On 1 November 1755, All Saints’ Day, Lisbon was shocked by an earthquake that brought on a series of waves in European politics and architecture. In her The Faces of Injustice Judith Shklar discusses this earthquake as a turning point for the demarcation line between natural and man-made disaster, shifting the borders of responsibility of governments to include harm caused by natural disasters that should have been anticipated. The urban architecture of Lisbon, a city with a myriad of small streets that offered no shelter once the houses started coming down, was partly to blame for the excessive amount of casualities. To have an idea of this architecture the reader—if familiar with Lisbon—could think of the famous Alfama district, the Moorish labyrinth of closely knit alleys, adorned with freshly washed laundry stretched across the narrow streets, stemming from an era when housing was considered a private enterprise not falling within the scope of public competence. After the earthquake Lisbon was reconstructed under the supervision of the marquis de Pombal who practically reigned Portugal as an enlightened absolutist monarch. He planned broad avenues which should allow people to rescue their lives by running to the middle of the road in the case of another earthquake and took care that earthquake-resistant buildings were constructed. One could paraphrase Shklar by saying that when natural disaster has public consequences, governments should intervene to the greatest extent possible to prevent harm.

It seems remarkable that in today’s world, bristling with socio-technical imbroglios that have a major impact on the risks and opportunities of citizens everywhere, the development of technological infrastructures is left mainly to scientific research, technical engineers and market forces. Quoting Lawrence Lessig one could claim that ‘governments should intervene … when private action has public consequences’. In fact, we can link his advocacy to Dewey’s discussion of the Public and its Problems of 1927, in which Dewey claimed that democracy implies that those that suffer the indirect consequences of a decision or action have found a way to participate in the decision. Dewey’s concern for democracy stemmed from the fact that emerging technological infrastructures had facilitiated a complex societal context in which indirect consequences of decisions taken outside the domain of national politics were massive, requiring more participatory conceptions of democracy in addition to representative democratic theory. In today’s world one could translate his concern by arguing that citizens who suffer or enjoy the effects of new technological infrastructures, like for instance Ambient Intelligence (AmI), should be able to influence decisions regarding the funding, designing and marketing of such emerging technologies. Instead of endorsing a paralysing technological determinism (akin to a fatalist acceptance of natural disaster) civil society and its government should realise that technologies are neither good not bad but never neutral, acknowledging that technologies can be constructed in different ways, with different normative implications.

In this contribution I will introduce the concept of technological normativity and compare it to legal normativity. After establishing how the two compare, their relationship will be explored, coming to the conclusion that modern law is in fact embodied in a specific technology: the written and printed script (section II). The idea that modern law is articulated in the script is elaborated in an analysis of oral, written and letterised traditions, including a speculative investigation of the transition from letterisation to digitilisation, followed by a similar analysis of the implications of the transition from orality and the script to the letter-press for law (section III). The implications of the transition from the printing press to digital communication for the constitution of law are initiated with a discussion of the vision of Ambient Intelligence, explaining the massive normative impact the realisation of this vision would have on our every day life. I will argue that this normative impact will change the mélange of positive and negative freedom that forms the backbone of constitutional democracy, unless we find ways to articulate the legal framework of democracy and the rule of law into the technological architecture it aims to regulate, creating what has been called ‘Ambient Law’ (section IV). The conclusion must be that lawyers and computer scientists should negotiate mutual transformations in the legal and technological infrastructure to sustain and reinvent democracy and rule of law in the age of Ambient Intelligence (section V).