Ordinarily, when we describe competing collections of values, and the choices we make among them, we call these choices “political.” They are choices about how the world will be ordered and about which values will be given precedence.

Choices among values, choices about regulation, about control, choices about the definition of spaces of freedom—all this is the stuff of politics. Code codifies values, and yet, oddly, most people speak as if code were just a question of engineering. Or as if code is best left to the market. Or best left unaddressed by government.

But these attitudes must be mistaken. Politics is that process by which we collectively decide how we should live. That is not to say a space where we collectivize—a collective can choose a libertarian form of government. The point is not the substance of the choice. The point about politics is process. Politics is the process by which we reason about how things ought to be.

A decade ago, in a powerful trilogy drawing together a movement in legal theory, Roberto Unger preached that “it’s all politics.”¹ That we should not accept the idea that any part of what defines the world as it is, is removed from politics. That everything should be considered “up for grabs,” everything subject to reform.

Many understood Unger to be arguing that we should in fact put everything up for grabs all the time, that nothing should be certain or fixed, that everything should be in flux, constantly changing. But that is not what Unger meant.

His meaning was instead just this: That we interrogate the necessities of any particular social order; that we ask whether they are in fact necessities; that we demand that those necessities justify the powers that they order. As Bruce Ackerman puts it, we must ask of every exercise of power: Why?² Perhaps not exactly at the moment when the power is exercised, but sometime.

“Power,” in this account, is just another word for constraints that humans can do something about. Meteors crashing to earth are not “power” within the domain of “it’s all politics.” Where the meteor hits is not politics, though the consequences may well be. Where it hits, however, is nothing we can do anything about.

But the architecture of cyberspace is power in this sense; how it is could be different. Politics is about how we decide. Politics is how that power is exercised, and by whom.

If code is law, then, as William Mitchell writes, “control of code is power”: “For citizens of cyberspace, . . . code . . . is becoming a crucial focus of political contest. Who shall write that software that increasingly structures our daily lives?”³

As the world is now, code writers are increasingly lawmakers. They determine what the defaults of the Internet will be; whether privacy will be protected; the degree to which anonymity will be allowed; the extent to which access will be guaranteed. They are the ones who set its nature. Their decisions, now made in the interstices of how the Net is coded, define what the Net is.

Footnotes

¹ Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Edit Delete

² In Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980), the core analytic device is dialogue: every assertion of power is met with a demand for justification. Edit Delete

³ Mitchell, City of Bits, 112. Edit Delete