Anyway, this is getting a bit outside of what I actually know, which is more or less just limited to the corporate personhood stuff! But hope this is helpful!

Obviously this has gotten all more complicated today because I think lay definitions of "personhood" (stemming from things like fetal personhood) have clearly undermined a lot of what actually was a pretty coherent legal understanding of what a "legal person" is

I guess so? Competency would probably be a good category - like, within the classical debates surrounding corporate personhood, it was regularly brought up that a child or infant is, technically, not a "person" under law because a child shouldn't be, say, punished in the same way as an adult

To give rights to corporations that ‘natural persons’ do not actually have

The comparison between bearing witness is really interesting though because, as I see it, legal personhood is about punishment and fines more than rights as such, but I think this is what’s changed in the past decade or so (the Supreme Court used a relatively unobjectionable ‘fiction’…)

Some people in this tradition meant this very literally, others acknowledged that it’s a bad parallel because, say, a corporation cannot be married. But this is the distinction between a ‘natural person’ and a ‘legal person’, the latter of which is a legal fiction necessary for law to operate

To be very brief here (as I feel I should respond since Seth mentioned the influencer book!), legal personhood descends from a British legal tradition that uses ‘person’ to signify who has rights and who can be punished by law. It doesn’t mean all ‘persons’ have equal rights or abilities under law

I mean, a worldview that says that an impenetrable measurement machine can show you the aliens hidden in your soul seems like something they may already believe

Every future imagined by a tech company is worse than the previous iteration.