Rethinking how technologies harm

Published online on November 24, 2020

Abstract

Understanding how technologies contribute to social harms is a perennial issue, animating debate within and well beyond criminology. This article contributes to these debates in two ways. First, it critically examines five of the key approaches criminologists have used to think through how technologies contribute to harms. Second, it proposes a new approach to understanding ‘technology–harm relations’. Bringing the theory of critical realism, Simondon and Floridi into conversation, the proposed approach offers a stratigraphy of harm that enables us to excavate the different layers of human–technology and technology–harm relations. In doing so, it enables us to distinguish between four technology–harm relations that untangle the socio-technicality of harmful events: instrumental utility harms, generative utility harms, instrumental technicity harms and generative technicity harms.