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CMC0010.1177/1741659018774609Crime, Media, CultureWood

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Crime Media Culture

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Algorithmic tyranny: Psycho-Pass, © The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1741659018774609
https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659018774609
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Mark A Wood
The University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract
This article makes a case for the value of science fiction to criminologists through examining
the popular Japanese cyber-punk anime series Psycho-Pass. Through portraying a surveillance
society of pre-crime and algorithmic policing, Psycho-Pass raises important questions about the
datafication of crime and its role in facilitating increasingly invasive and ubiquitous forms of social
control. Psycho-Pass, I argue, encourages us to question a society of algorithmic tyranny: a society
where the overwhelming majority of classifications are driven by algorithms, and where crime
has been reduced to a data object and ‘measureable type’. I conclude my case for incorporating
the technological imagination of science fiction into the criminological imagination through
identifying three key resources the genre may offer criminologists: archaeological, pedagogical
and capacity building for reflexive governance.

Keywords
Anime, digital criminology, popular criminology, pre-crime, predictive policing, science fiction,
surveillance

Introduction
In ‘Social science fiction’, Isaac Asimov (1953), one of the genre’s most celebrated and prolific
authors, delineates three categories into which all science fiction stories may be placed. In the
gadget plot, the story’s focus remains on the new technology itself. In the adventure plot, the
gadget serves as a dramatic prop that either helps, hinders or causes the central problem charac-
ters must overcome. Finally, in the social plot, the story focuses on the effect a new gadget or
technology has on the everyday lives of characters, and ‘the impact of scientific advance upon
human beings’ (Miller, 1977: 14). Social science fiction is everywhere. We see it in Orwell’s cele-
brated 1984, and Huxley’s Brave New World. We can find it in Netflix’s Black Mirror, and in an
array of contemporary TV shows, films and novels. And increasingly, we can find it in the work of

Corresponding author:
Mark A Wood, The University of Melbourne, John Medley Building, Melbourne, Victoria, 3010, Australia.
Email: mark.wood@unimelb.edu.au
2 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 00(0)

social scientists themselves, where it not only offers concepts, but also speculative visions of
futures and social orders moulded by new technologies (Burrows, 1997; Frase, 2016; Jameson,
2005).
Social science fiction has much to offer criminologists. Through offering people-centric visions
of technologically-driven futures, the genre has sparked technologists’ imaginations, offered pol-
icy makers cautionary tales and provided perhaps the central wellspring of narratives about tech-
nological futures. We have seen on numerous occasions already how social science fiction has
been assimilated into academic criminology. Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia of 1984 gifted crimi-
nologists and sociologists alike with the notion of Big Brother-style surveillance (see Lyon, 2003;
Marks, 2005). Phillip K Dick’s work has furnished criminologists with the concept of pre-crime
(McCulloch and Pickering, 2009; McCulloch and Wilson, 2016; Zedner, 2007a). Even the term
‘cyberspace’, much used within cyber-criminology (see Jaishankar, 2007; Ngo and Paternoster,
2011; Wall, 2007), has its origins in Gibson’s seminal novel Neuromancer.
The last decade has witnessed a surge in studies of ‘popular criminology’: the theories of crime
and criminal justice advanced within cinema, literature and other forms of popular culture (Kohm,
2017; Rafter, 2007). Yet whilst criminal justice has been a longstanding theme within science fic-
tion and literature studies (see Olander and Greenberg, 1977), few criminologists have examined
the diverse literary and cinematic genre of science fiction (see Brown, 2010; Cohen, 1985; Wall,
2008). Following Cohen’s (1985) lead, in this article I want to suggest that science fiction’s ability
to help us think ‘longer term about technology’ (Miller and Bennett, 2008: 598) can offer another
important resource for criminology: a means to unpack ‘visions of social control’ underpinned by
technological advancements. Science fiction, I argue, offers a springboard for imagining, interro-
gating and sensitizing us to the technological unconscious of criminal justice and social control –
the opaque workings of technologies employed within the criminal justice sector that are rarely
understood by the individuals who employ them to detect, predict, map and respond to crime.
This article makes a case for the value of science fiction to criminologists through examining
the celebrated and popular cyber-punk anime series Psycho-Pass. Written by Gen Urobuchi and
directed by Naoyoshi Shiotani, Psycho-Pass, which ran between 2012 and 2014,1 depicts a dysto-
pian Japan governed by an advanced pre-crime supercomputer. As a work of both social science
fiction and hard science fiction – science fiction that attempts to remain faithful to the laws of
nature and ‘committed to avoiding scientific errors in stories’ (Westfahl, 1993: 162) – Psycho-Pass
raises important questions about criminological orientations towards technology and its role in
facilitating increasingly invasive and ubiquitous forms of social control. In the spirit of Rafter and
Brown’s (2011) Criminology Goes to the Movies, in this article I map out the popular criminology
of Psycho-Pass. I do so not simply to identify theoretical motifs in the show, but to problematize
them. Psycho-Pass, I argue, doesn’t just represent criminological theory – it also poses key thought
experiments for criminologists to think about risk, security, surveillance and the nature and impli-
cations of technology.
Through examining Psycho-Pass, I bring together and analyze two phenomena that have yet to
receive significant attention from criminologists: cyber-punk science fiction, and Japanese anime.
Despite recent interest in comics, graphic novels and animation (see Giddens, 2015, 2017; Phillips
and Strobl, 2013), there is scant literature by criminologists and legal studies scholars on such
forms of popular culture emanating from non-Western regions. Like Western comic books,
graphic novels (Petty, 2015) and animation, Japanese anime and manga lend themselves to
Wood 3

