Seeing Through Technology: Heidegger, Turing, and the Ontological Limits of Information Technology Law

Résumé

This article argues that contemporary information technology law confronts a foundational philosophical problem which most regulatory frameworks have not yet adequately acknowledged. Drawing primarily on Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology, particularly his concepts of revealing (aletheia), Enframing (Gestell), and standing-reserve (Bestand), and supplemented by the philosophical implications of Alan Turing's Imitation Game, the article contends that modern digital systems do not merely assist human activity. They actively structure the conditions under which human beings understand themselves, others, and social reality. Contemporary legal systems, by focusing predominantly on harmful outcomes - privacy violations, algorithmic bias, and data misuse - risk regulating only the surface effects of a far deeper transformation: the ontological enframing of human life through digital infrastructure. The article examines how algorithms determine visibility, how datafication converts persons into standing-reserve, how Turing's Imitation Game has been realised at scale in digital systems that blur the boundary between representation and reality, and how law itself increasingly operates through the same technological logic it seeks to govern. The central argument is that effective regulation of technology cannot remain blind to the question of what technology reveals, and what it conceals, about human beings and social life.