Andrea Monti, Lost in the Shell

Andrea Monti is at Edinburgh Law School on Wednesday 21 October, talking through his book Lost in the Shell (Routledge, 2025). It's a mid-afternoon session, 15:00 to 16:00, held in Teaching Room 02 at Old College on South Bridge.

In Lost in the Shell, Monti takes aim at the increasingly superstitious relationship Western societies have with technology and the ambition to transcend human limits: to defeat ageing, enhance the body and mind, and become, through technology, something resembling gods. He argues that law and rights are human social constructs created to govern human interactions, and that forgetting this principle opens the door to a society organised around different assumptions: technologically mediated loneliness disguised as individualism, the erosion of social bonds, the infantilisation of Western culture, and an unquestioning faith in technological solutions.

He points to potentiative medicine, artificial and bioprinted organs, genetic intervention and brain enhancement as forces that could create inequalities qualitatively different from those we know today, with the emergence of a technologically enhanced human élite. It's a wide-ranging look at how the drive to 'upgrade' ourselves might end up hollowing out the very things that make us human.

Monti is an Italian lawyer, academic, author and journalist who teaches digital identity, privacy and cybersecurity at Sapienza University of Rome, and writes on technology, law and geopolitics for La Repubblica - Italian Tech, MIT Technology Review Italia and Wired.it. This isn't his first go at the subject, either: he also wrote The Digital Rights Delusion (Routledge, 2023). Entry is free, so you can just turn up to Teaching Room 02 at Old College between 15:00 and 16:00 on Wednesday 21 October.