Below is a recording of a presentation I gave at this year’s conference on the Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations (PHTR), titled ‘Technological Mediation vs. the Rule of Law’. It builds on part of a paper I wrote in 2018 (“Law as a User: Design, Affordance, and the Technological Mediation of Norms” 15(1) SCRIPTed 4) that discusses the role played by technological mediation in law-as-we-know-it.
Here I talk about how a full understanding of the relationships between law and technology requires engagement with what I call the ‘regulatory’ and ‘existential’ roles of the latter; the first raising questions about the translation of textual norms into code architectures, and the second about how this reflexively structures the nature of legal protection.
Discussion