Abstract

This article is organized into two parts: one sociological, the other legal. In the first part, I reason about the way information technologies have amplified two "classic" human desires by making them more accessible: this has given us the narcissistic desire for an augmented social exposure and the desire to record, quantify, and leverage the events that make up our lives. Here I consider how these two desires often spontaneously turn aggressive, unleashing an anger that in panoptic fashion is vented against the recorded image, with potentially devastating effects on those on the receiving end of such outbursts. In the legal part, I consider the unauthorized publication of intimate material, pointing out that while this activity is fully part of the problem, it has yet to come within the purview of any specific law in Italy, even though the law as it stands not only admits of such an interpretation but also embraces it in important ways. Even so, the courts are reluctant to grant protections to victims of hate activity, as can most recently be appreciated in the decision the Italian Court of Cassation handed down in a criminal case of 2016 that I discuss (Ruling 11675/2016). To explain this disconnect in the law, I point to the classic victim-blaming culture, but I also more specifically point to certain distinctive traits of the current neoliberal paradigm, showing how they translate into action in criminal law, and how, in complementary fashion, they also account for the control that - in an all-exclusionary, albeit unwitting, fashion - is exercised in the cyberworld.