences during the 2008 financial crisis and its years-long aftermath. His advice was straightforward and powerful: (1) “buy time when you can buy low”, or invest in yourself when your skills seem undervalued, and (2) “occupy intellectual space intentionally”, knowing that the time will inevitably come when you will be in a better place to prosper off those earlier investments.

Inspired by those reflections, today I revisit some of my earlier thoughts about space and place with respect to digital technology¹. While my dissertation now focuses on community ownership of data and digital infrastructures, my thinking on these digital resources began with exploring how spatial theories might help us understand digital globalization. I’ll explore in this piece how my thinking has evolved, and how these ideas have shaped my research on digital globalization, digital resources, and community empowerment.

From Digital Globalization to Digital Commons: A Look Back

In Fall 2021, during that course on Space and Place, I began investigating how theories of physical space could help us better understand digital globalization. At that time, the world was creating and transmitting 44 zettabytes of data daily (that's 44 billion trillion bytes), with cross-border data flows having grown 45 times between 2005 and 2015. I argued that we must consider data flows as more than economic transactions, framing them as manifestations of our social organization, thoughts, and lived experiences.

Drawing on spatial theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, and Michel Foucault, I reasoned that digital spaces are socially constructed arenas imbued with meaning, symbolism, power, and political control. Lefebvre's ideas about the production of social spaces emphasized the relationship between power and the control of space, which I connected to data colonialism, noting how our lived experiences are abstracted, commodified, and transformed into capital through data relations. Foucault's Panopticism provided a lens for understanding digital surveillance, showing how digital architecture can create a perception of constant monitoring that ensures compliance without direct force.

Essentially, my analysis revealed that just as physical spaces reflect and reproduce power dynamics, digital spaces encode values, hierarchies, and forms of control.

Defining Space and Place in Digital Contexts

Before moving forward, let's clarify what we mean by "space" and "place" in digital terms. Drawing from geographers and social theorists, space can be understood as the broader field of social relations, flows, and possibilities — an abstract dimension where social, economic, and political activities unfold. It is the broad setting where interactions happen, encompassing the networks, infrastructures, and protocols that enable data to flow.

Place, by contrast, refers to locations imbued with meaning, identity, and human attachment. As Doreen Massey suggests, places are where multiple social relations intersect to create particular meanings and experiences. In digital contexts, places emerge when communities develop shared practices, identities, and governance systems within broader digital spaces — transforming abstract infrastructure into sites of belonging.

The distinction matters because while digital technologies create new spaces of interaction and exchange, communities actively transform these spaces through collective practices that imbue them with meaning; this transformation represents a form of sovereignty, a concept important to my research.

Current Research: Democratic Practice in Digital Territories

Today, my research focuses on how communities create meaningful digital places by collectively managing digital resources; this is only made possible by spaces that enable a certain kind of collective empowerment. I focus on four types of "democratic experiments" with digital technology: platform cooperatives where workers and users collectively own digital platforms; data sovereignty initiatives ensuring communities control data about themselves; peer production systems enabling non-commodified creation and sharing (e.g. knowledge commons like Wikipedia); and participatory governance projects enabling direct democratic control over digital resources.

These initiatives demonstrate how technology can operate differently: communities can make claims on technology to transform abstract digital space into meaningful places that embody their values and priorities. For instance, rural communities building their own internet networks create not just connectivity, but local spaces where technology supports community priorities. Another example: communities designing artificial intelligence tools to protect local languages, rather than letting them fade away. These examples underscore how communities are actively transforming digital spaces into empowering terrains. Together, we might call the people involved "digital commoners" – people who aim to expand resources held in common and create conditions for shared participation in power. They're not just passive users of technology but active designers of digital systems.

What unites the cases I’m researching is their engagement with what we call the "constitutive powers" of digital technology²: the capacity to design systems that embody specific values, create affordances that enable particular forms of social action, and establish new forms of sovereignty over crucial resources.

The Evolution of My Research Approach

Comparing my earlier and current research highlights significant changes in my approach. While I continue to draw insights from spatial theory, and I remain informed by the lens of control and extraction, my research now emphasizes the proactive roles communities play to enact democratic possibilities within the digital economy.

