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.
These complications are magnified when we consider the link between geography and cyberspace. Even if I should have the right to vote in the community where I work, should I have the right to vote in the community where I play? Why would real-space citizens need to have any control over cyber-places or their architectures? You might spend most of your life in a mall, but no one would say you have a right to control the mall’s architecture. Or you might like to visit Disney World every weekend, but it would be odd to claim that you therefore have a right to regulate Disney World. Why isn’t cyberspace more like a mall or a theme park than like the district in which you live and vote?
Your relationship to a mall, or to Disney World, is the relationship of consumer to merchant. If you don’t like two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesa-me-s eed-bun, then you can go to Burger King; McDonald’s has no duty to let you vote on how it makes its hamburgers. If you don’t like the local mall, you can go to another. The power you have over these institutions is your ability to exit. They compete for your attention, your custom, and your loyalty; if they compete well, you will give them your custom; if they don’t, you will go somewhere else. That competition is crucial in disciplining these institutions. What makes them work well is this competition among these potential sources for your custom.
This merchant-sovereign part of our life is important. It is where we spend most of our time, and most people are more satisfied with this part of their lives than they are with the part within which they get to vote. In this sense, all these places are sovereigns; they all impose rules on us. But our recourse with respect to merchant- sovereigns is simply to take our business elsewhere.
But the merchant-sovereign part of our life is not exclusive. There are also citizen-sovereign parts of our
