Cyber-Systemics, Systemic Governance and Disruption of the Criminal Law

Criminal law regulators face difficulties in adapting to technological change. They must often operate in environments of significant uncertainty, with changing policy aims and legislative provisions that fail to ‘move with the times’. Rather than engaging with robust, let alone radical theoretical examination of their actions and structure, regulatory organisations struggle to enforce laws in communities affected by technological or systemic change, often leading to claims of overcriminalisation, inadequacy, regulatory overreach or inconsistency. This article suggests that dealing with disruptive criminality solely through legal instruments is a policy failure. Instead, a radical new framework is proposed, embedded in cybernetics (a transdiscplinary approach to exploring regulatory systems). Such a framework — systemic governance — offers a substantially altered way of managing regulatory relationships that resists disruptive change and challenges regulators to find new ways of engaging with the population they seek to influence.