invisible hand. We make the hand invisible by looking the other way.
But it is not a great time, culturally, to come across revolutionary technologies. We are no more ready for this revolution than the Soviets were ready for theirs. We, like they, have been caught by a revolution. But we, unlike they, have something to lose.
Appendix
In Chapter 7, I sketched briefly an argument for how the four modalities I described constrain differently. In this appendix, I want to extend that argument. My hope is to provide a richer sense of how these modalities — law, the market, norms, and architecture — interact as they regulate. Such an understanding is useful, but not necessary, to the argument of this book. I’ve therefore put it here, for those with an interest, and too much time. Elsewhere I have called this approach “the New Chicago School.” [1]
Law is a command backed up by the threat of a sanction. It commands you not to commit murder and threatens a severe penalty if you do so anyway. Or it commands you not to trade in cocaine and threatens barbaric punishments if you do. In both cases, the picture of law is fairly simple and straightforward: Don’t do this, or else.
Obviously law is much more than a set of commands and threats.[2] Law not only commands certain behaviors but expresses the values of a community (when, for example, it sets aside a day to celebrate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr.);[3] constitutes or regulates structures of government (when the Constitution, for example, establishes in Article I a House of Representatives distinct from a Senate); and establishes rights that individuals can invoke against their own government (the Bill of Rights). All these are examples of law, and by focusing on just one kind of law, I do not mean to diminish the significance of these other kinds. Still, this particular aspect of law provides a well-defined constraint on individuals within the jurisdiction of the law giver, or sovereign. That constraint — objectively — is the threat of punishment.
Social norms constrain differently. By social norms, I mean those normative constraints imposed not through the organized or centralized actions of a state, but through the many slight and sometimes forceful sanctions that members of a community impose on each other. I am not talking about patterns of behavior: It may be that most people drive to work between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m., but this is not a norm in the sense I mean. A norm governs socially salient behavior, deviation from which makes you socially abnormal.[4]
Life is filled with, constituted by, and defined in relation to such norms — some of which are valuable, and many of which are not. It is a norm (and a good one) to thank others for service. Not thanking someone makes you “rude”, and being rude opens you up to a range of social sanctions, from ostracism to criticism. It is a norm to speak cautiously to a seatmate on an airplane, or to stay to the right while driving slowly. Norms discourage men from wearing dresses to work and encourage all of us to bathe regularly. Ordinary life is filled with such commands about how we are to behave. For the ordinarily socialized person, these commands constitute a significant portion of the constraints on individual behavior.
Norms, like law, then, are effective rules. What makes norms different is the mechanism and source of their sanction: They are imposed by a community, not a state. But they are similar to law in that, at least objectively, their constraint is imposed after a violation has occurred.
The constraints of the market are different again. The market constrains through price. A price signals the point at which a resource can be transferred from one person to another. If you want a Starbucks coffee, you must give the clerk four dollars. The constraint (the four dollars) is simultaneous with the benefit you want (the coffee). You may, of course, bargain to pay for the benefit later ( “I’d gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today”), but the obligation is incurred at the time you receive the benefit. To the extent that you stay in the market, this simultaneity is preserved. The market constraint, unlike law and norms, does not kick in after you have taken the benefit you seek; it kicks in at the same time.
This is not to say that market transactions cannot be translated into law or norm transactions. Indeed, market transactions do not exist except within a context of law and norms. You must pay for your coffee; if you do not, the law of theft applies. Nothing in the market requires that you tip the waiter, but if you do not, norms kick in to regulate your stinginess. The constraints of the market exist because of an elaborate background of law and norms defining what is buyable and sellable, as well as rules of property and contract for how things may be bought and sold. But given these laws and norms, the market still constrains in a distinct way.
The constraint of our final modality is neither so contingent nor, in its full range, so dependent. This is the constraint of architecture — the way the world is, or the ways specific aspects of it are. Architects call it the built environment; those who don’t give out names just recognize it as the world around them.
Plainly some of the constraints of architecture are constraints we have made (hence the sense of “architecture”) and some are not. A door closes off a room. When locked, the door keeps you out. The constraint functions not as law or norms do — you cannot ignore the constraint and suffer the consequence later. Even if the constraint imposed by the door is one you can overcome — by breaking it down perhaps, or picking the lock — the door still constrains, just not absolutely.
Some architectural constraints, however, are absolute. Star Trek notwithstanding, we cannot travel at warp speed. We can travel fast, and technology has enabled us to travel faster than we used to. Nonetheless, we have good reason (or at least physicists do) for believing that there is a limit to the speed at which we can travel. As a T-shirt I saw at MIT put it, “186,282 miles per second. It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law.”
But whether absolute or not, or whether man-made or not, we can consider these constraints as a single class — as the constraints of architecture, or real-space code. What unites this class is the agency of the constraint: No individual or group imposes the constraint, or at least not directly. Individuals are no doubt ultimately responsible for much of the constraint, but in its actual execution the constraint takes care of itself. Laws need police, prosecutors, and courts to have an effect; a lock does not. Norms require that individuals take note of nonconforming behavior and respond accordingly; gravity does not. The constraints of architecture are self- executing in a way that the constraints of law, norms, and the market are not.
This feature of architecture — self-execution — is extremely important for understanding its role in regulation. It is particularly important for unseemly or unjust regulation. For example, to the extent that we can bring about effects through the automatic constraints of real-space code, we need not depend on the continued agency, loyalty, or reliability of individuals. If we can make the machine do it, we can be that much more confident that the unseemly will be done.
The launching of nuclear missiles is a nice example. In their original design, missiles were to be launched by individual crews located within missile launch silos. These men would have been ordered to launch their missiles, and the expectation was that they would do so. Laws, of course, backed up the order — disobeying the order to