analyses centring on the issues of representation, affect, aesthetics and spectatorship that visual
criminology is concerned with (Brown and Carrabine, 2017). However, rather than examining the
criminological aesthetics (see Young, 2009) of Psycho-Pass, in this article I instead want to unpack
its dystopian vision of social control, and the questions that criminologists might take away from
its depiction of a pre-crime society.
The purpose of my analysis here is, therefore, quite different to that of Wall’s (2008) analysis
of social science fiction’s impact on mainstream conceptions of cyberspace. Whereas Wall was
concerned with the significant impact that social science fiction writers such as William Gibson
and Bruce Sterling have had on conceptualizations of contemporary ‘cyberspace’, I am interested
in examining how the genre might serve as a springboard for thinking through the implications of
future criminal justice technologies. In this sense, my argument is not that social science fiction
should be a cultural reference point for criminological understandings of technology, but rather
that it should be a jumping off point for interrogating future techno-social configurations. That is,
rather than comparing representations of criminal justice in science fiction to real-life referents,
we might be better served to treat social science fiction as a simulator: a machine for generating
realistic imitations of potential criminal justice futures.
My argument is not that science fiction necessarily exceeds the theoretical insights offered
within academic criminology. Rather, science fiction offers criminologists thought experiments for
questioning and thinking through potential criminal justice futures. This is a product, I argue, of
what literary theorist Suvin (1979) terms the novum of science fiction: the fictional, albeit scientifi-
cally plausible, innovation, invention and/or technologies upon which stories within the genre
hinge (see Chu, 2010). Through interrogating the novum of quality social science fiction,2 crimi-
nologists are presented with a raft of questions pertaining to current and potential criminal justice
technologies. Indeed, if we look back to the examples of 1984, Minority Report and Neuromancer
mentioned above, it is the novum of each of these stories (Big Brother, pre-crime and cyberspace)
that has inspired academic theory.
Psycho-Pass, I argue, encourages us to question a society of algorithmic tyranny – a society
where the overwhelming majority of classifications are driven by algorithms. In a state of algorith-
mic tyranny, we are defined primarily by what Cheney-Lippold (2017: 48) terms ‘measurable
types’: data templates that offer interpretations of the world, assign individuals’ identities and
frequently ‘determine the discursive parameters of who we can (and cannot) be’. And in present-
ing a society where data speaks for us, and where crime has become a ‘measureable type’ derived
solely from data, Psycho-Pass offers us a vista of what, riffing on Beer (2017) we might term the
criminogenic power of algorithms. Though criminologists have recently interrogated the growth
of algorithmic risk (Hannah-Moffat, 2018), the pre-crime society (Zedner, 2007a) and the chal-
lenge that Big Data presents to criminology (Chan and Bennett Moses, 2016b), these investiga-
tions are, understandably, rooted in the present. Through presenting a hypothetical society that is
very much an intensification of these recently explored trends, Psycho-Pass – and other forms of
social science fiction – offer criminologists a resource for thinking ‘longer term’ about the implica-
tions of these trends.
I begin this article by first discussing Japanese animation, or ‘anime’, as a site of popular crimi-
nology, along with some of the key methodological considerations of researching anime as a
Western criminologist. I then provide a brief summary of Psycho-Pass, detailing both its premise
and salient literary and criminological influences. Having established the key criminological motifs
4 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 00(0)

Psycho-Pass explores, I then examine how the show’s depiction of a pre-crime society, which takes
us beyond ‘algorithmic power’ (see Beer, 2009) to full-blown ‘algorithmic tyranny’, offers crimi-
nologists a resource for problematizing the transformation of crime into a ‘data object’. I conclude
by making a case for incorporating the technological imagination of science fiction into the crimi-
nological imagination. Social science fiction, I argue, offers three key resources for criminologists
concerned with the crime-criminal justice-technology nexus: 1) a historico-discursive resource for
archaeologically excavating and problematizing the literary inspirations of criminal justice innova-
tions; 2) a pedagogical resource for engaging students in questions concerning the criminological
implications of technological change; and 3) an analytical resource for developing both a critical
consciousness of technology and the capacity to reflexively govern technological innovations in
the criminal justice sphere.

