The End of Cyberspace

Thought of the day

In last month's Harvard Business Review, Jonathan Zittrain warns against the seductive appeal of "tethered appliances." I think he's onto something.

The core boon and bane of the combined Internet and PC is its generativity: its accessibility to people all over the world -- people without particular credentials or wealth or connections -- who can use and share the technologies' power for various ends, many of which were unanticipated or, if anticipated, would never have been thought to be valuable.

The openness that has catapulted these systems and their evolving uses to prominence has also made them vulnerable. We face a crisis in PC and network security, and it is not merely technical in nature. It is grounded in something far more fundamental: the doubled-edged ability for members of the public to choose what code they run, which in turn determines what they can see, do, and contribute online.

Poor choices about what code to run -- and the consequences of running it -- could cause Internet users to ask to be saved from themselves. One model to tempt them is found in today's "tethered appliances." These devices, unlike PCs, cannot be readily changed by their owners, or by anyone the owners might know, yet they can be reprogrammed in an instant by their vendors or service providers (think of TiVo, cell phones, iPods, and PDAs). As Steve Jobs said when introducing the Apple iPhone earlier this year, "We define everything that is on the phone. You don't want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone, and then you go to make a call and it doesn't work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers."

If enough Internet users begin to prefer PCs and other devices designed along the locked-down lines of tethered appliances, that change will tip the balance in a long-standing tug of war from a generative system open to dramatic change to a more stable, less-interesting system that locks in the status quo. Some parties to the debates over control of the Internet will embrace this shift. Those who wish to monitor and block network content, often for legitimate and even noble ends, will see novel chances for control that have so far eluded them.

Source: Jonathan Zittrain, "Saving the Internet," Harvard Business Review 85:6 (June 2007), pp. 49-59.

Technorati Tags: design, interface, internet

New law and technology blog

In the course of my attempts to reconstruct the history of cyberspace, I've spent a certain amount of time reading legal writing on cyberlaw-- the application of copyright and property law on the Internet. I hadn't expected it, but the law is arguably the field in which the metaphor of cyberspace has been most influential. The metaphor of the Internet as place, and the way you conceptualize the relationship between real physical places (which have jurisdictions and laws) and digital places (which might or might not be terra nova) has serious consequences.

So I was interested to come across the new Law and Technology Theory blog. As today's post explained, it's interested in two big questions: "First, should we have a general theory of law and technology? Second, what form should such a theory take?"

Is it a good idea to have a general theory of law and technology? Should we try to generate principles that will provide us with advance guidance for approaching a new technology? For example, we are currently trying to decide how to deal with privacy threats imposed by RFID tags that are incorporated into passports. Should we generalize from previous efforts to regulate technologies that threatened privacy to formulate principles that will guide us in the case of RFID tags? Alternatively, should we formulate principles that will serve as common guidelines for regulating the adoption of technologies that produce similar social tensions, but at first blush appear quite different? For example, genetic testing and the Internet, two technologies, which were recently diffused, produce similar social tensions. Should they be governed by common principles?

Two primary objections are likely to be brought forward. First, such an endeavor is antithetical to the very essence of technological change. The application of general principles will suffocate human creativity. We are likely to make decisions that will inhibit new opportunities at the expense of stability and social order. Second, the articulation of general principles would be impractical and doomed to failure. Nobody could have predicted the way the Internet has changed our lives. Technology advances beyond our wildest imagination - any principles we formulate today will become very quickly extinct and unworkable.

Of course, in my view the obvious first thing to do is ask, what "theory" of technology should you use? The definition of technology one begins with will have a serious effect on the project.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, law, technology

Something else to add to my "to read" list

Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu's Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World. Here's a bit of Nicholas Carr's review:

The World Wide Web has always been viewed as a place apart. The constraints of the physical world - territorial boundaries, national and local laws, even distance itself - don't seem to apply to the virtual world, where everyone is every place (and no place) all the time....

In their excellent new book, Who Controls the Internet?, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu calmly dismantle this view of the web, revealing it to be a naive and wishful fiction. They show, through a series of engaging examples, why the Internet, far from existing outside national boundaries and laws, is increasingly being shaped by those boundaries and laws. Location, it turns out, matters a great deal on the Internet, for technical, political and cultural reasons. The virtual world, like its physical counterpart, has a spiky geopolitical topography.

(Very weirdly, when you use the ecto Amazon search tool to look for Goldsmith and Wu's book on Amazon, the second hit is article from International Journal of Men's Health, Gay and bisexual male escorts who advertise on the Internet: understanding reasons for and effects of involvement in commercial sex. One of these things is not like the other.)

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, end of cyberspace, law

Notes on "Is Cyberspace Still Anti-Sovereign?"

There are a number of things I’d change about the language of that screed, but, still, a decade later, it feels both impetuous and important. Serious questions remain. Was it accurate? Is Cyberspace naturally anti-sovereign? If so, is that a good thing?

So John Perry Barlow asks in "Is Cyberspace Still Anti-Sovereign?"

