I’ve argued that there is a choice about how cyberspace should be, but that we’re disabled from making that choice. We are disabled for three very different reasons. One is tied to the limits we place on courts, the second to the limits we have realized in legislatures, and the third to the limits in our thinking about code. If choice must be made, these limits mean we will not be making that choice. We are at a time when the most significant decisions about what this space will be are being made, yet we haven’t the institutions, or practice, to evaluate or readily alter them.

In part 4, I describe these problems, and in chapter 16, I sketch three types of solutions to them. Neither part will be complete, but both should be suggestive. The problems that cyberspace reveals are not problems with cyberspace. They are real-space problems that cyberspace shows us we must now resolve.

Footnotes