OTNS: Is Code still Law? Interview with Lawrence Lessig
In this episode we had the pleasure of speaking to Lawrence Lessig, the legal scholar known for coining the term "code is law" which if you've been in crypto, you'll know that this phrase has been very influential on the space. During the discussion we talk about the original design of the internet, how it has opened up a Pandora's box of overlapping sovereignties, and the role of code in regulation and its implications for democracy. Check out a previous episode to learn more abo...
Top Keywords
No salient keywords identified yet for this episode.
Transcript
Hello everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. I'm Josh. I'm here with my co host Primavera De Filippi and we are both in Florence at a, like I said, a BlockchainGov sponsored, crypto event. And we have the honor of having Lawrence Lessig, to come join us for the show. Lawrence Lessig, you're known for, I believe, coining the term code is law, which has become very, prevalent in the crypto world and throughout its history. And so I think it would be nice to start if you want to just give a quick introduction to yourself and, like, maybe recount the history of this term code is law and how it's, you know, changed or stayed the same, over time.
Sure. So it's great to be here in Florence and and in this conversation. And I've been a law professor for hundreds of years now, And way back at the beginning of my legal work, I was focused on the transition from communism in Eastern Europe. And so we would go there as naive Americans, and we would see people offer constitutions to these countries. And very quickly, you realize that that it wasn't just legal texts they needed. They needed social norms to support the infrastructure of free republican governments that they needed. And so the absence of norms made the law irrelevant. And then five years into my work, I started looking at technology, the intersection between law and technology. And again, you had the lawyers who would pass rules that they would impose on the network. And here, very quickly, recognize it was not just that there was an absence of certain norms. There was also the absence of an architecture that made it possible for those rules to have purchase or have a place. And as you saw that the architecture itself was plastic, it could be changed, the code could be rewritten, it could be different code, you began to see that the values that the architecture supported, really overrode the values implicit in the law. So the original Internet was stateless. It, you couldn't know where someone was, what they were doing. And so what that meant was it protected privacy. It protected the freedom to innovate because you couldn't tell that I was using TCP to do voice over IP or to, you know, send email. And it also, protected free speech because I could say what I wanted and you couldn't regulate me. Those were features of the original architecture.
And so what I By original architecture, is this like the Internet, after it was given to the public or after it was, Yeah. This is Internet circa,
1994 and 1995.
Okay.
And so in my as I originally framed it in my book, code and other laws of cyberspace, the point was that we should recognize the league, the values, the political values implicit in that code. And that code was in that sense law. But then once you see that the values were implicit in the architecture and you know that the architecture could change, what I was worried about was that people who had an interest in a different legal world or a different set of legal values would change the architecture to perfect their control or invasion of privacy or restriction of speech. And so that was the argument of code of of code and other laws of cyberspace that we have an architecture that gives us values we celebrate, but we can't count on that architecture because the very people who made it can remake it, or we can layer on top of it technologies that change those values. And I remember the the review of my book in the New York Times, David, Pogue wrote, Lessig rights as if the Internet will become technology of persistent surveillance and constantly violate people's privacy. But the proof is is is just not there, you know. And it's like, well, actually, that's because we're sensitive enough to what was creating the privacy
and how easily it could be taken away. And so when when so when you were saying code is law, I guess my impression is that, it almost seems like a recognition that the Internet was this kind of like plastic piece of infrastructure that can have kind of, I would argue, perhaps like a politics embedded into it. Yes. So it's just like it's also recognizing that the law is like a very political field where whoever has the power to change the law has the power to, like, change a lot of things, change norms, change a whole bunch of stuff that
people allow or not allowed to do various things. Right. I mean, you can in a in general sense, that's true. But then we realize that it's actually hard to change something harder to change some things than to change others. So, you know, if if we think about a government trying to regulate cigarettes, or the consumption of cigarettes, the government could tax cigarettes. That's pretty easy to do in a well functioning market because you can collect the tax. So that raises the price and people are less interested in smoking. The government could try to stigmatize people who smoke. So California did this. It had all sorts of ads on billboards that made people who smoke seem like weak people or pathetic people. So that's trying to change the norms around smoking, and that's harder. But there's a period of time where the federal government was talking about regulating the nicotine in cigarettes to make them less addictive. So changing the code of the cigarette. And, you know, if that were effective, that would be a pretty cheap way to reduce the addictiveness and thereby achieve the objective of reducing smoking. Each of these is an intervention. And what the regulator needs to do is step back and say, well, what's the easiest intervention or the less the least, liberty restrictive kind of intervention or, you know, whatever the dimension is that you're trying to maximize for, what's the right way to intervene to achieve the result that you're trying to achieve? And that's the dynamic that I think was missing in the context of people thinking about how the law interacted with technology.
