Here is a strengthened rewrite that brings those points in clearly: * **imagination, creativity, and science fiction as method** now appear right up front, * **backcasting the future** is positioned as part of the design methodology, * **skin in the game** is made explicit, * and the constitution is clearly described as governing **the project itself**, which is to be **mutually owned and governed by its members**. I have kept the voice as Graham’s and integrated the new ideas into the argument rather than adding them as awkward extras. --- # Hitchhiker’s Guide to Earth *A conversation starter on story, constitutional imagination, and planetary governance.* Winter 2026 *This document is intended as an invitation to conversation rather than a fixed proposal.* > *Note on authorship: This document was first captured as a voice recording by Graham Stewart. It was subsequently organised, expanded, and tidied with AI assistance. The ideas, intentions, and voice remain Graham’s.* ## Background We begin from a simple observation: constitutions are not shaped by law alone. They are shaped by story, culture, imagination, and the shared metaphors through which people come to understand power, legitimacy, rights, responsibility, and collective life. For that reason, this project treats imagination, creativity, and science fiction not as decoration, but as part of the design methodology itself. We are interested in backcasting the future: using narrative, speculation, and shared acts of imagination to ask what kind of world we are trying to reach, and then working backwards to identify the constitutional substrate, institutional forms, and cultural practices that might help bring that future into being. Formal constitutional law gives us doctrines, institutions, procedures, and limits. But constitutional culture is what makes those structures meaningful. It is what enables people to imagine themselves as participants in a shared political order. It is what helps societies ask who belongs, what should be protected, how authority should be constrained, and how people with very different experiences can still make rules together. At moments of transition or crisis, culture often opens these questions more effectively than technical language alone. This is where *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy* becomes relevant. Douglas Adams’ work is widely known as comic science fiction, but beneath the humour it offers a sharp and enduring reflection on bureaucracy, technology, uncertainty, absurdity, institutional failure, and the limits of human understanding. Again and again, Adams returns to a central question: how do human beings make decisions together in systems that are far larger, faster, stranger, and more complex than their ability to fully comprehend? That is also a constitutional question. The argument here is not that *Hitchhiker’s* contains a ready-made constitution, nor that fiction can replace legal thought. The point is more practical, and more serious. *Hitchhiker’s* offers a widely recognised cultural language through which people can begin engaging difficult questions of governance, legitimacy, complexity, law, and collective survival. It makes serious inquiry more accessible without making it less serious. This matters because the project described here is not simply a literary or arts initiative. At its heart, *Hitchhiker’s Guide to Earth* is an attempt to convene a year-long participatory constitutional drafting process for planetary life: a process through which legal scholars, governance practitioners, technologists, artists, students, and citizens can work together on the question of what a constitutional framework adequate to the twenty-first century might require. In that sense, *Hitchhiker’s* is not the constitutional substance of the project but its public gateway. The constitutional substance comes from the legal, governance, technological, and participatory methods that sit beneath it. ## Why Hitchhiker’s, why constitutional law, why now At first glance, Douglas Adams and constitutional law may seem to belong to different worlds. In practice, they converge on a common terrain. Constitutional law is concerned with how power is organised, limited, distributed, justified, and revised. It asks how institutions retain legitimacy, how rights are protected, how participation is structured, and how societies adapt when inherited rules no longer match present reality. Adams explores the lived experience of what happens when systems fail. His fiction exposes the absurdity of remote bureaucracy, the danger of technical intelligence without wisdom, the brittleness of systems that confuse procedure with legitimacy, and the need for humility, adaptability, and humour in the face of complexity. What constitutional law examines formally, satire often reveals experientially. For this reason, *Hitchhiker’s* is not being used here as decoration or branding. It is being used as a civic and pedagogical interface: a cultural framework that lowers the barrier to entry for constitutional thought, especially for students and interdisciplinary collaborators who might otherwise feel excluded by abstract legal or institutional language. This matters especially now. Questions once treated as technical or sectoral increasingly reveal themselves as constitutional in nature. Climate breakdown, AI, privacy, migration, digital identity, platform power, ecological collapse, personhood of nature, and the governance of outer space all raise fundamental issues of authority, legitimacy, rights, participation, and long-term institutional