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BOOK REVIEW

Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (book site)
Lawrence Lessig, 1999
New York, NY: Basic Books
ISBN: 0-465-03912-X
List Price: $30.00

"Yet individuals in the context of cyberspace can be less empowered - depending on the way that our code is structured - to resist the code...If you violate (social) norms, you might get punished by friends, neighbors, etc. But it's still civil disobedience. The possibility is still, in a sense, architected into norms. But it's not a possibility that's necessarily architected into code." (Feed Magazine interview of Lawrence Lessig, January 5, 2000)
Reviewed by Duncan Friend

@ the reviewer
Duncan Friend manages Internet Services for a state agency in Topeka, Kansas.

If your area of interest is the Internet (it is), and usability (likely), one of your daily tasks will be to try to make Internet technology serve "human" ends, instead of making us shape our patterns of behavior to serve it.

In his new book, Lawrence Lessig, constitutional scholar, Harvard professor, and "friend of the court" in the Microsoft anti-trust trial introduces that issue, but in terms of "rights" - not "user preferences". People that spend their lives dedicated to preventing the first iteration of software from getting shrink-wrapped will empathize strongly with the ideas he presents. For you already know the secret to shaping the user experience (read: people's lives). It's the code.

The main emphasis of this book is that, far from being the wild, wooly Web, there's really little mystery to it. The whole place is composed of only software and the hardware it runs on. Your rights, your security, your privacy - how this world "behaves" - is made up entirely of the decisions of individuals and businesses written into the code. Arguing that it is an uncontrollable and unregulable (his word) place is like a web designer saying "I just can't control that banner, it has a mind of its own!"

What does all this mean for you? This copiously footnoted (47 pages) book serves as a mini-course on the issues involved. From ideas like:

  • The "Cost of Control". As it gets cheaper to more effectively control or regulate information or a behavior, sometimes to even "perfectly" regulate it, should we? Trying to use the Constitution to answer these questions exposes what Lessig calls its "latent ambiguities", issues that were never decided on because an option wasn't technologically or financially feasible at the time.

to identifying:

  • The factors regulating behavior - Norms, law, the market, and architecture (code) - and how they interact. Lessig devotes an appendix to explaining his theory here. There are many ways that, for instance, the government can regulate a behavior without passing a law against it - and this is true with the Internet as well.

    • and

  • Examples that clearly show the role of decisions about "code" in regulating behavior. For instance, the code governing an AOL chat room allows only 23 people to participate at a time. However, on a street corner, I can voice my views to 300 people in an hour. How we choose to code, even in small ways, can make a big difference in what we can and can't do in cyberspace.

to posing questions about bringing to code the values of public law:

  • "Code is not law, any more that the design of an airplane is law. Code does not regulate, any more than buildings regulate. Code is not public, any more than television is public. Being able to debate and decide is an opportunity we require of public regulation, not of private action." <but> "....Whether code should be tested with these constraints of public value is a question, not a conclusion. It needs to be decided by argument, not definition."
    from Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace

    This is a rich book, with interesting stories and rigorous argument that avoids polemic. Lessig frequently breaks in to remind the reader that it is not all about what choice is made, but that much of what we take for granted about what is happening with the Internet, and what will happen in the future is a result of choices we can make, not some uncontrollable destiny.

    Finally, if I seem too lavish in my praise, the book covers an ongoing discussion about government involvement in the Internet that has occurred between the author/writer at Wired, Declan McCullagh, and Lessig. In fact, the official book site for "Code" even has an alternate URL: www.what-declan-doesnt-get.com. I've included a number of links at the end of this review, from a live streaming audio version of this debate, to chat transcripts and other reviews, as well as to Lessig's own site, which contains a number of links to his columns and publications.

    If you decide not to buy the book, I urge you to wander around these links for awhile, and see if your interest doesn't grow. Even without any government involvement, the Internet is already regulated by its code, a code that reflects value judgments and decisions that are made without much democratic participation. Choices are being made, and "no choice" on your part means that someone else decides.

    Get "coding" with these links:

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