So too with the changes to LambdaMOO. Before the balloting, LambdaMOO was regulated through norms. These regulations of social structures were sustained by the constant policing of individual citizens. They were the regulations of a community; the rise of democracy marked the fall of this community. Although norms would no doubt survive the establishment of a democracy, their status was forever changed. Before the democracy, a struggle over which norms should prevail could be resolved only by consensus—by certain views prevailing in a decentralized way. Now such a struggle could be resolved by the power of a majority—not through what a majority did,but through how they voted.

I’ve romanticized this bizarre little world far more than I intended. I do not mean to suggest that the world of LambdaMOO before democracy was necessarily better than the one after. I want only to mark a particular change. Like CC, and unlike AOL, LambdaMOO is a place where norms regulate. But unlike CC, LambdaMOO is now a place where members have control over restructuring the norms.

Such control changes things. Norms become different when ballots can overrule them. And code becomes different when ballots can order Wizards to change the world. These changes mark a movement from one kind of normative space to another, from one kind of regulation to another.

In all three of these cyber-places, code is a regulator. But there are important differences among the three. Norms have a relevance in CC and LambdaMOO that they do not in AOL; democracy has a relevance in LambdaMOO that it does not have in CC or AOL. And monitoring has a relevance in AOL that it does not have in LambdaMOO or CC (since neither of the latter two use data about individuals for commercial purposes, either internal or external to the organization). Code constitutes these three communities; as Jennifer Mnookin says of LambdaMOO, “politics [is] implemented through technology.”¹ Differences in the code constitute them differently, but some code makes community thicker than others. Where community is thick, norms can regulate.

The final space in this survey is also constituted by code, though in this case the “management” has less ability to change its basic architecture. This code is net code—a protocol of the Internet that is not easily changed by a single user. At least it was not easy for me.

Footnotes

¹ Mnookin, “Virtual(ly) Law,” 14. Edit Delete