design. They are constitutional questions, even when they are not yet named as such. No one discipline can meet them alone. The next generation of constitutional thought will need to be legally rigorous, technologically literate, culturally resonant, and participatory in form. It must be able to work across law, governance, design, performance, ecology, and computational systems. It must also be able to engage the public as participants rather than spectators. That is the space this project is trying to open. ## The constitutional drafting project The core of this initiative is the design of a year-long constitutional drafting process. The aim is not to rush toward a single final text, but to convene a serious public inquiry into what forms of constitutionalism may be needed for planetary life in an age of ecological crisis, technological acceleration, and institutional fragmentation. This process also has an important principle of practical commitment, or what might be called skin in the game. The constitution being drafted is not only a speculative exercise about governance in the abstract. It is also intended to govern the project itself. In other words, the community undertaking this constitutional inquiry is also seeking to become the first community meaningfully shaped by it. The project is intended to be mutually owned and governed by its members: those who participate in the process of debate, drafting, contribution, and care. In principle, this includes anyone from Earth who genuinely enters the conversation and contributes to the shared constitutional effort. The aim is not simply to talk about legitimacy, participation, ownership, and responsibility, but to apply those questions to the governance of the project itself. This is important for both ethical and methodological reasons. A constitution drafted only for others can easily become performative. A constitution drafted for one’s own shared project creates a different level of seriousness. It forces questions of governance, finance, ownership, conflict, accountability, and participation to become real rather than rhetorical. For that reason, the process is designed to hold a productive tension between play and seriousness. Imagination and humour matter because they open space for new possibilities and reduce fear around difficult questions. But the work must also engage with real-world issues: how decisions are made, how resources are shared, how labour is recognised, who gets paid what, how financial flows are governed, and how social, systemic, and environmental considerations are embedded in everyday working practice. The project is therefore interested not only in constitutional language at the level of ideals, but in constitutionalism as lived design: the shaping of actual rules, working norms, economic arrangements, and institutional habits that embody the values being discussed. This work is intended to be shaped by several intersecting strands. First, it is informed by the life’s work of Dr Heather Allansdottir, whose scholarship in comparative constitutional law, public international law, climate governance, and space law offers a rigorous legal foundation for the process. Her work on constitution-writing in transitional contexts, constitutional adaptation under pressure, and the governance implications of emerging domains such as outer space is directly relevant to any attempt to imagine legal forms adequate to the scale and complexity of the present century. Second, it builds on the experience of the Hitchhiker Research Fellows and collaborators, who together bring many years of work in computational law, governance innovation, digital systems, participatory democracy, corporate governance consultancy, and institutional design. This includes experience developed through governance and advisory work connected to Bioss, as well as work on how legal and organisational structures operate in practice under conditions of complexity. Third, the project draws on strands of work within the fellowship concerning liquid democracy, trust networks, privacy-preserving infrastructures, personhood of nature, and the integration of artificial intelligence and privacy standards into democratic and institutional design. These questions are not peripheral to constitutional thought. They are increasingly central to it, because constitutions today cannot be understood only as legal texts. They are also expressed through socio-technical systems, governance protocols, data structures, and the practical conditions under which participation becomes possible or impossible. Fourth, the project is grounded in participatory cultural methods: citizen assemblies, legislative theatre, collaborative inquiry, and public storytelling as ways of widening meaningful constitutional participation. The intention is not simply to explain a constitutional framework to the public once experts have already defined it, but to create a process in which legal scholarship, governance practice, public imagination, and democratic experimentation can genuinely inform one another. Taken together, these strands make the project unusual. It is neither a conventional constitutional law exercise nor an arts programme loosely themed around governance. It is an attempt to create a serious constitutional design process that is legally grounded, technologically informed, publicly accessible, experimentally embodied, and culturally alive. ## Partnership with constitutional lawyers One important strand of this work involves collaboration with constitutional lawyers whose scholarship and practice intersect with institutional