If we combine the first two themes, we come to a central argument of the book: the regulability described by the first theme depends on the code described in the second. Some architectures of cyberspace are more regulable than others; some architectures enable better control than others. Thus, whether a part of cyberspace—or cyberspace generally—can be regulated turns on the nature of its code. Its architecture will affect whether behavior can be controlled. To follow Mitch Kapor, its architecture is its politics.¹

And from this an important point follows: if some architectures are more regulable than others—if some give government more control than others—then governments should favor some architectures more than others, if regulability is the government’s aim.

This fact is a threat to those who worry about governmental power; it is a reality for those who would do something about governmental power. Some designs enable government more than others; some designs enable government differently; some designs should be chosen over others.

It is here that questions of open source software matter. Among the designs that enable or disable government’s power to regulate, open code will hold an important place. It will check, as I argue more extensively later, the top-down power of government while enabling an extremely effective scope for bottom-up control.

To restate theme two: the code is a regulator, and the government has a greater interest in the code that regulates better than others.

Competing Sovereigns

But regulation by whom? Boral was just one state. Its problems were not the problems of its neighbors. And the rules we live by while in Boral, or while in a particular Avatar space, need not be the rules that we live by generally.

This was the issue raised most importantly by Jake Baker. His story raises the question of competing authority. Jake lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His life there was subject to the norms of Ann Arbor, and he apparently adapted to these norms reasonably well. The authority of that space governed Jake, and as far as anyone knew, it appeared to govern him exclusively.

But in cyberspace Jake’s norms changed. When Jake went to cyberspace, his behavior changed. He was governed there by a set of norms different from the norms that governed him in Ann Arbor.

The problem was that when he went to cyberspace, he never left Ann Arbor. “Going” in cyberspace functions differently from “going” in real space. When you “go” somewhere in real space, you leave; when you “go” to cyberspace, you don’t leave anywhere. You are never just in cyberspace; you never just go there. You are always both in real space and in cyberspace at the same time.

Footnotes

¹ See Mitchell Kapor, “The Software Design Manifesto,” available at http://hci.stanford.edu/bds/1-kapor.html; David Farber, “A Note on the Politics of Privacy and Infrastructure,” November 20, 1993, available at http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/199311/msg00088.html; “Quotations,” available at http: //www.cs.yorku.ca/~peter/4361/quotes.html (visited May 30, 1999); see also Pamela Samuelson et al., “A Manifesto Concerning the Legal Protection of Computer Programs,” Columbia Law Review 94 (1994): 2308. Steven Johnson powerfully makes a similar point: “All works of architecture imply a worldview, which means that all architecture is in some deeper sense political”; see Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (San Francisco: Harper Edge, 1997), 44. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, originally cofounded by Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow, has updated Kapor’s slogan “architecture is politics” to “architecture is policy.” I prefer the original. Edit Delete