Anime: An uncharted site of popular criminology

To date, studies in popular criminology have generally been Eurocentric in their subject matter,
focusing on films and television shows produced in North America and Europe. This focus on the
global North is not peculiar to popular criminology alone, but is symptomatic of cultural criminol-
ogy more generally. In their editorial for Crime, Media, Culture’s recent Asia-style Special Issue,
Fraser et al. (2017), for example, note that the administrative flavour of criminology in Asia has
resulted in a dearth of cultural and critical criminological scholarship in the region (see Laidler
et al., 2017). Echoing Fraser et al.’s (2017) call for greater criminological engagement with Asian
media and culture, I suggest that Japanese animation – referred to in the West as ‘anime’ – rep-
resents an important, yet under-researched site of popular criminology that should be taken seri-
ously by cultural and media criminology. Whilst anime has received significant attention in film
and cultural studies (Condry, 2013), it has been conspicuously absent from criminological studies
of popular media.
Before I begin my analysis, it is worth charting out some of the key methodological considera-
tions I reckoned with in analyzing an anime franchise as a Western non-Japanese speaking crimi-
nologist. Anime producers regularly reference, remix or otherwise draw inspiration from Western
popular culture, leading to genre-hybridization (Davis, 2015; Denison, 2015) and fostering the
form’s global fandom. Whilst Psycho-Pass draws heavy inspiration from Western writers and theo-
rists,3 interpreting it through Western theory risks ignoring some of the show’s cultural specifici-
ties. Like any series, Psycho-Pass reflects the context in which it was produced. In examining how
popular culture produces, mirrors and challenges criminological theory, we must, as Aas (2012)
exhorts us to do, reflect on the ‘situated identity’ of these theories. In the case of Psycho-Pass, it
is particularly worth reflecting on the criminological context of Japan, which gives some additional
nuance to the theories referenced and/or alluded to in the show. Like its fictional counterpart
depicted in Psycho-Pass, Japan is a low crime society, with one of the lowest homicide rates in the
world (UNODC, 2013). Whilst Psycho-Pass’s meditations on a technologically-facilitated low crime
society are certainly transferable beyond Japan (and in Psycho-Pass: The Movie, the series expands
its lens beyond the country), they should be read against this backdrop of a society that already
has a very low crime rate.
This article’s focus on technology, however, opened up another concern – that of ‘techno-
orientalism’. Often traced back to William Gibson’s foundational work in the cyber-punk genre
Wood 5

(Nakamura, 2013), techno-orientalism refers to the practice of imagining Asia as futuristic and
hyper-technological (Roh et al., 2015; Ueno, 1999). In focusing my discussion specifically on the
technological in Psycho-Pass, I do not want to repeat the techno-orientalism that Denison (2015)
notes has sometimes characterized Western studies of anime. Though technology is a common
theme in anime, anime extends far beyond the mecha, cyberpunk and science fiction genres it is
often associated with by Western audiences. Future criminological studies of manga and anime
might, for example, readily examine how incarceration, policing, organized crime and criminal
justice have been represented in prison dramas such as Rainbow: Nisha Rokubō no Shichinin, and
thrillers such as Monster and Death Note.

‘I’ve only ever obeyed that gun’s orders’: A brief summary

of Psycho-Pass and its criminological parallels

We live in a time when man’s own mind is wide open to anyone with the right machine.
(Tomomi Masaoka, Psycho-Pass)

Before beginning my analysis, a brief summary of Psycho-Pass is required for readers unfamiliar
with the series. Described by Pinchuk (2016: N.P) as ‘Minority Report meets a Clockwork Orange
by way of Ghost in the Shell’, Psycho-Pass depicts a 22nd century Japan under the Sibyl System: a
network of psychometric scanners that assess not only the likelihood of an individual committing
a crime, but also their aptitude for various roles and occupations in society. Through following
protagonist Akane Tsunemori, a member of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of Tokyo’s
Public Safety Bureau, the show examines the moral, social and cultural implications of a society
governed by pre-crime, ubiquitous surveillance and algorithmically-imposed identities. As
explained in the first volume of the series’ prequel manga, Psycho-Pass is set in:

[a] future, where one’s mental state and personality can be measured into numbers. Every emo-
tion, desire, social deviation, and mental inclination is put into record … This value that deter-
mines the standards of human mind, even an individual’s soul itself … is known to the public
as ‘psycho-pass’. (Sai and Gotou, 2017: 6–7)

In the world of Psycho-Pass, public and private space have both been transformed, to use Kitchin
and Dodge’s (2011) term, into sophisticated ‘code spaces’ where individuals are intermittently
surveilled by a network of psychometric scanners monitoring their psychological wellbeing and
the probability that they will commit a crime. This last metric is referred to in the show as an indi-
vidual’s ‘crime coefficient’: the component of their ‘algorithmic identity’ (Cheney-Lippold, 2011,
2017) that quantifies their risk of engaging in harmful or illicit behaviour. When an individual’s
‘crime coefficient’ passes a threshold, it alerts members of the CID, who are tasked with appre-
hending them before they commit a crime, or, if their psycho-pass crime coefficient is high enough,
summarily executing them.
The Sibyl System’s role in ‘preventing’ crime doesn’t end with surveillance, however. Members
of the CID are armed with algorithmically-driven guns called ‘Dominators’ that only fire when the
6 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 00(0)

