Living in Technical Legality: Science Fiction and Law as Technology
Kieran Tranter
Abstract
Successive transformations have resulted in the emergence of a total technological world where old separations about ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ have declined. With this, the tendency towards technicity within modern law has flourished. There has often been identified a mechanistic essence to modern law in its domination of human life. Usually this has been considered an ‘end’ and a loss, the human swallowed by the machine. However, this innovative book sets out to re-address this tendency
By examining science fiction as the culture of our total technological world, Living in Technical Legality jou ... More
Successive transformations have resulted in the emergence of a total technological world where old separations about ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ have declined. With this, the tendency towards technicity within modern law has flourished. There has often been identified a mechanistic essence to modern law in its domination of human life. Usually this has been considered an ‘end’ and a loss, the human swallowed by the machine. However, this innovative book sets out to re-address this tendency
By examining science fiction as the culture of our total technological world, Living in Technical Legality journeys with the partially consumed human into the belly of the machine. What it finds is unexpected: rather than a cold uniformity of exchangeable productive units, there is warmth, diversity and ‘life’ for the nodes in the networks. Through its science fiction focus, it argues that this life generates a very different law of responsibility that can guide living well in technical legality.
Keywords:
Technology,
Modern law,
Science Fiction,
Technical Legality,
Living,
Responsibility
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781474420891 |
Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: May 2020 |
DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474420891.001.0001 |