Registration
Call for Participation
This expert workshop invites scholars and practitioners to explore the legal, regulatory, and policy implications of what we term the editable world, a socio-technical condition in which the physical environment becomes subject to real-time computational rendering.
Digital infrastructures are no longer confined to screens, platforms, or online spaces. With the rapid development of spatial computing, extended reality (XR), and AI-enabled wearable devices, digital systems are becoming embedded directly into perception, mobility, and everyday encounters. Streets, classrooms, workplaces, public institutions, and civic spaces are turning phygital: hybrid environments in which physical reality is continuously annotated, filtered, augmented, and personalized through computational layers.
While existing research and regulation have focused extensively on digital platforms, online discourse, and data governance, far less attention has been paid to environments where digital systems no longer merely mediate communication, but actively interfere with seeing, sensing, and inhabiting the world. In such contexts, perception itself becomes a site of intervention; public space becomes physically shared but also digitally customized; and longstanding conceptual distinctions between online and offline, public and private, infrastructure and interface begin to erode.
The workshop starts from the premise that editable reality is not a speculative future scenario. It is already emerging through prototypes, pilot deployments, design choices, and regulatory blind spots. At the same time, the idea of “editing the world” is not entirely new. Humans have always curated their environments socially, culturally, and spatially, by forming communities, choosing neighborhoods, and shaping boundaries of belonging and exclusion. What distinguishes the editable world today is a new mode of curation: one that operates through real-time perceptual mediation, individualized algorithmic layers, and continuous computational rendering of physical reality. Editing shifts from visible, collective, and slow-moving social practices to individualized, adaptive, and often opaque interventions embedded directly into perception.
This transformation raises urgent questions for law, policy, and governance. Who governs phygital spaces when digital layers are controlled by private platforms while physical spaces remain subject to public law? How should legal systems conceptualize public space when it is no longer a singular, stable entity, or uniformly shared? What happens to legal notions of privacy, dignity, autonomy, and consent when perception itself becomes a site of data extraction, inference, nudging, and, in particular in the context of digital sexualized violence, abuse? And how can democratic accountability be preserved when citizens inhabit different versions of the same physical environment?
These dynamics expose a growing governance vacuum, in which public law regimes governing physical space coexist uneasily with privately governed digital layers that increasingly structure visibility, access, and behaviour.
The workshop also recognizes that the editable world is shaped by economic incentives and political economy. Much like the early Internet, phygital environments risk a trajectory from openness toward enclosure, as proprietary business models, monetization of perception, and platorm-based gatekeeping reshape access to and participation in physical public space. This raises familiar yet unresolved questions about power asymmetries, privatization of shared infrastructures, and the role of competition, data, and intellectual property law in governing perceptual environments.
About humanet3
humanet3 is an interdisciplinary research group which analyzes, deconstructs, and contributes to initiatives aiming at a human-centered digital transformation, as proposed by the European Union in its ‘European Declaration on Digital Rights and Principles for the Digital Decade’. humanet3 is a joint research group established by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Prof. Armin von Bogdandy), the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition (Prof. Josef Drexl), and the Center for Humans and Machines (CHM) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin (Prof. Iyad Rahwan). It is led by Erik Tuchtfeld, further group members are Anna Sophia Tiedeke, Arian Henning, Chaewon Yun, Germán Oscar Johannsen, and Natalie Abel.