And, so in in this concept of code is law, it's also the thing that anyone that controls the code controls the law. And, if it is, like, some private actor, then you can create some kind of, powerful private ordering. But the private actor is also subject to a government, and therefore, whatever private ordering you're trying to do, eventually, if the government is regulating the online operator, the government is also operating the technological infrastructure. Right? So this means that there is limited, sovereignty in the technological infrastructure that is created. So do you think that blockchain changed the situation?
Well, blockchain changes it to the extent it is a more entrenched set of technical values. So, you know, you couldn't have built a cryptocurrency on top of web one point o. I mean, it was stateless. You had no infrastructure for private key encryption, like, none of that would have been feasible. And so if you tried to do a cryptocurrency, it would not have been effective because it would have been so easy to cheat. But when you have a blockchain cryptocurrency, then the code is making it practically impossible to cheat, at least on the ledger, not at the edge. And so that code, is a much more significant value to those who wanna build this particular kind of application. And it challenges the sovereignty of governments because to the extent governments enjoyed having a monopoly over currency regulation, Now there's an effective currency they can't, regulate. But it's always relative. It's never absolute. I mean, the government does have sovereign authority over blockchain in the sense that they can start shutting down every exchange and everybody who's, participating and anybody who's got high electricity demands because that's probably, crypto mining going on. The government can always do something. It's not clear the government can always do it effectively or efficiently
because the code can create too big of an obstacle. So I'm trying to play around with the analogy of network state and blockchains. And, in some way, I'm wondering whether the government really has sovereignty over the blockchain, or does it have sovereignty over the interfaces and the gateways that are bringing the blockchain into its own jurisdictions? So if they wanna shut down crypto exchanges, it's because the crypto exchanges exist in their own jurisdictions. They might have a much harder time shutting down the centralized exchanges. And, of course, they might figure out they could sanction them. But, again, this is only with the interface with the people in their own, jurisdictions. So I'm wondering, like, isn't that similar to saying that there is a not a nation state that is that has its own currency. And then, of course, one country can say, well, we cannot we cannot exchange this currency in our in our jurisdiction. We don't accept this currency in our jurisdiction, but that doesn't mean that they have jurisdiction of, the issuance of that, foreign currency.
Right. So that's exactly the way to think about it. That they have relative effect, even though they don't have an absolute effect over the technology itself. But there have been many stages in the history of the Internet where people have talked about open source software in this way. Like the open source software is out there. The government can't control it once it's out there. Sure. In the sense that the government's not going to blow up the chips that are running the software. But the government can make it practically useless by taxing anybody who engages with the software or regulating exchanges that are facilitating the software or whatever intervention makes sense. The government has a lot of power to muck about with this software. But, even though they don't have the power to ultimately destroy the knowledge that the software represents. And so it's always just thinking about what's the relative efficiency of different ways of intervening and and recognize the government now has a wider range of tools that it can deploy using these different modalities
of control. So in some way, so if we take currency as one specific prerogative of the state, do you think that blockchain technology is also enabling, additional things that usually are associated with a particular government, for instance, like identification and things like this. Like, are there, alternative, toolkits that the blockchain technology provides that were not available before that can now somehow compete or maybe be complementary with those things that usually were the monopoly of, the state functions.
