Control, Alt, and/or Delete? Some observations on new technologies and the human

With “Control, Alt, Delete, username, password” we daily gain access to the digital world. Failure to comply? Access denied! From a perspective nourished by the fields of Law and Literature, and Law and the Humanities, this chapter focuses on the influence of new technologies on our idea of the human and the idea of (the rule of) law. It aims to formulate some questions pertaining to a humanistic view of technology by means of an analysis of the German author-lawyer-philosopher Juli Zeh’s novel Corpus Delicti. This novel’s main theme is a state’s obsessive and omnipresent health concerns that prove to be an inescapable ideology with devastating consequences for its citizens. The juridical-political ideal of around-the-clock observation, lack of privacy, control and prevention that transpires in this novel works to the detriment of the main character Mia Holl who observes that law is a game that we all have to play. While disciplinary society’s sites of confinement may have broken down, new technologies introduce new forms of disciplining the human and this development speaks for our attention to the risks of an uninformed application of technology in and for law.