big brother, evolving

In Lawrence Lessig's book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, he describes the possibilities of government regulation of the internet. Occasionally it's difficult to cast myself back to 1999 to think about where he's coming from, as it seems like a long time ago on internet time. But where his cute, pop-sci rhetoric doesn't clog his message too much, he's got some interesting things to say.

I've read his stuff before on the issues of plagiarism. Fascinating stuff, and not unrelated to talk about "cyberspace" (sorry--I just can't use that word without the distance of scare quotes). The ease of cut-and-paste, the possibilities for self-publishing of text, graphics, music and video have developed into a kind of "remix culture" that stretches far beyond the court cases involving hip-hop's sampling culture. In this book, he notes that he's a constitutional law expert. And he's also quite tech-savvy, as he sails through (necessarily simplified) discussions of TCP/IP and Linux and all sorts of things that generally turn lawyers a delicate shade of green. At first, I thought the guy had a lot of interests. But I'm realizing now that these interests are all connected. Issues of freedom and privacy and the shared space of government and individuals all figure in his publications.

I've been thinking about his unobtrusive, spying worm example in the very beginning of the book. Later, he mentions this concept again: "Cost for the government is liberty for us. The higher the cost of a regulation, the less likely it will be pursued as a regulation. Liberty depends on the regulation remaining expensive" (56). It's a scary thought, and he means it to be so. But I wonder about the cost of sorting information--with so much collected, certainly it's not free to winnow through it. Will it ever be completely cheap for the government to spy on individuals? One cost is public backlash, as we've seen in our current government's wiretapping program. It may be possible for Bush to escape direct punishment for the illegality of the program, but, as Lessig suggests, the norms of society are regulating him. Of course, if word didn't get out about it, it would have been possible for the administration to carry on without backlash. But in a society as open as ours, and with the current climate of whistle-blowing, it seems possible that many of these illicit (or non-transparent) plans will out. Perhaps I'm just an optimist.

One issue I'm having with the book, however, is that it portrays government as a kind of monolithic entity. This breaks somewhat when he cites New York v. United States (which found it unconstitutional for the US gov to indirectly force the states to pass legislation--it must do so directly and take the responsibility for it). But otherwise, he writes of the government like many of the freshman papers I see: "The media chooses to influence us through..." The government, in particular the US government, is no more of a monolith than "the media"--and given the consolidation of media outlets in corporations such as ClearChannel, it's less so. The government regulates our society with a mixture of motivations: safety and well-being of its constituency, desire for reelection, passion for certain causes, moral upstandingness or turpitude. It seems impossible to assign it the sweeping desires for information-collection that Lessig warns of. I think his warnings are apt, and important to heed. And certainly, open soruce code is a factor keeping the government honest. But at least in America, our government is made up of people like ourselves.