The Utility of Incoherence: How To Escape Control By Not Making Sense

The logics that control our lives are secretly changing, as private companies entrench poorly-understood technologies in every facet of our society. If we do not know the rules that govern our lives, how can we maintain autonomy? And how are private actors building a gibberish world to escape the law?

In this talk, I will explain Prof Arno Lodder & I's framework of "Techno-Regulatory Incoherence", wherein techno-architectures are designed intentionally such that the law is rendered gibberish when applied to them. With reference to emergent technologies such as Generative AI and Blockchain, as well as bizarro virtual universes that confound all regulatory principles in real space, I will exhibit how private actors are able to escape the control of the state and create disparate private regulatory worlds which cannot be brought under the remit of the law without undermining its current stability.

Critically, I will outline the mounting risk of regulatory chaos, wherein a centralised coherent public framework distracts from a peripheral techno-landscape, where fragmentation and incoherence abound.