Lit review (Pt. 1)

Lessig has very few detractors on the Internet, which is making my "conflict, limitation, debates or holes in the literature" part very short. Here is the first half of it though.

Lessig points out early in his piece that “Code is Law”. While many definitions exist for both of these words, exponentially many more connotations are associated with any combination of those definitions. Code exists in a technological sense, shaping and bending the actions of everything in cyberspace. From RSS feeds to Facebook friend requests, World of Warcraft magic spells to Google Earth buildings, the code defines what we see and how we see it. Code also exists between people who interact in cyberspace; though this code is social in nature. This is the code that defines what “poking” on facebook really means, the code that make you mortified when you accidentally “reply to all” on a what was a secret email, the code amongst thieves on the piratebay.org asking everyone to “seed plz”. The Law exist in real life, the law that Lessig says makes you a thief if you steal a book, but an idiot if you don’t pick up a twenty dollar bill blowing past your feet on a sidewalk. The Law is also lurking in cyberspace, FBI worm viruses silently inviting itself into hardrives and searching for any illegal documents, reporting back to its superior servers.

There is a sort of decaying optimism in the book. An idea that the structure of freedom and liberty lie within the network of cyberspace and that it can be properly regulated to maintain freedom, but there is no one to trust to do this right. “Regulability” is his first concept in which he argues that it is possible to regulate the Internet. “Regulation by Code” is his second theme, where we the technical code becomes the means to the end of “Regulability”. The nuts and bolts of what can and cannot be done, what factors limit the users of cyberspace. A third piece is what Lessig calls “Latent Ambiguity” where the freedom of the internet allows for the government to allow the FBI to use the aforementioned worms in order to search private data. The ambiguity coats the issues of code with layers of hazy indistinctness. The last issue is sovereignty, how can one individual, organization, or government rise above the Internet to attempt to label what is good or bad, harmful or helpful? Sovereignty on the internet allows for a group to be legitimized, for their norms to be the final say in their space. These spaces, however are constantly overlapping in cyberspace, and there is no enforcers to give one side the leverage of justice in hopes of being vindicated.


My full review of his book "Code" will be coming shortly.