There have been notable efforts to regulate or restrict access to the Internet. Indeed, "one could write a book about all the ways in which existing governments and multinationals have imposed themselves on the global commons" in the last decade; in fact fact, "several people have done so." Netwar has emerged as a new kind of asymmetrical projection of power, enabled by the Internet. Spam and online crime proliferate, and arguments over copyright law continue.

But Barlow is still fundamentally optimistic:

I have not given up on the idea that, as a species, we can be more humane and fair, nor have I forsaken the notion that the greater understanding bred by universal access to knowledge is the key to increasing these qualities in us....

I appear doomed to live a long time, but I don’t think I’ll live to see the world I dreamed of when I was dashing off my little manifesto 10 years ago. Nevertheless, I believe that world is being born. It won’t be paradise, since it will be full of human beings and all our less noble qualities, but it will be more enlightened and enlightening than anything we have experienced so far.

Technorati Tags: culture, cyberspace, end of cyberspace, internet, John Perry Barlow, politics

What's in a name?

So why should we care what term (if any) replaces cyberspace? Why should we care that the term cyberspace was used in the first place?

Words have power-- two kinds that especially interest me. First, words can reflect reality. As Raymond Williams showed in his great Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, you can use the changing meaning of certain "keywords" to trace deep changes in culture. Words can serve as weathervanes, signaling deeper shifts in the economic and social forces that shape history. Second, words can shape reality: whether we know it or not, they can affect the way we think about important things.

For me, the word "cyberspace" is interesting both as weathervane and as reality-maker. Its history serves as a nice entree into the cultural history of computing-- the history of our use of computers, and thinking (or anxiety, or hope) about their uses and place in the world.

"Cyberspace" has also helped create belief in a space separate from the everyday world of people and things, in which information lives-- and importantly, in which information can live more freely (in various senses) than in the real world. The belief in that separate space has had some real, unintended consequences. Let me give one example here; part of my larger project is to document others, so more will be coming.

Several legal scholars have argued that the concept of cyberspace has had a big impact on copyright law. A decade ago, when courts were just starting to deal with questions about how to apply law to the electronic realm-- whether, for example, sales taxes should be applied to online sales based on where the buyer was, where the seller was, where the server was-- David Johnson and David Post argued that thinking of cyberspace as a place would help clarify these issues: "Many of the jurisdictional and substantive quandaries raised by border-crossing electronic communications," they wrote, "could be resolved by one simple principle: conceiving of Cyberspace as a distinct 'place' for purposes of legal analysis by recognizing a legally significant border between Cyberspace and the 'real world.'"

Not everyone agreed. Two years later, Andrew Shapiro worried that this wasn't a good move: "[W]e are not well served by the idea that cyberspace is an autonomous 'place,'" he wrote. "This conception wrongly implies that online interactions are, or should be, governed by their own body of law. It suggests that what happens 'there' is in some way unconnected to what happens 'here.' In so doing, it distracts us from recognizing that the real significance of cyberspace is not in its being elsewhere but, quite the opposite, in its coming increasingly closer to us."

So why did this matter? Dan Hunter argues that the popularization of the metaphor ultimately contributed to the "second enclosure movement" of cyberspace in the late 1990s and 2000s:

Cyberspace was once thought to be the modern equivalent of the Western Frontier, a place, where land was free for the taking, where explorers could roam, and communities could form with their own rules. It was an endless expanse of space: open, free, replete with possibility. This is true no longer.... [W]e are enclosing cyberspace, and imposing private property conceptions upon it.... The conception of 'cyberspace as place' leads to the implication that there is property online, and that this property should be privately owned, parceled out, and exploited.

Mark Lemley notes a deep irony in this history. "In a curious inversion, those who argued less than a decade ago that cyberspace was a place all its own - and therefore unregulable by territorial governments - are finding their arguments and assumptions used for a very different end. Instead of concluding that cyberspace is outside of the physical world, courts are increasingly using the metaphor of cyberspace as a "place" to justify application of traditional laws governing real property to this new medium."

In other words, the "placeness" of cyberspace became a resource for asserting property rights in the digital realm-- and often asserting forms of rights that destroy customary, important practices like fair use. Of course, you can argue that even without the notion of cyberspace-- or a term for describing the Internet and our interactions with it that helped create that sense of place-- lawyers for Hollywood, the record industry, etc., would have found ways of asserting their clients' copyrights online. However, it seems fairly clear that in the U.S., the idea of cyberspace as a place made it easier for those arguments to gain ground.

Technorati Tags: copyright, cyberspace, end of cyberspace, language

Netizens

Another thing I hadn't thought through is the way that the discourse about "netizens"-- people who think of themselves as citizens of cyberspace-- helps build the idea of cyberspace as place. People are citizens of places, after all: for all the value of the argument that nations are "imagined communities," countries are places.

[To the tune of Johann Sebastian Bach, "Toccata in D Minor BWV 913," from the album "Toccatas BWV 910-916".]

Technorati Tags: cyberspace, politics