design, civic rights, legal pluralism, and governance under conditions of complexity. A key figure in this conversation is Dr Heather Allansdottir, a constitutional and public international law scholar whose work spans comparative constitutional law, human rights, climate governance, and space law. Heather’s role in this project is foundational rather than ornamental. The year-long drafting process is intended to be substantially informed by her scholarship and experience: not only her work on constitution-writing in politically transitional settings, but also her attention to the ways legal systems must evolve when older constitutional forms fail to keep pace with contemporary pressures. Her expertise is especially important because this project is interested not only in constitutions as national legal documents, but in the future of constitutionalism itself. How do societies write and revise the rules by which they live when the relevant actors include not only states and citizens, but also transnational networks, digital systems, ecological systems, future generations, and potentially extra-terrestrial forms of governance? How do we think constitutionally at planetary scale without abandoning legal seriousness or democratic legitimacy? Heather’s work helps anchor these questions in rigorous scholarship. At the same time, the Hitchhiker framework creates an imaginative and accessible public language through which those questions can be opened to wider participation. It allows constitutional inquiry to become a live cultural and educational process rather than a closed professional discourse. ## The role of the Hitchhiker Research Fellows This constitutional work is strengthened by the wider experience of the Hitchhiker Research Fellows and collaborators, who bring long-standing expertise across governance, computational law, organisational design, digital systems, trust infrastructures, participatory methods, and corporate governance practice. Among these strands is work by Dr David Bovill and others on liquid democracy, trust networks, privacy-preserving systems, and the ways artificial intelligence and privacy standards can be integrated into democratic and governance frameworks without reducing people to data points or participation to managed procedure. This sits alongside wider fellowship interests in personhood of nature, legislative theatre, citizen assembly design, and the development of more humane socio-technical institutions. This collective experience matters because the constitutional problems of the present are not merely jurisprudential. They are also infrastructural, organisational, and technical. Power is increasingly exercised through code, standards, platforms, contracts, protocols, and hidden governance architectures. Any serious attempt to design constitutional forms for the present century must therefore include people who understand both law and the systems through which law is now increasingly mediated. The project is particularly interested in the intersection between constitutional design and computational governance: how constitutional values may be expressed through digital institutions; how legal and technical architectures might reinforce rather than undermine democratic accountability; and how future governance systems can be designed to remain participatory, legible, and humane. ## Mutual ownership and working practice A further distinguishing feature of the project is that questions of governance are inseparable from questions of ownership, contribution, and economic practice. The intention is that the project itself should be mutually owned and governed by its members, with constitutional participation tied to real involvement in the community and its work. This means that debates about rights and responsibilities are not abstract. They touch directly on the life of the project: how value is created, how labour is recognised, how contributions are attributed, how compensation is decided, how shared resources are stewarded, and how ecological and systemic responsibilities are taken into account. The aim is to strike the right balance between play and imagination on the one hand, and real-world institutional seriousness on the other. Humour and creativity are part of how the work stays open, generous, and inventive. But they are not an escape from practical reality. They are part of how the group becomes capable of facing practical reality together. That includes difficult and necessary questions about economic design. If this project is to draft a constitution worth taking seriously, it must be willing to ask how the economy of the project itself should function: who is paid, for what, according to which principles, and with what regard for fairness, contribution, care, sustainability, and long-term stewardship. These are not side issues. They are constitutional issues in lived form. ## Potential areas of collaboration While this document is primarily an invitation to dialogue, we are exploring several concrete forms of institutional partnership, particularly in the areas of constitutional design, governance research, civic education, and community-led inquiry. These may include: * supporting a year-long constitutional drafting and deliberation process informed by comparative constitutional law, public international law, space law, participatory governance, and socio-technical systems design. * contributing to research on participatory, federated, commons-based, and computational approaches to constitutional design. * co-developing educational resources that translate complex legal and