target’s crime co-efficient exceeds an acceptable level. When aimed at a target, a Dominator
reads and sends continuous psycho-metric data about the individual to the gun’s user. If the tar-
geted individual’s crime co-efficient exceeds a certain threshold, the gun’s user is then instructed
by the weapon to fire at the individual. The Dominators, then, are much more than merely ‘tools’
employed by agentic law enforcement officials. Instead, they might more accurately be described
as technologies that employ and direct CID agents, imposing a logic of actuarialism on their use
of force. Indeed, in one scene, CID enforcer Tomomi Masaoka even states that ‘he follows that
guns’ orders’. As the eyes of Sibyl and a direct expression of the state’s will, the Dominators
offload choice, decision making and judgement from the CID agents wielding them onto technol-
ogy. In this way, the Sibyl System – and the artificial intelligence that seemingly drives it – func-
tions as judge, jury, executioner and watcher.
As the above description shows, Psycho-Pass has numerous criminological parallels. Perhaps
most saliently, the show’s overt references to surveillance, actuarial risk assessment (see Feeley
and Simon, 1992, 1994) and the scientification of social control resonate with many classic ‘sur-
veillance essays’ (see Marx, 2016). These include Deleuze’s (1992) essay on the rise of societies of
control, Cohen’s (1985) work on ‘net widening’, Clarke’s (1988) work on dataveillance and, of
course, Foucault’s (1977) work on the disciplinary society and panoptic regimes of surveillance
(see Santy and Soelistyo, 2014). Indeed, the panopticon is explicitly discussed in the second season
of the show as the name of a potential replacement to the Sibyl System. Though the Sibyl System
is certainly panoptic in its normalizing aims, it is more akin to what Poster (1990) terms the super-
panopticon, a ubiquitous panopticon ‘without walls’, than it is to Foucault’s (1977) original con-
ceptualization of bounded panoptic surveillance in prisons, schools and factories. Within the
fictional Japan of Psycho-Pass, citizens are almost constantly enveloped within Sibyl’s ‘surveillant
assemblage’ (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000), which, drawing on biometric and psycho-metric obser-
vations (see Aas, 2006), generates a digital ‘data double’ of their calculated stress levels and prob-
ability of committing a crime. Yet despite having the clearest parallels to recent criminological
work concerning the impact of digital technologies on criminal justice, many of the issues raised
by Psycho-Pass have a long history within criminological thought. Sibyl’s aptitude tests, for exam-
ple, recall early 20th century eugenic criminologist Henry Goddard’s (1920) recommendation that
all members of the population be administered mental tests and assigned jobs on the basis of their
results (see Rafter et al., 2016). Further, the notion of ‘latent criminals’ – individuals who (due to
their psycho-biological makeup) are deemed by the Sibyl System to have a high probability of
committing a crime – recalls Lombroso’s (2006 [1876]) notion of the ‘born criminal’.
Whilst Psycho-Pass references numerous works of science fiction,4 the show is particularly
indebted to the work of science fiction author Phillip K Dick, whose dystopian stories have been
adapted into a number of blockbuster Hollywood films including Blade Runner, Total Recall,
Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and The Adjustment Bureau.5 Dick’s influence on Psycho-Pass
is most pronounced in the Sibyl System, which illustrates perfectly his notion of pre-crime: strate-
gies used by law enforcement agencies that attempt to stop crimes before they are committed.
The ability to forecast crime, is not, however, that far-fetched from current policing practices.
Originally introduced in Dick’s (1956) short story ‘The minority report’, the notion of pre-crime has
increasingly been taken up by criminologists to explain the rise of strategies within law enforce-
ment and security agencies that bring the notion to life (Zedner, 2007a, 2007b). Yet whilst the
Precrime department of Dick’s Minority Report is the product of magic – namely, a trio of ‘mutants’
Wood 7

with the power of precognition – the Sibyl System is, ostensibly, a technological marvel; a product
of science, rather than the supernatural.
In this way, Sibyl can be read as a more advanced and invasive form of many contemporary
pre-crime initiatives, from predictive/algorithmic policing (see Chan and Bennett Moses, 2016a;
Van Brakel and De Hert, 2011) to CCTV surveillance that uses algorithms to either identify offend-
ers (Introna and Wood, 2004) or predict when violence is about to occur in an area (O’Callaghan,
2015). Interestingly, though, whereas much of this literature on actuarial risk and algorithmic risk
focuses on the ‘background’ factors that determine an individual’s risk profile (socio-economic
background, past offending history etc.), Psycho-Pass presents us with a pre-crime intervention
that is, to put it in Katz’s (1988) terms, just as focused on the emotional foreground of crime: the
thought processes and emotions that precede and occur during a crime.
Taken together, the fictionalized Japan of Psycho-Pass amounts to what Zedner (2007a) terms
a pre-crime society, ‘a society in which the possibility of forestalling risks competes with and even
takes precedence over responding to wrongs done’. ‘In a pre-crime society’, Zedner (2007a: 262)
explains, ‘there is calculation, risk and uncertainty, surveillance, precaution, prudentialism, moral
hazard, prevention and, arching over all these, there is the pursuit of security’.6 Under Sibyl, which
is named in reference to another of Dick’s (1987) works, The Eye of the Sibyl,7 Japan is a country
that is, to use Valverde’s (2001: 83) phrase, governed through security: each citizen’s risk of com-
mitting a crime is calculated through ubiquitous state surveillance (see Schinkel, 2011). Following
a preventative and prudential logic, citizens whose risk level exceeds a certain threshold and who
are deemed a moral hazard are sent to ‘emergency therapy’, or permanently removed from circu-
lation through summary execution.

