Beyond Instrumentalism: A Substantivist Perspective on Law, Technology, and the Digital Persona
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Law and technology matters have traditionally been researched in discrete categories such as intellectual property (e.g., copyright, patent, or trademark) or intermediary liability and responsibility (e.g., secondary liability and telecommunications regulation). In the last two decades, however, academics have studied the broader interaction between law and technology across legal fields. This Article examines progress to date and discusses two distinct perspectives on law and technology. The dominant approach has been an instrumentalist one that treats technology as a tool for individuals to use while downplaying its broader social implications. However, the fields of philosophy of technology, science and technology studies, and social studies of science are now mature enough to support a rival approach grounded in a deep understanding of the nature—rather than the results—of technological change. This substantivist approach suggests analytical principles to refine and improve technology law and policy in ways that rival, instrumentalist approaches have neglected. For instance, substantivist commitments support a law and technology construct called a “digital persona” to emphasize the need for laws and policies to promote autonomy within the online world. By contrasting instrumentalist and substantivist approaches, we demonstrate new ways to integrate ethics, policy, and law in the digital age.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it