Should complete access to the internet be a fundamental right? Is our quality of life directly or inversely proportional to our use of technology? Are humans behaving more and more like machines? When is a technologically enhanced human not a human anymore? If genetic editing was cheap and simple, would we allow it? Is Zuckerberg really watching us?
These are a few of the many normative 'tech and law' questions I don't answer in this article. All I do here is pretend to know the ugly truths and the dark stupidities of our time. And I marshal it the way Ambrose Bierce did in his famous, The Devil's Dictionary, which was followed by Advocate Bharat Ch ugh in his recent work, The Devil's Dictionary (of Law).
I have achieved this feat at the cost of my blood, sweat, tears, and toil. Blood, pressure of which shot up with the crypto crash. Sweat, finding judgments from the red tape CM IS of the courts' websites. Tears, shed in learning jumbled-letter-soups derived from the ‘techno-legal’ names of things. Toil, in aiding my 60-year-old lecturer-mother with her ‘virtual classes’.
(Drum roll)
Presenting to you, dear reader, “The Devil’s Dictionary of Technology and Law”. Onward.
A
Artificial Intelligence: intelligence at times so intelligent that it extends beyond the comprehension of human intelligence.
Automation: A build-up to the documentary ‘Rise of the Planet of the E-Apes’. It begins with a blacked-out, anonymous house-helper narrating how he lost his job to a machine.
B
Blockchain: Learning this concept will instantly block your chain of thought and you will block it out of your system forever. See also: Jurisprudence.
Boilerplate Clause: A set of terms in a contract that is used mutatis mutandis to save time and effort, only to increase both time and effort in the form of dispute resolution.
Case Management Information System (CM IS): A system that informally performs stress tests on lawyers before producing their desired output. This is done to maintain the highest levels of mental endurance in the legal fraternity.
Cloud Service: A digital space to hold your data, often afforded to you at ‘no charge’ as the real product is not the cloud service but you.
Compliance: A corporate practice that has, somehow, kept thirsty predators from abusing and misusing resources to prey on each other and the masses. It involves drowning said predators in redundant procedures.
Cybersecurity: A process involving bonafide acts similar to fighting hostile gunmen with a pencil. You need to be precise every time, they need to be precise just once. Even this kind of security requires you to ‘jaagte raho’ at all times.
D
Data Protection: A concept you take seriously only after you’re a victim of whatever or whomever you were needed to be secure from.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi): (Un)banking using blockchain technology to defy (pun intended) the existing banking system.
Disruptive Technology: Any new technology that convinces 20-year-olds to invest in it “coz iz d future”. To create “long-term wealth and retire by their 20’s”. My dear 20-year-old, Savdhan rahe! Satark rahe!
Drone: A mechanical creature capable of air, water, and land operability. Yet, most likely to be spotted in weddings hovering over Priti and Pankaj as they do the ‘Titanic’ pose. If you spot multiple of them, someone is finding their own match in the crowd from the comfort of their homes.
E
E-commerce: A new weapon in the arsenal of the bargainers who unabashedly insist on paying the seller at discounted prices, instead of buying from the app actually offering those prices! If the customer is king, this one is irking.
E-sports: A full-time profession, pending the approval of Indian parents. It involves mastery in online physical activity and skill at the cost of real-life physical activity and skill.
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