The criminogenic power of algorithms

Up to this point, I have detailed some of the key parallels between Psycho-Pass and criminological
theory. In this section, I hope to address another issue: where does Psycho-Pass help take us
beyond existing criminological knowledge? For whilst it is one thing to note the pedagogical value
of science fiction for criminologists in representing existing issues pertaining to technology and
criminal justice, it is quite another to argue that the genre offers criminologists thought experi-
ments for thinking longer term about technology. In what follows, I hope to demonstrate that
Psycho-Pass does not just mimetically represent already knowable issues pertaining to technology
and justice. Rather, it poses new questions and directions for criminologists concerned with the
criminal justice-technology interface.
As a form of popular criminology, the twin novums of Psycho-Pass – its pre-crime Sibyl System
and the Dominator weapon’s wielded by its main characters – bring to bear important questions
for criminologists concerned with the contemporary technological unconscious,8 and the potenti-
alities stemming from its logic of interoperability and networked interconnection. Psycho-Pass, in
short, presents a future world governed by a technological unconscious with an overactive super-
ego. And though the show probes a number of issues relating to the increasingly salient supere-
goic dimension of the technological unconscious, two stand out: its illustration of the criminogenic
power of algorithms and its problematization of crime as a ‘measureable type’ and data object.
Throughout much of the first season, the nature and workings of the Sibyl System are not
revealed to viewers, nor known to the characters themselves. Like most digital technologies, its
8 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 00(0)

workings are opaque; it is trusted, but not understood by those who interface with it. Despite the
lack of understanding regarding how it functions, the Sibyl System is trusted by CID officials and
most members of the population, so much so that on several occasions characters feel compelled
to follow its directives, even in instances where they entail clearly unjust outcomes. In the opening
episode of the series, for example, rookie CID inspector Akane Tsunemori is called to her first case:
a man who, knowing he will soon be arrested, has abducted a woman after receiving a high crime
co-efficient rating. After sexually assaulting and torturing the woman, the man is summarily exe-
cuted by one of the CID agents upon orders from the Sibyl System. The psychological distress
caused by the event, however, causes the woman’s own crime co-efficient to spike, leading the
Sibyl System to direct the inspectors to fire a non-lethal shot at the woman and take her in for
‘emergency therapy’. After a further spike in her crime co-efficient, the Sibyl System directs the
CID members to ‘eliminate’ (kill) the target and switches their Dominators to ‘lethal elimination’
mode. Tsunemori ultimately disobeys Sibyl’s directives, opting to instead pacify her subordinates
and wait until the woman’s ‘threat level’ has been reappraised before firing a non-lethal ‘para-
lyzer’ shot to subdue her. Only through doing so is Tsunemori able to, in the words of fellow
protagonist Shinya Kogami, ‘put justice before duty’.
This episode, along with several others over the course of Psycho-Pass’s two series, vividly illus-
trates the criminogenic power of algorithms. Through labelling individuals as ‘at risk’ of offending
or placing them within other ‘measureable type’ categories that tangibly affect their lives,
machine-learning AI, like actuarial risk programmes before them, have the power to cause crimi-
nal behaviour. This criminogenic power of algorithms might be superficially understood through
the terms of classic labelling theory: a machine-learning algorithm identifies an individual as
matching their dynamic data template of ‘crime’; the individual internalizes this algorithmically
inferred assessment; as one of many potential responses to this labelling process (Rogers and
Buffalo, 1974), they engage in secondary deviance catalyzed by the very act of being labelled
(Lemert, 1967).
Indeed, on several occasions throughout the series it is the act of being labelled a threat by
Sibyl that precipitates a character’s descent into criminal activity. This alone is not particularly
novel within criminology; many secondary crime prevention programmes have been criticized for
their counterproductive effect of labelling the populations they target as ‘at risk’ of offending (see
Sutton et  al., 2013). What difference does it make, then, that it is a machine, rather than a
human, that is doing the labelling? Firstly, when aligned with a pre-crime rationality, machine-
learning algorithms may lead to the paradoxical situation of secondary deviancy without primary
deviance. In Psycho-Pass, false-positive classifications by Sibyl abound. Individuals who pose no
actual risk of committing a crime are on multiple occasions scheduled for ‘emergency therapy’ by
Sibyl – an act that leads some to a complete overhaul of their self-identity. As the next section will
explain, this is a product of crime’s datafication – its transformation into a data object and ‘measu-
reable type’ – and the datafictions that are produced by and sustain this process.

