Andrea Monti, Lost in the Shell
Location:
Teaching Room 02,
Old College
Date/time
Wed 21 October 2026
15:00-16:00
What if the greatest danger of technology is not what machines may become, but what human beings are willing to become because of them?
In Lost in the Shell (Routledge, 2025), Andrea Monti challenges the increasingly superstitious relationship of Western societies with technology and their ancient, recurring ambition to transcend the limits of the human condition: to defeat ageing, enhance the body and mind, and ultimately become, through technology, something resembling gods.
At the heart of the book lies a deceptively simple proposition: law and rights are human social constructs, created by human beings to govern human interactions. But once this principle is forgotten, the door opens to a society organised around fundamentally different assumptions.
Lost in the Shell explores what is already emerging beyond that door: technologically mediated loneliness disguised as individualism; the erosion of social bonds and their reconstruction around the belief that we are not necessarily who we are; and the infantilisation of Western culture alongside an increasingly unquestioning faith in technological solutions.
But a more radical transformation may lie ahead. Potentiative medicine, artificial and bioprinted organs, genetic intervention and brain enhancement could create forms of inequality qualitatively different from those we know today. Those able to enhance their bodies, cognitive abilities and lifespan may cease to be merely wealthier or more powerful than others. They could become a technologically enhanced human élite — almost a new “race”, quite literally occupying the top of the food chain.
This is therefore not simply a book about artificial intelligence, data or digital identity. It is a book about power, human limits, social bonds and the consequences of allowing technology to redefine the assumptions upon which law and society have been built.
Nearly a century after Aldous Huxley imagined a civilisation in which technology, social engineering and the pursuit of manufactured happiness transformed the meaning of being human. A Brave New World is just around the corner.
About the Author
Andrea Monti is an Italian lawyer, academic, author and journalist whose work focuses on the relationship between law, technology and society. He 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.
His research explores the legal, political and social consequences of technological change, with particular attention to cybersecurity, digital identity, individual rights and the changing relationship between human beings, technology and the State.
He has published a number of books on these topics including (with Raymond Wacks) Protecting Personal Information (Hart Publishing, 2019), COVID-19 and Public Policy in the Digital Age (Routledge, 2020), National Security in the New World Order (Routledge, 2021); and as a sole author The Digital Rights Delusion (Routledge, 2023), Lost in the Shell (Routledge, 2025), Cybersecurity Contract Essentials (Bloomsbury, 2026 - forthcoming).