Law and Algorithmic Futures in Psycho-Pass

Abstract

This article studies the Japanese franchise Psycho-Pass as a cultural legal text speaking to popular anxieties about the relationships between law, technology and society. In the world of Psycho-Pass, law and technology’s shared desires for prediction and ordering are combined into a streamlined logic: where criminality is defined through the algorithmic gaze, and algorithmic judgment is delivered upon a person’s entire life, stripping them of their autonomy and reducing individuals to mere fragments in an ocean of data. This logic also continually expands outwards, and creates new systems of oppression beyond its original borders and jurisdictions. Psycho-Pass is thus read as a jurisprudential text detailing the logic of law’s entanglement with a modern culture that seeks to reduce complex socio-political realities to systems of statistical quantification and prediction.