Crime as ‘data object’: Or, datafication and its datafiction

‘A measureable type’, Cheney-Lippold (2017: 47) explains, ‘is a data template, a nexus of different
datafied elements that construct a new, transcoded interpretation of the world’. As ‘datafied ver-
sions of ideal types’ (Cheney-Lippold, 2017: 51), they also accentuate certain dimensions of a
Wood 9

phenomenon (Weber, 1978). Further, to model measureable types, AI must quantify dynamic
phenomena. What constitutes crime and risk as ‘measurable types’ is not static, nor solely at the
whim of human programmers. Rather, through machine learning, the technological unconscious
is able to assimilate new markers of crime and risk from the data it constantly collects. Resonating
with recent work in the philosophy of information (Floridi, 2013), Psycho-Pass explores the dan-
gers of crime becoming a measurable type and a ‘data object’. As Cheney-Lippold notes, we must
distinguish between ‘terrorist’ (or criminal) as an object of legal and political knowledge, and ter-
rorist (or criminal) as a data object. For though an individual who commits an act deemed terror-
istic may retroactively be classified (legally and politically) as a terrorist, they may not, according to
the machine-learning algorithms that seek to identify such individuals, constitute a ‘terrorist’ as a
data object.
This profound limitation of crime as a measureable type is dramatized in Psycho-Pass by its
season one antagonist, Shogo Makishima – a highly intelligent and alienated individual who seeks
to destroy the Sibyl System and the society it has created. Makishima is unable to be apprehended
through the very system he seeks to destroy; classified as an individual who is ‘criminally asymp-
tomatic’, he is able to keep his crime co-efficient low, meaning that CID are unable to apprehend
or kill him using their Dominator weapons. Psycho-Pass, in other words, presents a world where
crime as a socio-cultural and political category has been almost completely superseded by ‘crime’
as a data object, so much so that the state is impotent in the face of violent individuals who the
Sibyl system does not classify as criminal.
Demonstrating the limits of Sibyl’s ‘technological solutionism’ (see Morozov, 2013), Psycho-
Pass therefore depicts a world where AI-informed pre-crime is always afflicted by false-nega-
tives. Yet, despite this shortcoming, the Sibyl System is, like many real-life criminal justice
technologies, lauded by its proponents as neutral and objective – a means of counteracting the
foibles of human decision making. Psycho-Pass’s Sibyl System therefore illustrates how algo-
rithms often provide a facade of objectivity to value-laden criminal justice practices. To use
Ferrell’s (1993) term, they offer a compelling ‘aesthetic of authority’ for criminal justice practi-
tioners to legitimate their actions. This veneer of neutrality is repeatedly questioned throughout
the series and finally shattered when the nature of the Sibyl System is revealed. Towards the end
of the first season, villain Makishima discovers that, far from being driven by software, the Sibyl
System is a wetware hive mind of (‘criminally asymptomatic’) people whose brains have been
surgically exercised and subsequently housed in a special container. Upon being informed of the
true nature of Sibyl, Makishima notes that trust in the system was predicated upon its ostensible
impartiality:

What a farce. They promised a society managed by fair and impartial machine intelligence. A
law free of petty human ego. People only accepted Sibyl because that’s what they thought they
were getting. But it was a lie – Sibyl’s arbitrary and unfair. It’s nothing but a committee of pick-
led brains in mason jars. (Makishima, Psycho-Pass)

The revelation that the Sibyl System is a hive mind rather than AI hides the truth that algorithms
are, to use Latour’s (1990) phrase, already ‘society made durable’. Further, it reveals a central truth
about algorithmic regulation and Big Data: that datafication requires datafictions to gain and
obtain legitimacy. Like Big Data, algorithmic regulation is a cultural as well as a technological
10 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 00(0)

phenomenon (Boyd and Crawford, 2012), and as such it requires its own ‘mythology’ and faith in
order to function.
Psycho-Pass’s central conceit is that criminal justice technologies are never impartial – they
reflect the values and presuppositions their creators hold and programme into them. What the
Sibyl System illustrates is that the technological unconscious is, to use Jameson’s (1981) term, a
political unconscious of values inscribed into technology. Despite its ‘aesthetic of authority’, raw
data collected and analyzed by digital surveillance technologies has no inherent meaning, but is
given meaning by programmes developed by humans. As Marx (2016: 49) notes, ‘the signs, mark-
ers, emanations, tracks, traces, remnants, deposits, debris, and residuals that accompany being in
the world and interacting with others are given new meanings by technology’.
More than just exploding the myth that technologies may be completely objective or neutral
(see Feenberg, 2002), Psycho-Pass offers a cautionary tale on what might be lost if crime is trans-
formed into a data object. In short, the Japan of Psycho-Pass is a society of algorithmic tyranny: a
society where, to quote Cheny-Lippold (2017: 25), ‘data about who we are becomes more impor-
tant than who we really are or who we may choose to be’. In a society of algorithmic tyranny, who
gets classified as a criminal is entirely determined by algorithms: it is a citizen’s datafied self or
‘data double’, rather than their biographical self, motivations and desires, that is judged. A society
of algorithmic tyranny is, in other words, post-narratival: data speaks for us, and patterns stand in
for explanation (see Chan and Bennett Moses, 2016b). Our data, and the algorithmically-inducted
identities that are inferred from it, drive our lives and opportunities, whilst narrative, context and
everything else that cannot be datafied and assimilated into ‘measureable types’ are removed as
indicators of risk. In the world of Psycho-Pass, such algorithmic tyranny has a hefty price. Characters
are seen constantly checking their own Psycho-Pass readings, afraid that they may be labelled a
‘latent criminal’ by Sibyl and targeted for emergency therapy. Biographical self is driven by data-
fied self. Further, in placing faith in technology and allowing crime to become a data object, crimi-
nal justice is, at least ostensibly, turned over to an acritical form of algorithmic regulation that not
only erases context, politics and narrative, but also supplants human knowledge and decision
making.

