Ch4Part1
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My aim in the last chapter was to crack one meme about the nature of the Net—that the Net has a nature, and that its nature is liberty. I argued instead that the nature of the Net is set in part by its architectures, and that the possible architectures of cyberspace are many. The values that these architectures embed are different, and one type of difference is regulability—a difference in the ability to control behavior within a particular cyberspace. Some architectures make behavior more regulable; other architectures make behavior less regulable. These architectures are displacing architectures of liberty.
This chapter suggests how and why. In a nutshell: the why is commerce, and the how is through architectures that enable identification to enable commerce. As the Net is being remade to fit the demands of commerce, architectures are being added to make it serve commerce more efficiently. Regulability will be a by-product of these changes. Or put differently, the changes that make commerce possible are also changes that will make regulation easy.
I don’t pick out commerce to pick on commerce. My argument is not that commerce is the enemy, nor that there is any necessary connection between commerce and regulability.1 There is no doubt that commerce will flourish in the future of the Internet, and no doubt that is a good thing. The presence of commerce in the Net’s future, however, does not mean that the Net of the future will be the same as the Net of the past. Commerce will change the Net, and my aim in this chapter is to help us understand how. [UPDATE NEEDED: at this point, to simply argue that commerce will change the Net isn't effective. In fact, it has changed the Net, i.e. it's no longer a proposition but a realization]
Identity and Authentication: Real Space
By “identity” I mean something more than just who you are. I mean all the facts about you that are true as well. Your identity, in this sense, includes your name, your sex, where you live, what your education is, your driver’s license number, your social security number, your purchases on Amazon.com, whether you’re a lawyer—and so on.
“Authentication” is the process by which aspects of your identity become known. Some become known when you reveal them; others become known whether you choose to reveal them or not. Perfect authentication would mean that others know for certain all the facts about you; happiness comes from others knowing a good deal less.
In real space much about your identity is revealed whether you want it revealed or not. Many of the facts about you, that is, are automatically asserted and self-authenticating.This is a fact about real-space life. If I walk into a bank, the teller will know a lot about me even if I don’t say a thing: he will know I’m a puffy, middle-aged white guy with glasses and blondish hair; he will know I’m not big and not strong, though I am somewhat tall. He will know all this whether I want to tell him or not. I could, in principle, try to hide some of these facts—I could put on a mask, walk on stilts, and try to enter the bank incognito. But if I did, I would be more likely to get tackled by a security guard than to hide any feature about myself. Hiding usually does not hide itself very well; usually we reveal that we are hiding.
Other facts about me, however, are not automatically asserted or automatically self-authenticating. Some facts you can learn only if I tell you (“I broke my leg when I was six”); some you cannot authenticate without resorting to some other source—credentials. The police officer wants a driver’s license, not your word that you are authorized to drive. A law school wants a copy of your college transcript, not a letter from you telling them that you graduated at the top of your class. A bank wants the deed on your house, not just a promise that you will repay the mortgage. [UPDATE IN PROGRESS: extended the "I broke my leg example"; Is this helpful?] If you come into a clinic complaining of recurring leg problems, a doctor will want to see your medical records, including x-ray documents of any bones you broke when you were six. In all these cases, facts about you must be authenticated by a document, and hence by an institution that stands behind the document.
Real-space life thus carries with it this mix of authenticating and authenticated credentials. Social life is a constant negotiation between these different credentials. In a small town, in a quieter time, documents as credentials were not terribly necessary. You were known by your face, and your face carried with it a reference (held in the common knowledge of the community) about your character. As life becomes more anonymous, social institutions must construct credentials to authenticate facts about you that in an earlier time, or in a smaller social world, would have been authenticated by the knowledge of the community about who you are.
The point may be obvious: the regulability of real-space life depends on these credentials. The fact that witnesses can identify who committed a crime, either because they know the person or because of self-authenticating features such as “he was a white male, six feet tall,” enhances the ability of the state to regulate against that crime. If criminals were invisible or witnesses had no memory, crime would increase. The fact that fingerprints are hard to change and can now be traced to convicted felons increases the likelihood that felons will be caught again. Relying on a more changeable physical characteristic would reduce the ability of the police to track repeat offenders. The fact that cars have license plates and are registered by their owners increases the likelihood that a hit-and-run driver will be caught. Without licenses, and without systems registering owners, it would be extremely difficult to track car-related crime. In all these cases, and in many more, features of real-space life make regulating real-space life possible.
Footnotes
1 Though I do think it is necessarily the case that how commerce is architected affects fundamental values. In this, I agree with David Chaum, who argued early on that payment systems would be crucial for “achieving electronic privacy”; see, for example, “Achieving Electronic Privacy,” Science (August 1992): 96, 96–97, available at http://ganges.cs.tcd.ie/mepeirce/Project/Chaum/sciam.html (visited May 30, 1999). Payment systems are crucial, and they can be crucially different. Edit Delete
