The essay argues that AI is reshaping law and democracy not only through new tools, but by generating a largely private, opaque & laquo;environmental & raquo; normativity that can conflict with traditional, text-based legal interpretation and accountability. It highlights how dominant digital platforms can influence perception and public discourse, fostering manipulation and polarization while shifting power away from representative institutions. In the justice system, he distinguishes helpful & laquo;auxiliary & raquo; uses of AI (le-galtech support) from & laquo;substitutive & raquo; ones that would replace human judgment. Zac-caria is cautious about predictive justice: it may aid analysis, but becomes dangerous when prediction turns into prescription, undermining the human, contextual nature of legal decision-making.
Starting from cybernetians' recurring references to Leibniz, this essay explores his contribution to the conceptual history of technology, of which cybernetics constitutes a decisive threshold. By examining the political theology underlying mechanistic thought-especially through the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence-and by contrasting Leibniz with Hobbes, it highlights his critique of power modeled on the machine and his anticipation of forms of governance that work by encouraging individuals to align spontaneously with universal order. From this perspective, monadology is interpreted as a theory linking order, individuality, and discipline: pre-established harmony becomes an operational principle that requires tools such as probability calculus and codification to secure the relation between spontaneity and program at the core of Leibniz's concept of freedom.
This paper aims to discuss, from an epistemological perspective, the thesis that technical activity constitutes an extension of the biological dimension. This is an ancient hypothesis that has more recently been taken up in biology, engineering, and the social sciences. The paper first delineates the field of inquiry, with reference to the French technological tradition; it then defines the thesis more precisely with reference to the work of Leroi-Gourhan; finally, it highlights some fruitful lines of problematisation of this thesis within the fields of cognitive archaeology (psychic domain) and the study of technical objects (political domain).
The essay analyses the interface between political and capitalist powers and digital technology and thus the functional role of this technique in governing and controlling the social. A triangle emerges, its poles being High-Tech capital, the State, and, in an ambivalent position, the magmatic cloud of the Social, which is the object of social control but also the subject of power that produces information, sociability and aggregation power. The current threshold of this social control project, has been hit by failures deviations, attacks and default, opposed by the security-driven hardening of power poles: the monopoly of infrastructures in Big Tech platforms and the centralization of political decisions. A hardening that attests to the failure of the project itself and the undisciplined power of the social pole.
Utopia and realism are two trends in political thought that emerge from great political, cultural, and social upheavals and correspond to the need for new concepts and a new political lexicon. While utopian writings of the Renaissance reveal a harsh and disenchanted realism-for instance, an ironic disenchantment pervades More's utopia, which shines through the scornful etymologies-, a strong utopian tension characterises Machiavellian realism. Furthermore, Renaissance utopia reveals its novel and modern image of the world by accepting the technique (artificium). Finally, a peculiar example of Renaissance utopia is the intersection between utopia and prophecy, allowing the direct political engagement by communities guided by prophets, who are aware of the tragic reality and intend to radically transform it for the realisation of the kingdom of Christ.