governance questions into publicly accessible formats. * exploring how citizen assemblies, legislative theatre, trust networks, privacy-preserving systems, and ecological jurisprudence might inform future constitutional method. * examining constitutional responses to the climate emergency, technological acceleration, and planetary-scale governance challenges. * experimenting with mutually governed organisational forms in which constitutional principles are applied directly to ownership, contribution, compensation, and stewardship within the project itself. ## Funding We anticipate that support for this work will emerge primarily through existing personal and institutional relationships across Oxford and other British, European, and American networks, rather than through generic open calls. The intention is not to force the work into pre-existing grant templates, but to build through networks of trust, intellectual alignment, and mutual commitment. In that sense, the funding is expected to follow the relationships and the seriousness of the work, rather than determining the work in advance. At the same time, the project is conscious that funding itself must be treated constitutionally. Questions of who pays, who is paid, how resources are shared, and how financial decisions are governed are not external to the inquiry. They form part of the lived constitutional practice the project is seeking to develop. ## Reciprocal working agreement for students One of the distinguishing features of *Hitchhiker’s Guide to Earth* is its commitment to federated, non-hierarchical, and reciprocal collaboration. This shapes how student and academic involvement is understood. Rather than offering one-way placements or passive observation, the project is interested in genuine exchanges in which students and researchers bring their expertise, curiosity, and critical intelligence, and receive meaningful participation, authorship, mentorship, and recognition in return. ### What we offer * active participation in a live, internationally networked cultural and governance project. * collaborative relationships with practitioners across governance, law, technology, cultural production, and community organising. * substantive credit on outputs where contribution is meaningful. * access to a network of collaborators and community catalysts across multiple countries and contexts. * the opportunity to contribute to, and where appropriate be named in, funding applications or institutional partnerships that arise from shared work. * references or formal recognition tailored to the student’s academic or professional goals. ### What we ask * genuine intellectual engagement with the project’s questions, rather than simple task completion. * willingness to work across disciplines and in formats that may be unfamiliar. * a commitment to reciprocity, openness, and honest inquiry. * a minimum engagement period of one academic term, with regular check-ins to ensure the relationship remains useful for all involved. ### Scope of agreement Any professor, class, or student wishing to collaborate formally with the project would be invited to co-author a brief working agreement at the outset, covering scope, expected outputs, time commitment, and attribution. This is not envisaged as a rigid contract, but as a living document of mutual intent, revisable by either party and grounded in ongoing consent. We are open to collaboration at undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral, and postdoctoral level, and across a wide range of disciplines, including law, governance, political theory, cultural studies, anthropology, technology, design, ecology, and communications. ## Next steps This note is offered simply as a starting point for conversation. At its heart is a straightforward but ambitious proposition: that the next generation of constitutional thinking may need to be more participatory, more cross-disciplinary, more technologically literate, more economically self-aware, and more culturally resonant than the forms we have inherited. *Hitchhiker’s Guide to Earth* is an attempt to create the conditions for that work. It uses imagination, creativity, and science fiction as part of its method, backcasting from the futures we hope to make possible in order to draft the constitutional substrate that might help us reach them. It uses the imaginative reach of Douglas Adams not as a substitute for legal rigour, but as a public gateway into a serious year-long process of constitutional inquiry and drafting. That process is intended to be informed by Dr Heather Allansdottir’s work in comparative constitutional law, climate governance, public international law, and space law, and by the experience of the Hitchhiker Research Fellows and collaborators in computational law, governance design, privacy, participatory democracy, trust infrastructures, citizen assembly methodology, legislative theatre, and related socio-technical approaches to institutional design. Crucially, the constitution being drafted is not only about the world beyond the project. It is also intended to govern the project itself: a mutually owned and governed endeavour in which those who participate in the debate help shape the rules, responsibilities, and economic arrangements by which the work is carried forward. If this resonates, the next step would be a conversation about whether, and how, such a process might be useful within an academic, civic, cultural, or institutional setting. Warmly, **Graham Stewart** Cerdanyola del Vallès [wgrahamstewart@gmail.com](mailto:wgrahamstewart@gmail.com) +34 658 366 933