I wasn’t there, however, to understand forgiveness. I wanted to learn something about how the place ran. I wanted to understand how this state exercises control over its citizens; how it continues to regulate; how it qualifies as one of the last remaining Communist states. So I spent time talking to lawyers, businessmen, and managers of the emerging Net in Vietnam ( “NetNam”). Very quickly, a surprising picture emerged.
Though the ideology of a Communist state admits very little limitation on the power of the state; though the Vietnamese state sets as its ideal a common good rather than the good of individuals or individual liberty; though on paper there is no “liberty” in Vietnam in the sense that we in the West like to imagine it — though all this is true, I could not escape the feeling that people in Vietnam, in their day-to-day existence, are far less “regulated” than people in the United States. Not all people, of course: Political opponents undoubtedly feel the power of the state quite forcefully. But I sensed that ordinary people in their ordinary lives, many running small shops, had no conception of the control that government can exercise; no experience of having their wages reported to a central bureaucracy once a quarter; no understanding of what it is like to live under the (relative) efficiency of the regulation we have here. Life there is remarkably free from governmental control. It was hard to imagine how it would have been different had Nixon won the war. Pornography was banned and hippies were harassed, but in the main, people and business got on with very little direct or effective regulation by government.
This fact (if you’ll allow random observations of an untrained anthropologist to count as fact) is not hard to understand. The “law” on the books in Vietnam may or may not be a stricter or more extensive regulator than the “law” in the United States. But the architecture of life in Vietnam clearly makes any real regulation by the state impossible. There is no infrastructure of control — there is barely any infrastructure at all. Whatever the regulations of the state may be, there is no architecture that could make them effective. Even if there is more regulation there than here (and frankly I doubt that there is), Vietnam has an effective “freedom.”
This makes perfect sense. The power to regulate is a function of architecture as much as of ideology; architectures enable regulation as well as constrain it. To understand the power a government might have, we must understand the architectures within which it governs.
The preceding chapters have all been about this very point. We can have an idea of sovereign power — the power of the sovereign to regulate or control behavior — but the significance of that power gets realized in a particular context. The state’s power may be “absolute”, but if the architecture does not support regulation, the state’s effective power is quite slight. On the other hand, the state’s power may be limited, but if the architectures of control are very efficient, this limited power can be extraordinarily extensive. To understand a state’s power to regulate we must ask: How well does its infrastructure support regulation?
This is the question we should ask about cyberspace, as a first step to understanding sovereignty there. What power do sovereigns have to regulate life in cyberspace? How do the modalities of regulation help or limit that power?
We’ll consider this question in three parts, two of which are the subject of this chapter. First, what is the nature of the sovereignty in cyberspace? How is it different from the sovereignty of France? Second, what limits the sovereignty of cyberspace? And third, the subject the next section, how will sovereigns interact in the regulation of cyberspace, not so much to control behavior there as to control the effects of that behavior here? How will they compete?
The Sovereign of the Space: Rules
When you enter the world of MMOG Second Life as a new character, the rules of Second Life are explained to you. Some of these rules are the techniques you will need to get around in Second Life — how to move, or how to fly. Some of the rules are normative commands that tell you what you can and can’t do.
It is impossible when confronting this introduction not to notice that these constraints are constructed. God didn’t make Second Life. No one is confused about whether he or she did. Nor is it likely that one entering this space wouldn’t notice that one important dimension to that construction is construction through code. That you can fly is a choice of the coders. Where you can fly is a choice of the coders. That when you bump into someone, a warning box is displaced is a choice of the coders. That you can turn off IM conversations from people you don’t want to hear from is a choice of the coders. No one mistakes that there are choices made here. Everyone recognizes that a critical part of the cyberspace world is made through code. As Second Life’s CEO, Philip Rosedale, put it to me: “What is God in a virtual world? Your only God is the code[1]”.
Now, as I’ve said from the start, we should distinguish between richly controlling spaces and thinly controlling spaces. Spaces like Second Life richly control the life of people playing there. Indeed, the whole objective of playing there is create the impression that one is there. These, again, are the sorts of places I call cyberspace.
Cyberspace is very different from life on a bill-paying website, or on a site holding your e-mail. Code controls these, too. But the control, or sovereignty, of those sites is distinct from the control of Second Life. In Second Life, or in what I’ve defined to be cyberspace generally, the control is ubiquitous; on a bill-paying website, or on what I’ve called the Internet, the control is passing, transitory.
Interestingly, there is an important dynamic shift that we’ve already identified, more in thinly controlling spaces than thick. This is the preference for code controls where code controls are possible.
Think again about the bill-paying website. It is of course against the law to access someone’s bank account and transfer funds from that account without the authorization of the account owner. But no bank would ever simply rely upon the law to enforce that rule. Every bank adds a complex set of code to authenticate who you are when you enter a bill-paying website. Where a policy objective can be coded, then the only limit on that coding is the marginal cost of code versus the marginal benefit of the added control.
But in a thickly controlling environment such as Second Life, there’s a limit to the use of code to guide social behavior. Sometimes, in other words, better code can weaken community. As Second Life’s Rosedale put it,
In some ways the difficulty of Second Life is a benefit because you have to be taught. And that Act of being taught is such a huge win for both the teacher and the student. . . . We have this sort of mentoring going on that is such a psychologically appealing relationship — one which the real world doesn’t give us very much[2].
A second way in which better code can weaken community is even more important. As Second Life is, it doesn’t enable people easily to segregate. As Rosedale described,
In Second Life, there’s basically not any zoning. What this means is that neighbor disputes are frequent. But from the standpoint of learning, this is actually a real positive. I’ve gotten e-mail from people that