Conclusion: Science fiction and the criminological

imagination
Psycho-Pass is, as Sakurai (2015a, 2015b) puts it, an ‘ambiguous dystopia’. Most of the citizens
within Psycho-Pass’s fictionalized Japan are, arguably, happier under the Sibyl System than they
were before it. Under this façade, though, is a grimmer reality: that by all but eliminating one form
of violence through pre-crime, you only increase another – the structural and symbolic violence of
the state, which comes to have complete totalitarian control over every single citizen. So utopian
is the concept and practice of pre-crime that it can quickly turn into a very dystopic vision of social
control. At its core, then, Psycho-Pass depicts a profoundly utilitarian vision of social control,
where the (ostensible) happiness of the many is secured by the misery of a few.
As Raymen (2017: 1) notes, dystopian fiction offers criminologists ‘an opportunity for a popu-
lar criminology to address what criminologists have described as our discipline’s aetiological crisis
in theorizing harmful and violent subjectivities’ (see also Yar, 2015). In addition to agreeing with
Wood 11

Raymen, I argue that dystopian science fiction also offers an opportunity for popular criminology
to address harmful, unjust and/or criminogenic criminal justice technologies. Psycho-Pass and
social science fiction offer very different dystopian visions to the post-apocalyptic fiction discussed
by Raymen. Whereas post-apocalyptic dystopia can, as Raymen (2017) demonstrates, be read viz-
a-viz Žižek (2010) as a fetishistic disavowal of the violent subjectivities produced by late capitalism,
Psycho-Pass and other cyber-punk fiction can more readily be read as cautionary tales in technol-
ogy. In this sense, the cyber-punk of Psycho-Pass is diametrically opposed to that of the post-
apocalyptic dystopia of The Walking Dead. For whilst the latter arguably acts to render the violent
core of capitalist subjectivity unconscious, the former might, like much other science fiction,
instead be said to promote a critical consciousness of technology’s unconscious (Wood, 2017).
Drawing again on Miller and Bennett (2008), I would like to conclude by quickly delineating
three ways in which science fiction may play a role in shaping the ‘criminological imagination’
(Young, 2011). Science fiction, I argue, offers criminologists at least three key resources: 1)
archaeological resources for tracing the literary inspirations behind criminal justice technologies;
2) pedagogical resources for promoting a critical consciousness of technologies among students
of criminology; and 3) capacity building resources for criminologists to reflexively understand and
govern new criminal justice technologies.

Archaeological
Firstly, science fiction offers criminologists a resource for tracing the role of certain texts in inform-
ing technological developments in the criminal justice sphere. As noted at the outset of this arti-
cle, concepts including pre-crime, Big Brother and cyberspace, long employed within criminology,
have their origins in science fiction. However, it is not just criminologists who have mined science
fiction for concepts and inspiration. Technologists developing innovations for the criminal justice
sectors have, on occasion, turned to science fiction for inspiration. One key example of this within
the criminal justice sphere is the ‘taser’, which owes its name and inspiration to the Stratemeyer
Syndicate’s 1911 book Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (Fessenden, 2015). In tracing the ‘technical
lineage’ (Simondon, 2011) of criminal justice technologies, it is important that criminologists
engage with all sources of inspiration for these inventions, regardless of whether they emerge
from science or science fiction.

Pedagogical
Secondly, through providing vivid narratives of socio-technical futures, social science fiction offers
criminologists a pedagogical resource for engaging students in questions concerning the crimino-
logical implications of technological change (see Miller and Bennett, 2008: 599). As Rafter and
Brown (2011) and others (see Atherton, 2013; Cook and Bacot, 1993) note, popular criminology
has significant pedagogical value. Films and other forms of popular culture ‘translate … theories
into narratives, enabling us to visualize a theory in action’ (Rafter and Brown, 2011: 186). Whilst
not a genre as readily associated with themes of crime and justice, science fiction’s regular forays
into these issues similarly offers teachers and students a resource for understanding and challeng-
ing criminological theory. Moreover, in providing ‘people-centric’ takes on the societal implications
12 CRIME MEDIA CULTURE 00(0)

of new technologies, science fiction provides a useful bridge between the social and the techno-
logical. Watching or reading science fiction addresses spectators with questions about technolo-
gies, and often compels them to take positions. Rather than thinking about what works of science
fiction mean, then, we might do better to think about what these works do to spectators as cata-
lysts for interrogating the technological.

Capacity building for reflexive governance

Finally, social science fiction offers criminologists techniques for what, following Miller and Bennett’s
nomenclature, we might refer to as capacity building for reflexive governance. Simply put, this refers
to the ability of researchers, scholars and policy makers to deliberate on real and potential technolo-
gies effectively, so that they may be governed effectively. Science fiction, Alan Finkel (2017) notes, is
a valuable resource for envisaging and questioning potential futures forged by technological
advancements. Through examining the human impact of ‘imaginary media’ (Parrika, 2015) and
technology, science fiction enables us to tease out the intertwined social, political and ethical issues
associated with new or potential technologies. Indeed, as Miller and Bennett (2008: 601) note:

Science fiction likely provides little technical accuracy about how technologies and their inter-
locking meanings are likely to interact, especially under conditions of disruptive change.
Instead, it suggests intriguing possibilities that provide needed attention to the character,
dynamics, and uncertainties of non-linear interactions.

