We live in a world shaped by planetary-scale, complex socio-technical infrastructures: from energy networks and global supply chains to digital media and social platforms. These systems structure our daily lives, our social relations, our economic opportunities, our freedoms, and our futures. Yet they lie beyond the control of any single individual or state. The challenge is how to govern these infrastructures so that they reflect local values, normative orders, and historical contexts.
Law in general, and information law in particular, is an instrument of power. It has traditionally carried the task of restraining and directing technology, especially in moments of rapid technological change. Today, however, institutionalised legal power increasingly competes with rapidly consolidating technological power – and neither is fully prepared for the consequences of ongoing disruption. This lecture explores the challenges facing information law in an era in which both the government of the self and the government of others have become, fundamentally, questions of technology governance.
Digital infrastructures
Technology governance has long aimed to reduce the risks and harms of innovation while ensuring that its benefits are widely shared. With the digital revolution, in which digital infrastructures have become tools for governing individual choices and entire populations – the risks and harms are no longer located in “the technology itself”, but in everything that technology touches.
Technology governance is therefore governance of complex socio-economic and socio-technical systems, and above all of human lives and shared worlds. This lecture examines what kinds of knowledge and what kinds of instruments this task requires, and asks how the legal profession can prepare for a future in which its own power is next in line to be disrupted.
Practical details:
Date: 23 April 2026
Time: 16.30
Place:
Aula of the University – Lutherse Kerk, Singel 411, 1012 WN Amsterdam.
This inaugural lecture can also be followed here online.