Code 2.0

1996), 390.

10.

Mark Stefik, The Internet Edge: Social, Technical, and Legal Challenges for a Net worked World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 14.

11.

Missouri v. Holland, 252 US 416, 433 (1920).

12.

This debate is nothing new to the American democracy. See Does Technology Drive History?: The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx eds. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 1–35 ('If carried to extremes, Jefferson worried, the civilizing process of large-scale technology and industrialization might easily be corrupted and bring down the moral and political economy he and his contemporaries had worked so hard to erect').

13.

Richard Stallman, for example, organized resistance to the emergence of passwords at MIT. Passwords are an architecture that facilitates control by excluding users not 'officially sanctioned.' Steven Levy, Hackers (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), 422–23.

Chapter Two notes

1.

Second Life — 'What is Second Life?', available at http://secondlife.com/whatis/ (cached: http://www.webcitation.org/5IwlPlof1). The currently leading game, World of Warcraft, claims more than five million alone. Available at http://www.blizzard.com/press/051219.shtml (cached: http://www.webcitation.org/5J9l6E2nF).

2.

It is also hypothetical. I have constructed this story in light of what could be, and in places is. I'm a law professor; I make up hypotheticals for a living.

3.

Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 55.

4.

Ibid., 2.

5.

John Crowley and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, 'Napster's Second Life? — The Regulatory Challenges of Virtual Worlds' (Kennedy School of Government, Working Paper No. RWP05–052, 2005), 8.

6.

'MUD' has had a number of meanings, originally Multi-User Dungeon, or Multi-User Domain. A MOO is a 'MUD, object-oriented.' Sherry Turkle's analysis of life in a MUD or MOO, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), is still a classic. See also Elizabeth Reid, 'Hierarchy and Power: Social Control in Cyberspace,' in Communities in Cyberspace, edited by Marc A. Smith and Peter Kollock (New York: Routledge, 1999), 107. The father — or god — of a MUD named LambdaMOO is Pavel Curtis. See his account in 'Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities,' in Stefik, Internet Dreams, 265–92. For two magical pages of links about the history of MUDs, see Lauren P. Burka, 'The MUDline,' available at http://www.linnaean.org/~lpb/muddex/mudline.html (cached: http://www.webcitation.org/5IwlUROJy); and Lauren P. Burka, 'The MUDdex,' available at http://www.linnaean.org/~lpb/muddex/ (cached: http://www.webcitation.org/5IwlWqPPL).

7.

This is not a rare feature of these spaces. It is indeed quite common, at least within role playing games. Julian Dibbell described to me a 'parable' he recognized within Ultima Online: As he calls it, the 'case of the stolen Bone Crusher.' 'I got two offers for a Bone Crusher, which is a powerful sort of mace for bopping monsters over the head. I started dealing with both of them. At a certain point I was informed by one of them that the Bone Crusher had been stolen. So I said, `I'll go buy it from the other guy. But, by the way, who was it that stole the Bone Crusher, do you know?' He said the name of the other guy. I was faced with this dilemma of was I going to serve as a fence for this other guy knowingly. And so, I turned to my mentor in this business, the guy who had been doing this for years and makes six figures a year on it, and, you know, I thought of him as an honest guy. So I sort of thought and maybe even hoped that he would just say just walk away. We don't do these kinds of deals in our business. We don't need that, you know, blah, blah, blah. But he said, `Well, you know, thieving is built into the game. It is a skill that you can do. So fair is fair.' It is in the code that you can go into somebody's house and practice your thieving skills and steal something from them. And so, I went ahead and did the deal but there was this lingering sense of, `Wow, in a way that is completely arbitrary that this ability is in the code here whereas, you know, if it wasn't built into the code it would be another story; they would have stolen it in another way.' . . .' 'But in Ultima Online, it is very explicitly understood that the code allows you to steal and the rules allow you to steal. For me what was interesting was that there remains this gray area. It made it an interesting game, that you were allowed to do something that was actually morally shady and you might have to decide for yourself. I'm not sure that now, going back to the deal, I would have taken the fenced item. I've been stolen from in the game, according to the rules, and it feels like shit.' Audio Tape: Interview with Julian Dibbell (1/6/06) (on file with author).