In this sense, science fiction’s value to academics and others concerned with criminal justice tech-
nologies lies not in predicting the future or reflecting trends in the present, but in simulating pos-
sible futures and enabling us to act in the present. As a site of popular criminology and a resource
for criminological thought experiments, science fiction is particularly valuable for imagining and
interrogating criminal justice technologies. What, for example, are the human implications of
advanced pre-crime technologies (Minority Report and Psycho-Pass)? Who is responsible when an
AI commits an act of violence (Asimov’s I, Robot and Blomkamp’s Chappie; see Wale and Yuratich,
2015)? What are the social and ethical implications of committing violence against sentient AI
(Westworld and Ex Machina)? Raising such questions is key to dismantling ‘technological utopian-
ism’ (Nellis, 2013) – a set of beliefs that, among other troubling outcomes, further suppresses the
technological unconscious of criminal justice.

Acknowledgements
A big thank you to Will Arpke-Wales, James Petty and Chrissy Thompson for reading and providing invaluable
feedback on various drafts of this article (in Will’s case, twice!). Thanks also to the two anonymous Crime,
Media, Culture reviewers who provided extremely detailed and constructive feedback on this manuscript - your
feedback improved this article considerably and introduced me to some great authors I’d hitherto neglected.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or pub-
lication of this article.
Wood 13

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. To date, the Psycho-Pass franchise is comprised of two television series, a feature film, two manga
series, an official novelization and a game, Psycho-Pass: Mandatory Happiness. In March 2018, it was
announced that the series would be making a comeback in 2019 with a film trilogy, Psycho-Pass: Sinners
of the System.
2. Of course, in suggesting science fiction as a resource for criminologists, it is worth qualifying that crime
and criminal justice are far from universal themes in the genre and that science fiction – like any genre
– varies in quality. As science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon (1958: 2) famously noted in an adage
that has since come to be known as Sturgeon’s Law (see Dennett, 2013), ‘90% percent of everything
[science fiction included] is crud’. A great deal of the genre will, therefore, either have little relevance to
criminology, or will offer criminologists little in the way of thought experiments, provocations or other
tools for thinking longer term about technology.
3. Throughout the series, a variety of Western philosophers and social theorists including Plato, Descartes,
Rousseau, Bentham, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Weber and Russell are discussed by characters to think
through the ethical and existential issues they face within their dystopian world. Psycho-Pass’s direc-
tor Naoyoshi Shiotani (in Curzon, 2016) also notes that some of the show’s main cinematic influences
included the Western science fiction and/or detective movies Blade Runner, Minority Report, Gattaca,
The Fifth Element, Seven and The Millennium Trilogy.
4. In the first season, antagonist Shogo Makishima recommends Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Elec-
tric Sheep? to one of his subordinates, and Orwell’s 1984 and William Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic and
Neuromancer are also mentioned.
5. Psycho-Pass’s debt to Dick is even acknowledged in the following dialogue between season one villains
Shogo Makishima and Gu-sung Choe, where Makishima states that the world in which he lives resem-
bles a Dickian dystopia:
Makishima: This city is like a parody of the sort of novels I used to read when I was younger.
Choe: Oh yeah? What kind? Like a William Gibson book?
Makishima: More like Phillip K Dick. Not as controlling as the societies George Orwell depicted in
his work, and not quite as wild as those in Gibson’s either.
6. Psycho-Pass’s focus on risk is explained by its creator, Gen Urobuchi (in Kemps, 2014), who states that
one of the central themes he wanted to convey in the show was fear in society.
7. Indeed, in several episodes the Dominators wielded by enforcers and agents are described as ‘Sibyl’s eyes’.
8. The notion of a technological unconscious, as formulated by Thrift (2004) and others, is particularly apt for
unpacking the value-laden nature of digital technologies for several reasons. Firstly, and most obviously, it
emphasizes how technologies can unconsciously shape practices, behaviour, beliefs and subjectivity (see
Wood, 2017). Secondly, the term foregrounds the often suppressed, invisible or otherwise hidden nature
of a technology’s ideological code. Owing to the hidden nature of the language which structures it, digital
technology obscures the values it concretizes. Finally, the notion of a technological unconscious lets us bet-
ter come to grips with the plasticity, interoperability and scope of late-modern information infrastructures
(see Manovich, 2001; Nusselder, 2009). Whereas the more commonly-used notion of black boxes similarly
foregrounds the opaque inner workings of technologies, the notion of a technological unconscious better
captures, in my view, the complex infrastructure of interacting technologies and flows of information that
underpins much of contemporary life. The technological unconscious, in other words, encompasses the
totality of interoperable black boxes that form the backdrop to contemporary life.

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Author biography
Mark A Wood is a lecturer in criminology at the University of Melbourne. Most of his research falls within
the sphere of digital criminology, examining informal justice, crime watching, public criminology, networked
offending and counter surveillance on social media. His work has appeared in Theoretical Criminology,
Surveillance & Society, Feminist Media Studies and The International Journal of Cyber Criminology. His first
book, Antisocial Media: Crime-Watching in the Internet Age, was released by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017.