Law in the Age of the 4th Industrial Revolution: Between the Impersonal Technology and Shadow Orders

Abstract

The time in which we live is not easy. On the one hand, the latest technological advances create an illusion of unprecedented progress. On the other hand, it appears that millions of people in the world are deprived from the opportunity to use these advances in their everyday lives. Moreover, it appears that these technological advances can cause more problems than they help to solve. This situation also applies to the legal sphere where the law is gradually turning into a neutral, depersonalized technique. Mostly restrictive, repressive and estranged from the will of individual social associations, such law (law as a mere technique) generates rather radical responses in the form of different "shadow" (unofficial) norms, institutions and practices. In this paper the problem of a possible clash of the official positive law with shadow social orders is analyzed. Trying to find the way out of the false dichotomy between the technologized official law and fundamentalist rules of some narrow communities, the author discusses the origins and weak spots of the contemporary legal order.