Yeah. I mean, so states encourage the development of mature institutions, again, in banking, but not just in banking. And those are costly things to establish. And blockchain allows the establishment of the function of that institution without the institution itself. And that becomes really valuable if you're in a relatively underdeveloped context where the institutions don't exist. But the function of the institution now exists because you have a computer connected to the Internet that can then connect to a blockchain technology. And so I think we should just think about the range of functions that we wanna encourage or discourage. And then think about how each of these different modalities, code or norms or law or markets, facilitate or inhibits, each of these. And my my point was always to say we need to think about this in a holistic way. It was never to suggest that one, dominated, or necessarily dominated, which is why I I think, Josh, as you open the interview, it's kind of weird for me to hear the way people have used the the meme code is law. I mean, I felt really bad. I felt kind of guilty listening to some of these defendants who are being prosecuted for, you know, their crypto schemes, you know, insist. No. This is allowed because code is law. And I'm like, oh my gosh. Am I liable here? I mean, because, you know, yes, code is law, but it's just not the only law. So okay. You could say that the law of the code allowed me to do this. But if the law of SEC regulation says you can't do this, you're stuck. And so it's never about, like, one thing being the only thing. Right. It's about recognizing how each of these things is part of a whole, and
any smart regulator will have to think about what the trade off among them will be. So let's go back to the the question of network state. I think that there are at least two reason to justification why people are thinking or are promoting the idea of network state. One, which is very clearly we don't like the jurisdiction of the state in which we are in, and therefore we want to move away and create an alternative jurisdiction that we are no longer subject to the sovereignty of the state. The other one is, we realize that now we do have new affordance because of those technologies that enable us to, as a community, as a network nation, doesn't matter how what's the high vocabulary, but that enable us to have our own currency, to have our own identification system, to have to use this the function of those institutions, which is more of a additional layer that we can add on top of the existing territorial jurisdiction that we are not necessarily interested in escaping. And so from hearing what you say, it sounds to me that you don't believe that blockchain technology alone enable to escape from the jurisdiction because if you're resident on the country, they will still find a way to criminalize whatever you do with the blockchain. But do you believe that it nonetheless enabled the creation of those additional layer of sovereignty? And do you consider this additional layer to be a sovereign layer despite the fact that it's an overlapping jurisdiction with the national territorial jurisdiction?
Right. Yes. Because sovereignty is always overlapping. And, you know, so we can emphasize the difference with times past and emphasize the continuity with times past. So the difference would be to say, this now gives people the opportunity to exit to all sorts of different communities. Like, I could have been somebody that was out there, you know, working in a coal mine, and now I understand that I can, like, become a programmer and to stay in my house and have all of my economy through my Internet connection, and I can order food to be delivered. And so in some sense, I've escaped from the life I had before in that jurisdiction, but I remain in that jurisdiction. So if I engage in illegal activities on my computer, you know, child pornography or something like that, the doors will be broken down and somebody will come in and arrest me. So I'm never completely escaping. So that that makes it sound like this is something new I can escape. But of course, historically, we've always been living in worlds that have overlapping jurisdictions. Right? So you are a priest in a church, in a town, in a nation. Right? As a priest in the church, you had a certain sovereignty within the church. And the state many states recognized, the power of the church to protect those within it. But that power was limited. It wasn't, you know, complete. And you might in the community be okay, but the state might be taken over by a different church and begin to, like, wanna regulate you because you're the wrong church. So you these these overlapping layers have always existed, but I think they're more significant now because it is easier to move into a a more complete existence in these quote separate spaces, even though they're not separate in an absolute physical sense. They're just kind of layers on top of the physical space that you're living. So you're always both online and in the real world. And, you're never just online, not yet. May maybe when we can migrate our intelligence to,
AI completely, then that will be different. One of the things that I think sometimes, the feeling that I get with a lot of, I guess, techno utopian types is that they it's almost like they forget that they're humans made out of flesh and bone. And like, yeah, I think, yeah, like as if they already live online completely.
Yeah. And I think another thing that we forget is, the kind of not designed, unintentional, constraints of the real world that make society possible. So one of the most important in the old days was you couldn't really filter out what you didn't want to see or know or hear. Like, you lived in a town, you picked up the newspaper, the newspaper covered all the news. You walked around, you saw homeless people, or you saw buildings that were dilapidated. You just had to confront that and deal with that. And one consequence of that is we had relatively well functioning democratic structures because people knew and had to deal with the same problems. They lived in the same world. One fear about the opportunity to move into every different world you want is that the capacity to filter out what you don't wanna hear or know or deal with anymore grows dramatically. This this is I think the paradigm, example of why The United States' political system is falling apart because people opt into their own news universe. And, like, we live in these different bubbles, and we don't even understand the same facts. And that's a that's a feature or a bug of this increasingly sophisticated efficient technology for deciding, I know who you are and I'm gonna feed you what you want and I'm not gonna feed you what I know you don't want because you won't watch me as much if I do. And, you know, nobody created the world that we had before that made democratic deliberation possible. Now we have to recreate that world or recreate the conditions for democratic deliberation if we want something like democratic,
