Cultural Legalities of the Corporation in Science Fiction: Biopolitics, Technology, Data

Jordan Belor

doi:10.25907/01041

This thesis engages in a cultural legal analysis of the corporate form. More specifically, it analyses the intersections between the corporation and technology through a critical reading of a series of science fiction texts. Central to each of these readings is an understanding of the corporation’s reliance upon, and deployment of, digital data. In engaging in its cultural legal readings, the thesis takes-up and draws upon the theories of biopolitics, applying them specifically to the corporate form and its use and abuse of technology and data. What this highlights is not only the ‘impactful’ nature of the corporation—both the benefits and harms they cause—but how such an entity collects, manipulates and deploys data in the name of improving overall quality of life, whilst producing multiple externalities and subordinating life to its own profitability and continuity. The thesis engages in four readings of science-fiction texts: Marvel’s WandaVision (2021); a modern adaptation of Phillip K Dick’s Autofac (2018); Netflix’s Altered Carbon (2018); and Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018). Each of these readings, take-up and critically analyses a key aspect of the corporate form: corporate identity, corporate personality, perpetual succession as a form of immortality, and corporate ownership—both of and by the corporation. At the same time, each of the texts look to the way in which a certain technology or technological development represents or alters the traditional understanding of these features of the corporation: the way a synthetic person challenges questions of identity metaphysics that undergird the corporate form; how automated corporations resituate debates over corporate purpose; the way visions of technologically-enabled human immortality question the need for corporate perpetual succession; and whether forms of virtual property and virtual worlds provide a critique of the ownership of corporate persons. What ties each of these readings together is the way in which both contemporary developments—and the speculative future envisionings in the cultural texts—reveal the corporation’s reliance upon, and manipulation of, digital data. The ownership, control and manipulation of data has become essential to the corporation’s survival while positioning the representation and image of the human person as ancillary or subordinate to its image. This focus on the capturing of the human within the digital, that is then controlled and manipulated by corporate entities, situates the thesis within the field of biopolitics—a rendering of the human as only that which is observable, measurable, datafiable and caught within the web of corporate control. That is, the human legal subject has become a site or source of data for the corporation, which is then deployed for its owned continuity and profitability. As such, this thesis interrogates the corporation’s use of legal devices where, on the surface, it improves quality of life, but in actuality captures life only to reproduce it as artificial. The goal of transforming life into something resembling anything artificial is central to this thesis’ inquiry to understand our current experiences as well as our possible futures with the corporation. As such, this thesis explores representations of the corporate form in science fiction which offers a series of possible futures to observe the plasticity of the corporate form and how we engage with it. This thesis becomes a jurisprudential anthology on legal relations between the artificial and the natural, persons and things, reality and imaginary, and the corporation and the human. With each substantive chapter, the thesis engages with possible futures that illustrate the corporation’s ability to create, produce, use, own and control artificial life, placing itself as the apotheosis of this legal and unescapable artificial reality where even death is simply a datafiable event. This thesis’ critical analysis on each of these science fiction texts interrogates the corporate form’s plasticity in possible futures where fantasised technologies become reality and its artificiality affects law, life, and culture. In particular, this thesis engages with both the theoretical understandings of corporate jurisprudence ranging from biopolitics to data while also aligning that with how they are reimagined in popular culture. As such each of the substantive chapters reveal different aspects of the corporation reliance on humanity in form and substance that cannot be ignored. By interrogating the corporate form in contexts that do not yet materially exist, they have afforded an opportunity to examine the interconnections between the schools of biopolitics, cultural legal studies, law and technology (including data), law and film, personhood, metaphysics, and corporate jurisprudence. By bringing these schools together in this cultural legal exploration, the violence embedded within biopolitics not only forms at the centre of each text it also serves as a testament. This testament is that each point text reveals that artificiality is used in both a means to deliver violence as a means of control, but also one of relations. That is, artificiality at its core directly implicates and amplifies the way that technology—both mechanical and legal—influences the way that persons interact with each other and the law.

Cultural Legalities of the Corporation in Science Fiction: Biopolitics, Technology, Data

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Details

Metrics