Kieran Tranter, Living in Technical Legality: Science Fiction and Law as Technology (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)

New from Kieran Tranter, Griffith University Law School:

Kieran Tranter, Living in Technical Legality: Science Fiction and Law as Technology (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

What if this is not the end? This is the question that is pursued in my new book Living in Technical Legality (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Many feel very insecure about the future due to rapid technological change. News feeds scroll to suggest that humans as a species are facing a degraded future; a future of uncertain employment, automation, and increased surveillance. In this book I try to tell a different story; a more hopeful story about human futures. I do so through science fiction. Science fiction is the place where technological beings dream themselves, their society and its future. This is why science fiction references accompanies public discussions about disruptive technologies. It also explains the popularity of science fiction within mainstream contemporary culture, with it grounding for much in the way of franchised cinema and digital gaming. So what happens if science fiction is taken seriously? Science fiction shows humans and related entities living, striving and failing with and through technology. It broadcasts that to be human is to be fundamentally engaged with technology. Whether humans were always so entwined with technology is a moot point. Some identify the palaeolithic emergence of tools and language as the decisive turn to technology. In this story humans as a species have evolved as technological beings. Others blame the classical Greek philosophers who set up the intellectual resources to count, theorise and reconstruct the world. Science fiction reinforces the suggestion that human life, autonomy and responsibility has been mediated by and through technology for a very long time. If there ever was an ‘end’ to some pre-technological sense of the human, it must have happened a long, long time ago. Nevertheless, life and living has endured after the supposed apocalypse. Humans have, and do, find meaning and worth in the technological world. So the question becomes how can a meaningful and worthwhile life be lived in the technological world? The first is to establish what does it mean to be a technological being? The second is how can that technological being live a worthwhile life? Science fiction has a role in imaging responses to both of these. Science fiction imagines technological beings as nodes within networks. It is a location where networks constrain, but also empower, doing in the world. The being that convention calls the ‘human’ is a hybrid entity composed of biology and culture that changes as it moves through time. The human as a technological being is a fluxing node where multiple networks meet. This can be terrifying. There are two dangers. The first is of over-determination. That the node in the network is pre-programmed. There is no choice of action, everything is set by the wider context so that there is no scope for discrete, purposeful doing in the world: ‘The computer says no’. However, this is not entirely true. While it total freedom of choice is illusionary, there is always a form of structured agency. The idea of ‘structured agency’ opens to the second terrifying danger; that its exercise is a value-free zone where any choice is equality valid. However, as nodes in the network there is a tendency to connection. In this there can be seen responsibility to the becoming of the world. For some this is expressed in terms of making the world more complex. For others there is a tangible sense of connection that can be nurtured and developed. It is this sense of responsibility that should inform the exercise of the structured agency available to technological beings on how to live a worthwhile life. In the book I examine three specific node locations (the legal subject, the lawyers and the scholar) for the exercise of responsibility to the becoming of the world through an intertwined reading with specific science fictions. In the chapter on the legal subject, Octavia E Butlers Xenogenesis story is discussed. This fantastic trilogy of novels from the late 1980s explores the limits and possibilities of action in a colonised, biological over-determined space. The struggles and partial victories of each of the novel’s protagonists show how to exercise structured agency in the personal, intimate and every-day. In short this is not the end; notwithstanding ever present anxieties about technological futures. But there is a need to let go of older forms of thought. To live well with technology involves embracing the science fictionality of the present. Rather than passively deferring to the machines that are making the world, it involves the seeing and seizing the opportunities for making a difference.

Kieran Tranter Griffith Law School Australia