Is Technology Really in its Villain Era? Reflections from Gikii 2025 @ IVIR Amsterdam

There’s a certain magic to the Gikii conference, and this year’s gathering at the University of Amsterdam’s @Institute for Information Law (IViR) was no exception. For someone who spends most of her days navigating the formal procedures and protocols of the EU bubble, it’s a refreshing dose of intellectual whiplash. It’s a world where a deep dive into “Foot fetish anxieties and (self-)censorship” can share the stage with a critique of big tech through the lens of 19th-century anti-imperialist literature. 

The theme, “Technology in its Villain Era?”, set a playful, provocative tone for two days of brilliant, creative, and sometimes wonderfully strange conversations. It was, in a word, fun.

I confess, however, I also often felt delightfully lost. It was a plunge into a multiverse of geek culture, a whirlwind of phantasmagorical stories where I struggled to distinguish the dystopian corporate allegories of Severance from the redemptive arcs of fallen Jedi. The energy was infectious, a testament to a community that engages with the law not as a dusty set of rules, but as a living, breathing narrative that needs to be explored, challenged, and reimagined.

Yet, amid the legal banter, a persistent unease began to settle in. The conference’s very premise, echoed in many of the presentations, rests on an assumption I believe is fundamentally flawed and, worse, dangerous for effective governance. The question we were asked to ponder was how to regulate technology. And my answer is: we shouldn’t.

The Seduction of a Simple Villain

The entire “Villain Era” framing, as clever as it is, nudges us toward a familiar trap: the myth of Sin, where we cast technology as a modern-day scapegoat for our complex social failings. It’s a seductive narrative because it gives us a simple, non-human culprit. It’s the “job-killing robots”, the “polarizing platforms”, the Joker’s algorithm in Gotham City. This thinking inevitably leads to what I’ve called “policy hallucinations” in my work: laws written to appease the ghosts of our own making, regulating fantasies instead of functions.

The problem with this approach is that it leads us directly to a graveyard of obsolete, technology-specific legislation. The pace of innovation ensures that today’s villain is tomorrow’s historical curiosity, leaving behind a law that is both irrelevant and inert. History is littered with these legislative ghosts.

Any law passed today that attempts to regulate “Large Language Models” (LLMs) or “Generative AI” by name is, by its very nature, already obsolete. The technology is evolving faster than any legislative body can possibly keep up. This is the predictable outcome of regulatory lag: we cannot win a race against technological change. We must, instead, stop running a 100-meter sprint.

The Enduring Wisdom of Regulating People, Not Things

The alternative is not to abandon regulation, but to re-anchor it in a more durable foundation: technology neutrality. We must regulate what technology does or enables, not what it is. Our focus should be on curbing harmful behavior and negative outcomes, and incentivizing beneficial ones, regardless of the tool used.

We have powerful blueprints for this. The U.S. wire fraud statute, enacted in an era of telegraphs, remains a primary tool for prosecuting internet crimes today because it governs a timeless human behavior, fraud, not a transient technology. Similarly, both the U.S.’s Section 230 and the EU’s E-commerce Directive have proven remarkably resilient because they regulate specific, defined activities—hosting, caching, acting as a conduit—rather than attempting to regulate “the internet” as a monolithic entity. These frameworks succeed because they regulate actions, not artifacts.

This is the conversation I felt was missing at Gikii. While we were brilliantly deconstructing the villain arcs of platformed misogyny or the gamified spectacle of racial capitalism, we were often still aiming our regulatory fire at the technology itself. The challenge is not to write better laws for AI; it is to write better laws for a world in which AI exists. This means focusing on accountability, liability, transparency, and due process, principles that apply whether the harm is caused by a person, a corporation, or an algorithmic product deployed by that corporation or even public authorities.

A Word of Caution on Building Regulation on Sci-Fi Scenarios

This brings me to my final concern, one that felt particularly relevant in a room buzzing with creativity: the suggestion that science fiction might serve as a source of “regulatory phronesis,” or practical wisdom, for our technological future. I understand the appeal. Science fiction is a powerful tool for imagining possibilities and exploring ethical dilemmas.

But as a foundation for policy, it is terrifying. For every George Orwell whose predictions about surveillance felt chillingly prescient, there are thousands of less-than-visionary sci-fi authors whose worlds make little sense now, and never did. Basing law on speculative fiction risks the ultimate policy hallucination: writing rules for worlds that exist only in our imagination, while ignoring the prosaic, tangible harms unfolding in our own. Are we to draft aviation policy based on Futurama? Or agricultural policy based on Soylent Green?

The work of governance must be grounded in the world as it is. It requires evidence-based risk assessment, not dystopian fantasy. It requires clear lines of human accountability, not speculation about the motives of a fictional superintelligence.

The Path Forward: From Villain Arcs to Durable Rules

Gikii 2025 was a phenomenal event, a vital forum for the kind of boundary-pushing thoughts we desperately need. My critique is not of the community, but a friendly challenge to it. We, the people who think deeply about these issues, must lead the way in moving the conversation from the ephemeral to the enduring. We must shift our focus from “regulating technology” to regulating human conduct in a technologically advanced society.

The most heroic act we can perform is the patient, often unglamorous work of building technology-neutral frameworks that are durable enough to protect democratic values for generations to come. The challenge isn’t to unmask the villain of the season, but to write rules that outlast any single story.

Written by Caroline De Cock, LL.M. , Head of Research.