This evolution reflects a deeper engagement with questions of power and transformation. Where my earlier work primarily mapped how dominant systems create digital spaces that reinforce existing inequalities, my current research spotlights active resistance and innovation from below. The theoretical framing has evolved as well. In addition to spatial theory, my current research incorporates frameworks from commons theory, economic democracy, and decolonial thought. An expanded toolkit helps me analyze how digital space is structured, and vitally, how it might be restructured.

There's also a shift in focus from large-scale dynamics of global digital processes, to community-level experiments and their specific practices and architectures. This brings with it a refreshed perspective: from detached observation to action-oriented research. As an example, we³ recently launched Computing for the Common Good, a pathway initiative for students interested in fusing technological skills with civic purpose. We aim to partner with community⁴, giving students opportunities to apply technical skills to real, local community problems. It’s “coding for community”, to reimagine digital and economic systems from the ground up.

Throughout this academic journey, certain core insights have remained central to my thinking: (a) digital spaces embody specific power relations and value systems, (b) they shape who participates, who benefits, and who exercises control, (c) they are socially constructed, politically contested, and economically consequential, and (d) they are (increasingly important) sites where broader social and political values are encoded, which means those are the frontiers where society can potentially be transformed.

The cases I study demonstrate that digital spaces need not replicate existing hierarchies and extractive practices. When communities collectively steward (design, govern, and own) their digital resources, they can create places that strengthen social bonds, distribute benefits more equitably, and enable meaningful participation in technological decisions.

Despite these positive examples, we should acknowledge real challenges. Powerful companies and states still dominate much of the digital world, making it tough for community-led projects to sustain themselves and grow. They must navigate complex regulatory environments not designed to support them, and face ongoing pressure toward co-optation or marginalization by more powerful actors.

Yet what makes these community-led initiatives so compelling is precisely their practical nature. They're not utopian fantasies but working demonstrations of how technology can be designed differently – how code can constitute new social relations.

“Occupy Intellectual Space Intentionally”: Creating Places of Digital Empowerment

As digital technologies increasingly shape our social, economic, and political lives, the question of who designs and controls these systems becomes increasingly consequential. Communities around the world aren't just accepting technology as it comes — they're reshaping it according to their needs and values.

This transformation involves more than technical expertise; it requires reimagining relationships between technology, community, and governance. By developing cooperative ownership structures, participatory decision-making processes, and technologies that strengthen social bonds, communities demonstrate that digital systems can operate according to a different set of logics.

A major part of my research journey is the commitment to better understanding these communities and their practices, serving broader conversations about shared technological futures. This commitment resonates with Dr. Temple's advice from last week, to "occupy intellectual space intentionally." Communities⁵ are doing precisely this in digital contexts — occupying digital space, writing different rules for technology, and establishing meaningful places amidst uncertainty and inequality – and my hope is that my work embodies the same spirit of perseverance.

The labor of reimagining space and place in the digital economy reminds us that technology isn't predetermined in its effects or organization. It emerges from specific social arrangements, human values, and priorities that we collectively create and can therefore transform.

This is a time when the stocks of those working to strengthen our collective capacities, and to address shared problems, are not particularly high. But to face compounding challenges⁶, we need digital infrastructures that enable collective problem-solving and enact shared values. In this sense, Dr. Temple’s “buying time when you can buy low” is fantastic guidance for individual researchers like myself, and also those investing towards a reimagined digital economy.

1. Concepts that first drew my attention in a memorable anthropology course, Space, Place, and The Built Environment.

2. In a paper with one of my dissertation advisors, Dr Ben Manski.

3. I run the Digital Commonwealth Project from the Center for Social Science Research at George Mason University.

4. Co-ops, social enterprises, local businesses, and public agencies.

5. As previously articulated, I refer to communities as those united by geography, culture, economic interests, or common purpose.

6. Whether they are challenges with respect to intellectual capacities (think federal workers losing their jobs currently, in the US), political, economic, or ecological.