“Mr_Bungle”, it would have said, “is not the name of any player.”
The date, as it happened, was April Fool’s Day, but this was no joke: Mr. Bungle was truly dead and truly gone.[36]
When the Wizards saw this, they moved to the other extreme. With no formal decision by the citizens, the Wizards called forth a democracy. Starting May 1, 1993,[37] any matter could be decided by ballot, and any proposition receiving at least twice as many votes for as against would become the law.[38] Many wondered whether this was an advance or not.
There is a lot to think about in this story, even in my savagely abridged version.[39] But I want to focus on the sense of loss that accompanied the Wizards’ decision. There is a certain romance tied to the idea of establishing a democracy — Kodak commercials with tearful Berliners as the Wall comes down and all that. The romance is the idea of self-government and of establishing structures that facilitate it. But LambdaMOO’s move to self-government, through structures of democracy, was not just an achievement. It was also a failure. The space had failed. It had failed, we could say, to self-regulate. It had failed to engender values in its population sufficient to avoid just the sort of evil Bungle had perpetrated. The debate marked the passage of the space from one kind of place to another. From a space self-regulated to a space regulated by self.
It might seem odd that there would be a place where the emergence of democracy would so depress people. But this kind of reaction is not uncommon in cyber-places. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon tell a story of the emergence of a “widget” called the FINGER command on UNIX, that would allow users to see when the last time another user had been on the computer, and whether she had read her mail. Some thought (not surprisingly, I should think) that this command was something of an invasion of privacy. Whose business was it when I was last at my machine, and why should they get to know whether I have read my mail?
A programmer at Carnegie Mellon University, Ivor Durham, changed the command to give the user the power to avoid this spying finger. The result? “Durham was flamed without mercy. He was called everything from spineless to socially irresponsible to a petty politician, and worse — but not for protecting privacy. He was criticized for monkeying with the openness of the network.”[40]
The values of the UNIX world were different. They were values embedded in the code of UNIX. To change the code was to change the values, and members of the community fought that change.
So too with the changes to LambdaMOO. Before the balloting, LambdaMOO was regulated through norms. These regulations of social structures were sustained by the constant policing of individual citizens. They were the regulations of a community; the rise of democracy marked the fall of this community. Although norms would no doubt survive the establishment of a democracy, their status was forever changed. Before the democracy, a struggle over which norms should prevail could be resolved only by consensus — by certain views prevailing in a decentralized way. Now such a struggle could be resolved by the power of a majority — not through what a majority did, but through how they voted.
I’ve romanticized this bizarre little world far more than I intended. I do not mean to suggest that the world of LambdaMOO before democracy was necessarily better than the one after. I want only to mark a particular change. Like CC, and unlike AOL, LambdaMOO is a place where norms regulate. But unlike CC, LambdaMOO is now a place where members have control over restructuring the norms.
Such control changes things. Norms become different when ballots can overrule them, and code becomes different when ballots can order Wizards to change the world. These changes mark a movement from one kind of normative space to another, from one kind of regulation to another.
In all three of these cyber-places, code is a regulator. But there are important differences among the three. Norms have a relevance in CC and LambdaMOO that they do not in AOL; democracy has a relevance in LambdaMOO that it does not have in CC or AOL. And monitoring has a relevance in AOL that it does not have in LambdaMOO or CC (since neither of the latter two use data about individuals for commercial purposes, either internal or external to the organization). Code constitutes these three communities; as Jennifer Mnookin says of LambdaMOO, “politics is implemented through technology.”[41] Differences in the code constitute them differently, but some code makes community thicker than others. Where community is thick, norms can regulate.
The next space in this survey is also constituted by code, though in this case the “management” has less ability to change its basic architecture. This code is net code — a protocol of the Internet that is not easily changed by a single user. At least it was not easy for me.
.law.cyber
His name was IBEX, and no one knew who he was. I probably could have figured it out — I had the data to track him down — but after he did what he did, I did not want to know who he was. He was probably a student in the very first class about cyberspace that I taught, and I would have failed him, because I was furious about what he had done. The class was “The Law of Cyberspace”; version one of that class was at Yale.
I say version one because I had the extraordinary opportunity to teach that class at three extraordinary law schools — first at Yale, then at the University of Chicago, and finally at Harvard. These were three very different places, with three very different student bodies, but one part of the course was the same in each place. Every year a “newsgroup” was associated with the class — an electronic bulletin board where students could post messages about questions raised in the course, or about anything at all. These postings began conversations — threads of discussion, one message posted after another, debating or questioning what the earlier message had said.
These newsgroups constituted what philosophers might call “dialogic communities.” They were spaces where discussion could occur, but where what was said was preserved for others to read, as in CC. That was the dialogic part. The community was what was made over time as people got to know each other — both in this space and in real space. One year students in the class and students outside the class (who had been watching the .law.cyber discussions develop) had a party; another year the students outside the class were invited to attend one class. But over the three years, at three different schools, it was clear that three communities had been made. Each was born on a particular date, and each lived for at least a couple of months.
My story here comes from Yale. Yale is an odd sort of law school, though odd in a good way. It is small and filled with extremely bright people, many of whom do not really want to be lawyers. It fashions itself as a community, and everyone from the dean on down (not a “Yale” way to describe things) strives continuously to foster and sustain this sense of community among the students. To a large extent, it works — not in the sense that
