Madrid, 15 de julio de 2025
José Luis Piñar Mañas. Professor of Administrative Law. President of the Legal Commission of the Hermes Foundation.
It would be absurd to question the advantages that come with a digital society. We all benefit from it. Technological innovation saves lives, expands access to culture like never before, boosts scientific research, advances towards better healthcare, it integrates and facilitates life for people with disabilities. It allows us to stay connected, manage public administrative procedures from home, purchase almost any product and have it in our hands in record time, communicate with billions of people, know what’s happening in the world in real time, hold meetings between people spread across five continents, search and obtain information on any topic, access entire libraries, listen to our favorite music or rewatch the films we’ve always wanted to see. A digital society is also an undeniable reality. According to easily accessible studies, the number of mobile devices is counted in the billions; in most countries, there are more devices than people. Today, our society is digital.
But is this the only possibility? Much has been said about the cost of not digitizing in terms of loss of efficiency and productivity, business opportunities, limited access to employment, or even social isolation. The economic consequences of not digitizing have also been quantified. However, we must not overlook the enormous environmental and energy costs of digital transformation and artificial intelligence, whose development heavily depends on the massive processing of both personal and non-personal data. According to the Energy and AI report by the International Energy Agency (December 2024), emissions from electricity consumption by data centers will rise from 180 million tons in 2024 to 300 or 500 by 2035. Although these emissions will remain below 1.5% of the energy sector’s total emissions during that period, data centers are among the fastest-growing sources of emissions. Water consumption from using ChatGPT is alarming, as the Spanish Institute of Engineering has warned, and major tech companies are investing in nuclear power to meet the growing demand for AI: Microsoft is planning to reopen the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in 2027 to power its data centers.
And all this is happening in a dazzling, dizzying process of innovation, an acceleration of history, full of unpredictable changes. Changes that push us to become digital, to succumb to the idea that the only possible present and future is a digital one. That lead us to believe the only viable human condition will be — if it isn’t already — the “digital human being,” a digital person. Or not a person at all. Young people, and many not-so-young ones, no longer live with the internet; they live in the internet. As I’ve recently warned, just as “city air makes you free” (“Stadtluft macht frei,” according to a medieval German proverb), one might think that digital air also makes us free. But quite the opposite: while one can leave a city, it is increasingly difficult to leave the digital realm. Digital society traps us to the point where leaving it becomes nearly impossible — or even heroic. Even the exercise of many rights is now conditioned to being digital. Then, must we be digital by obligation?
I believe the answer is clearly no. On the contrary, the existence of a right to not be digital must be recognized. A right that means not being excluded, not being forced to navigate digital environments to exercise basic rights or interact with public authorities. This is not about ignoring the benefits of technology, but rather, as I’ve said before, about preventing its expansion from becoming a source of exclusion. A right that, paradoxically, must coexist with what might seem the opposite: the right to be digital. Indeed, digital transformation brings undeniable benefits to society. Combating the negative consequences of rural depopulation, what is known as “empty Spain”, will likely only be possible through digitalization, allowing people to remain connected to society from within nature.
In this context, much has been said about both the right to universal internet access and the right “to not use the internet”. In the United Kingdom, a request to formally recognize the latter has been brought to Parliament, aiming to protect the right to choose a digital or non-digital life, and to ensure that being digital is an option, not an obligation. The justification for this request is quite telling; it’s about guaranteeing the freedom to choose and the right to decide whether one wants to live without or surrounded by the internet. Without non-digital alternatives, we risk losing our ability to choose, and “our children will grow up believing they never had that choice”.
Without delving into the debate over whether our 1978 Constitution can be interpreted to derive new rights not foreseen at the time of its drafting (see Jiménez de Parga and Mendizábal Allende votes in Constitutional Court Ruling 290/2000 of November 30), I believe the right to not be digital finds strong grounding in Articles 10, 14, 15, and 18 of the Spanish Constitution. Human dignity, equality, privacy, the free development of personality, even the right to physical and moral integrity, are undoubtedly rights that, like the last of these, recognize a person´s right to protect their essence “as a subject with the capacity for free and voluntary decision-making” (STC 94/2023, F.J. 3B).
This right also seeks to prevent discrimination arising from the digital divide. That’s why the Supreme Court and Ombudsman have criticized efforts to force all individuals to interact with public administrations through electronic means. Article 14 of Law 39/2015 establishes the right to interact with the Administration through such means, and the obligation to do so for certain groups. Therefore, for the Administration to convert a right into a generalized obligation contradicts that right: Supreme Court Ruling, Third Chamber, July 11, 2023. Thus, making prior appointments mandatory is inadmissible, as Diego Gómez has repeatedly denounced.
Yet while it is essential to avoid discrimination arising from the digital divide (a goal rightly pursued by the Digital Rights Charter adopted in 2021, despite its lack of prescriptive value), the right to not be digital rests on a much deeper foundation. The digital divide, by definition, will diminish over time. But what will not diminish, and will instead increase to unsuspected extremes, is the capacity for surveillance and manipulation over human beings in digital environments. As I said at the beginning, people may feel free in a city, but they can leave it at will. It is far more difficult to enter the digital world and then try to escape its grasp. The digital, now also powered by artificial intelligence, can absorb a person, literally abduct them, diminish their openness to diversity, trap them in a comfort zone, in an uncritical, depersonalized, manipulated realm. The risk of mass manipulation is no longer hypothetical. It is already a reality. This is why we must certainly highlight the benefits of digital transformation, but we must also insist that going digital should remain a choice, not an imposition.
And for that, it is essential to recognize the right to not be digital, defining its content and limits (no right is absolute, except, in my view, the right to life and human dignity), and shaping its scope and mechanisms for guarantee and oversight. This is no easy task, but it is one we must undertake and build. Which demands, first and foremost, the recognition of this emerging right and asserting that we cannot be forced to be digital by obligation.
