Cyberspace is very different from life on a bill-paying website, or on a site holding your e-mail. Code controls these, too. But the control, or sovereignty, of those sites is distinct from the control of Second Life. In Second Life, or in what I’ve defined to be cyberspace generally, the control is ubiquitous; on a bill-paying website, or on what I’ve called the Internet, the control is passing, transitory.
Interestingly, there is an important dynamic shift that we’ve already identified, more in thinly controlling spaces than thick. This is the preference for code controls where code controls are possible.
Think again about the bill-paying website. It is of course against the law to access someone’s bank account and transfer funds from that account without the authorization of the account owner. But no bank would ever simply rely upon the law to enforce that rule. Every bank adds a complex set of code to authenticate who you are when you enter a bill-paying website. Where a policy objective can be coded, then the only limit on that coding is the marginal cost of code versus the marginal benefit of the added control.
But in a thickly controlling environment such as Second Life, there’s a limit to the use of code to guide social behavior. Sometimes, in other words, better code can weaken community. As Second Life’s Rosedale put it,
In some ways the difficulty of Second Life is a benefit because you have to be taught. And that Act of being taught is such a huge win for both the teacher and the student. . . . We have this sort of mentoring going on that is such a psychologically appealing relationship — one which the real world doesn’t give us very much[2].
A second way in which better code can weaken community is even more important. As Second Life is, it doesn’t enable people easily to segregate. As Rosedale described,
In Second Life, there’s basically not any zoning. What this means is that neighbor disputes are frequent. But from the standpoint of learning, this is actually a real positive. I’ve gotten e-mail from people that says, “Well, I didn’t get along with my neighbors, and as a result, I learned very rapidly a great deal about how to resolve disputes. How to be a good neighbor. ” . . . In the real world . . . there so much law . . . that you don’t actually have to talk to your neighbors. Instead there’s simply a law that says you can or can’t do something. . . . There’s an opportunity to communicate and interact in the virtual world in a way that the real world offers only under very rare circumstances[3].
The code thus doesn’t simply make all problems go away. It doesn’t remove the need for neighbors to work stuff out. And in this way, the code helps build community. The practice of interaction builds bonds that would not be built if the code produced the same results, automatically. Optimal design leaves certain problems to the players to work out — not because the solution couldn’t be coded, but also because coding a solution would have collateral costs.
Nonetheless, it is still the sovereign in these virtual spaces that chooses one modality over another. The trade-off is complicated. Perfect efficiency of results is not always perfectly efficient. But still the choice of means remains.
The Sovereign of the Space: Choosing Rules
But how is that choice made? Or more directly, what about democracy? In real space, the rule is that sovereigns are legitimate only if democratic. We barely tolerate (most) nondemocratic regimes. The general norm for real space life is that ultimately, the people rule.
But the single most interesting nondevelopment in cyberspace is that, again, as Castronova puts it, “one does not find much democracy at all in synthetic worlds”[4]. The one real exception is a world called “A Tale in the Desert”[5]. Democracy has not broken out across cyberspace, or on the Internet. Instead, democracy is a rare exception to a fairly strong rule — that the “owner” of the space is the sovereign. And in Castronova’s view, the owner is not ordinarily a very good sovereign:
In sum, none of the worlds, to my knowledge, has ever evolved institutions of good government. Anarchy reigns in all worlds.[6]
This isn’t to say that aggregated views don’t matter in cyberspace. Indeed, they are crucial to central aspects of the Internet as it is just now. A kind of voting — as manifested through links — guides search engines. Technorati, as I’ve already described, relies upon the same to rank blogs. And important sites, such as Slashdot, routinely use rankings or votes of editors to determine which comments will rise to the top.
These are all democracy-like. But they are not democracy. Democracy is the practice of the people choosing the rules that will govern a particular place. And with the exception of Wikipedia, and “A Tale in the Desert”, there are very few major Internet or cyberspace institutions that run by the rule of the people.
So what explains this democracy gap? And should we expect it to change?
Our history of self-government has a particular form, with two importantly contingent features. Before our founding, life was geographically based — a nation was a society located in a physical space, with a single sovereign allegiance. As we’ll consider more extensively in the chapter that follows, the conceptual revolution of the American Republic was that citizens could have two sovereigns — more precisely, that they (as the ultimate sovereign) could vest their sovereign power in two different delegates. Their state government was one delegate, the federal government was another; individuals living in a single geographic location could thus be citizens of both governments. That was the idea of the founding document, and the Fourteenth Amendment made it explicit: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Citizenship in this sense did not always mean a right to contribute to the self-government of whatever community you were a citizen of[7]. Even today there are citizens that have no right to vote — e.g., children. But for those recognized as members of civil and political society, citizenship is an entitlement: It is a right to participate in the governing of the political community of which they are members. As a citizen of the United States, I have the right to vote in U.S. elections; as a citizen of California, I have the right to vote in California elections. I have both rights at the same time.
At this level, the link between entitlement and geography makes sense. But as mobility has increased, the at-one-time obvious link between geography and citizenship has become less and less obvious. I live in San Francisco, but I work in Palo Alto. The rules give me full participation rights in San Francisco but none in Palo Alto. Why does this make sense?
Political theorists have noted this problem for some time[8]. Scholars such as Richard Ford and Lani Guinier have developed powerful alternative conceptions of self-government that would enable a kind of self-government not tied directly to geography. With one such alternative, voters choose (within limits) the community where their votes count. Thus if I felt participating in the future of Palo Alto was more important than participating in the future of San Francisco, I would have the right to vote in Palo Alto though I lived in San Francisco.
7.
See Judith N. Shklar,
8.
See Lani Guinier,