law

It is well known that any formulaic genre has a predictable story and a conventional meaning, nevertheless what makes each story unique is the ethos, that is to say the relationship between characters and environment. When the environment is digital, new media renegotiate traditional formulaic features, as is the case with detective stories and crime fiction in e-literature. The paper illustrates how digital ontology shapes the relationship between the ethos and the law. Indeed digital technology determines not only the criminal deed and the method of investigation, but it also highlights how the perception of the crime and the resultant moral or legal responsibility are more and more undetermined in social interaction. For Christie’s inter-war fiction or in American hard-boiled literature, the issue of social order was crucial, but contemporary aporia calls into question the happy ending of the investigation. We can anticipate that in electronic crime fiction the final social order and the need for penalty measures are not part of the storytelling. A brief overview of electronic detective stories will be given, even if particular attention will be paid on Elliot Holt's #TwitterFiction Story Was it a suicide? A homicide? Or an accident? Read and decide...1. In the latter, Miranda, the victim, is the product of digital media communication, and as any other digital object she is ontologically abstract. She simply exists in the relationship between digital subjectivity (communicated via social media by the other characters of the story) and a hyper-real objectivity made of binary code. Technically speaking she is a sequence of 0 and 1 or, as John Searle would say, she is syntax. Holt creates a character who is exiled from the objectivist system, although she exists in a social network for the followers and the readers. Somehow she is locked into some tweets, but beyond the real world. How can a police investigation cope with this? Now social media communication seems to undermine or dispossess reality of the concepts of “reference” and “referent”. The risk to overlap what is inside or outside the digital world, is truly existing, as the murder committed in Cleveland in 2017 to be posted on Facebook suggests. If in the past, a writer gave the reader a criminal case to solve within the rules of law, nowadays a digital writer gives his readers an experience. Actually, readers are no longer asked to share the detective's acumen and insight, but to participate to the criminal case. Today the anticanonical digital detective fiction does not merely tell stories of crimes and justice, but they put on stage how the Law does no longer play its role in society. Nowadays law tries to codify online and offline behaviours, rights and duties, but the more the relationship between these two realities are undefined the harder it is for the law to be effective and incisive in its goal. A more general difference between good and evil seems to be enough for the public of eliterature. Considerations about the Ethics Guidelines For Trustworthy AI, released by the the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group On Artificial Intelligence, will be taken into consideration.

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace is a 1999 book by Lawrence Lessig on the structure and nature of regulation of the Internet.

The primary idea of the book, as expressed in the title, is the notion that computer code (or "West Coast Code", referring to Silicon Valley) regulates conduct in much the same way that legal code (or "East Coast Code", referring to Washington, D.C.) does. More generally, Lessig argues that there are actually four major regulators (Law, Norms, Market, Architecture) each of which has a profound impact on society and whose implications must be considered (sometimes called the "pathetic dot theory", after the "dot" that is constrained by these regulators.)

The book includes a discussion of the implications for copyright law, arguing that cyberspace changes not only the technology of copying but also the power of law to protect against illegal copying. It goes so far as to argue that code displaces the balance in copyright law and doctrines such as fair use. If it becomes possible to license every aspect of use (by means of trusted systems created by code), no aspect of use would have the protection of fair use. The importance of this side of the story is generally underestimated and, as the examples in the book show, very often, code is even (only) considered as an extra tool to fight against "unlimited copying."

(Source: Wikipedia entry on Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace)

Jacques Derrida discusses “the law of genre” – the idea that genre hasthe function of imposing norms on literary and cultural practices: “Assoon as the word ‘genre’ is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as oneattempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established,norms and interdictions are not far behind: ‘Do,’ ‘Do not’ says ‘genre,’the word ‘genre,’ the figure, the voice, or the law of genre” (Derrida 1980,p. 56). In Derrida’s view, genre functions more to exclude forms of literarypractice than to elucidate them: “… as soon as a genre announces itself,one must respect a norm, one must cross a line of demarcation, one mustnot risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity” (p. 57).

(Source: Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg)

Marc Bousquet introduces a forthcoming Altx critical e-book, hosted online by ebr, appearing in five sections through the Fall of 2003. A new ebr thread, Technocapitalism, is built around its concerns.

(Source: EBR)

Excerpted from Water Writing - an essay; presented as part of the ebr Critical Ecologies thread; concurrent with a literary Festschrift in honor of Joseph McElroy’s lifework