can buy things. You can buy things and download them, or buy things and have them sent to your home. When you buy, you buy with a screen name, and when you buy with a screen name, AOL knows (even if no one else does) just who you are. It knows who you are, it knows where you live in real space, and most important, it knows your credit card number and the security it provides.
AOL knows who you are — this is a feature of its design. All your behavior on AOL is watched; all of it is monitored and tracked back to you as a user. AOL promises not to collect data about you individually, but it certainly collects data about you as part of a collective. And with this collective, and the link it provides back to you, AOL is a space that can better, and more efficiently, sell to you.
These four features mark AOL space as different from other places in cyberspace. It is easier for AOL to identify who you are, and harder for individuals to find out who you are; easier for AOL to speak to all its “citizens” as it wishes, and harder for dissidents to organize against AOL’s views about how things ought to be; easier for AOL to market, and harder for individuals to hide. AOL is a different normative world; it can create this different world because it is in control of the architecture of that world. Members in that space face, in a sense, a different set of laws of nature; AOL makes those laws.
Again, my aim is not to criticize the creation of this world or to say that it is improper. No doubt AOL makes promises to its members that are designed to allay some of the concern that this control creates, and no doubt if the place became oppressive, the market would provide plenty of alternatives.
Rather my objective is to impart a sense of what makes AOL the way it is. It is not just written rules; it is not just custom; it is not just the supply and demand of a knowing consuming public. What makes AOL is in large part the structure of the space. You enter AOL and you find it to be a certain universe. This space is constituted by its code. You can resist this code — you can resist how you find it, just as you can resist cold weather by putting on a sweater. But you are not going to change how it is. You do not have the power to change AOL’s code, and there is no place where you could rally AOL members to force AOL to change the code. You live life in AOL subject to its terms; if you do not like them, you go elsewhere.
These features of the AOL space have important implications for how it is regulated. Imagine there is a problem on AOL that AOL wants to stop. It wants to prevent or at least control a certain behavior. What tools does AOL have?
First, it has all the tools that any club, fraternity, or “community” might have. It can announce rules for its members (and AOL certainly does). Or it can try to stigmatize the behavior, to use the norms of the community to help regulate the problem. This AOL does as well. Alternatively, if the problem comes from the overuse of a particular resource, then the managers at AOL can price that resource differently by exacting a tax to reduce its usage or a different price for those who use it too much.
But AOL has something more at hand. If AOL does not like a certain behavior, then in at least some cases it can regulate that behavior by changing its architecture. If AOL is trying to control indecent language, it can write routines that monitor language usage; if there is improper mixing between adults and kids, AOL can track who is talking to whom; if there is a virus problem caused by people uploading infected files, it can run the files automatically through virus checkers; if there is stalking or harassing or threatening behavior, AOL can block the connection between any two individuals.
In short, AOL can deal with certain types of problems by changing its code. Because the universe that AOL members know (while in AOL) is defined by this code, AOL can use the code to regulate its members.
Think a bit about the power I am describing — and again, I am not complaining or criticizing or questioning this power, only describing it. As you move through this space that AOL defines — entering a chat area, posting a message to a bulletin board, entering a discussion space, sending instant-messages to another person, watching or following other people, uploading or downloading files from sites, turning to certain channels and reading certain articles, or obsessively paging through a space looking for pictures of a certain actor or actress — as you do any of these things, AOL is, in an important sense, there. It is as if the system gives you a space suit that you use to navigate the space but that simultaneously monitors your every move.
In principle, the potential for control is extraordinary. Imagine AOL slowing the response time for a certain kind of service it wants to discourage, or channeling the surfer through ads that it wants customers to see, or identifying patterns of behavior that its monitors would watch, based on the fear that people with patterns like X are typically dangerous to people of type Y. I do not think AOL engages in activities like these, and I am not saying that there would be anything wrong if it did. But it is important to note that the potential for control in this “community” is unlimited — not in the sense that AOL could make life miserable (since people would then leave), but in the sense that it has a regulatory tool that others, in both real space and other cyberspaces, do not. Its power is, of course, checked by the market, but it has a tool of control that others in the market, but outside cyberspace, do not have.
In principle, then, AOL must choose. Every time AOL decides that it wants to regulate a certain kind of behavior, it must select from among at least four modalities — rules, norms, prices, or architecture. And when selecting one of these four modalities, selecting architecture as a regulator will often make the most sense.
Counsel Connect
David Johnson began Counsel Connect (CC) in 1992 as an online lawyers’ cooperative. The idea was simple: Give subscribers access to each other; let them engage in conversations with each other; and through this access and these conversations, value would be created. Lawyers would give and take work; they would contribute ideas as they found ideas in the space. A different kind of law practice would emerge — less insular, less exclusive, more broadly based.
I thought the idea amazing, though many thought it nuts. For a time the system was carried by Lexis; in 1996 it was sold to American Lawyer Media, L.P.; in 1997 it migrated to the Internet, and it closed in 1999.[26] At its peak, it boasted thousands of subscribers, though it is hard to know how many of them contributed to the discussion online. Most simply watched the discussions of others, perhaps linking three or four discussion groups of their particular interest, plus a few of more general interest. But many saw the emerging culture as something amazing and new (for lawyers at least). As its founder, David Johnson, described it, “Think of The Well for lawyers, with its own highly unique evolution, emergence, maintenance, and adaptation.”[27] Members got to know each other well. “Inevitably, this led to numerous real world meetings. . . . Of those I attended, it always resembled a get together of long-time acquaintances even though many of us had not previously met face to face.”[28]
The discussion was organized into legal topics. Each topic was divided into discussion groups, with each group led by a discussion leader. The leader was not a moderator; he or she had no power to cancel a post. The leader was there to inspire conversation — to induce others to speak by being encouraging or provocative.
At its height, there were some 90 groups in this space. The poster of a particular message may have had it removed, but if the poster did not remove it, it stayed — at first in the list of topics being discussed, and later