society to continue. Yeah. Completely agree. I mean, I think that, like, one of the side effects of globalization, I feel like, has been, like, alienation from your just local space. So, like, I mean,
most people do not know, like, who their local, I don't know, like, town counselors or Or even neighbor. I mean Yeah. Or neighbors. Yeah. Yeah. You have these bedridden communities in America where people, like, sleep and then they commute into the city and they work and they have no connection to their local community other than Right. Right. They just need water and electricity. Yeah, and and the point is like the different the older world where you had to connect, was never designed by anybody. It was just like a feature of friction, a feature of the way the world was, like you just had and and the the challenge is that certain human capabilities, affordances, social affordances, depended on that contingent reality. And when we have a different reality, then we have to figure out whether it's possible to recreate those affordances or At the same time,
maybe because I'm very keen of the Internet world. But at the same time, I think that it's also true that when we are, like, in a particular country, we in we interact mostly with people that share at least the culture of this country, including, like, finance and immigrants. The Internet is also allowing us to interconnect with people all around the world, which might have might be aligned. Like, they there is, like, a strong value aligned, or at least that's that's the objective with this type of community or network nation, which is you're quite aligned on a particular degree. But that also that doesn't necessarily mean that you're sharing the same culture and that, like, that you're thinking the same way. And so I think there is also a benefit when we think about those network nation, which is all of Sudan, you also, in addition to the territorial proximity that you have with your neighbors, which oftentimes you don't really feel proximity with them. But by by interfacing and or by by identifying people across the world that share particular affinity and value, yet might come from very different background, very different culture and stuff so forth, it's also a way to connect with people that have diversity of opinion and whatnot, which would be much more hard to to identify or to to create kinship with, if you were only to be able to create a nation with people that you have territorial proximity with. Yeah. So it's
that's true and Janice faced. It goes both ways. Right? So, you know, if you think of yourself as a gay teen in the middle of Iowa, what the Internet enables you to do, is to connect with lots of other similar people to you around the world because there probably aren't that many who are out in the middle of Iowa or at least, you know, fifty years fifteen years ago. But the flip side to that is if you are a child pornographer or you you care about, you know, child sex, it was hard in the old world to to feed that. But it's easier in the new world to feed that. So these communities that you are enabling, can be both good and bad. And, you know, and I think we just have to learn to celebrate the good and and and mitigate the bad. I mean, because I'm certainly not against any of this. I'm just I'm just for us having a more sophisticated or or subtle understanding of what the influences in this space are gonna be and how we how we respond to them. And I firmly reject the naturalism or the is ism of the way people talk about this. Like when the Internet was born, my friend John Perry Barlow would say the Internet just is a place where behavior can't be regulated. And that, I think, led people not to pay attention to the way in which the architecture was evolving to make it really easy to identify and track and regulate all sorts of behavior that they thought the Internet was gonna protect. So that that's the that's the point I I still think we don't have any good recognition of.
Hi, everyone. If you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and join the crypto leftist communities on Discord or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. If you're enjoying the episode or find the content I make important, you could pitch into my efforts starting at $3 a month on patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist to help me out and join the newest patrons like Qualia, Jonathan, and Casey, which really helps since making this stuff isn't free in terms of money or time. As a patron, you get a shoutout on an episode like I just did and access to bonus content like Q and A episodes you can submit and vote on questions you'd like me to answer, and I'll give my thoughts in roughly twenty minutes. Of course, I'll still be making free content like this interview to help spread the message that Blockchain doesn't need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation if we put our efforts into it. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. Also, my book How Capitalism Ruined Crypto and How to Fix It is finally out through repeater books, so if you'd like to grab a copy, you can find a link to a Linktree which has many different links for different regions and countries, so you can find a way to get a copy of your own. There are also digital copies, so even if it's difficult for you to get a physical one, you can still read it through a digital copy.
Do you think it is desirable that, those networked communities, which we like to to call network nation for, different reasons, do you think that that is desirable that all of Sudan, those communities get to organize themselves in a way that goes beyond the way in which traditionally online communities organize, but that and where the difference is essentially that they can benefit from this sovereign type of, infrastructure so that, it's no longer just a community with a server in a particular country. It's a community that is creating its own sovereign currency, sovereign identification system. So do you see do you see this is desirable, or do you see this that is this also can, generate some strange competition or strange interfaces with, existing nation states?
Both. I think it's desirable in the sense that I think, the liberty to create all sorts of different communities is is a presumptive good. But I also think that inevitably, they're gonna create real tensions with real world existence too. And so we need to be capable of balancing or restricting or creating other affordances to make sure that the real world is not destroyed by these affordances of these different spaces. And again, I think the political debate is the easiest place to see this. If the consequence of everybody living in their own network state is that they don't understand the basic problems of the physical world, like they just don't either understand that there is global warming or that the water is polluted or whatever, then acting politically in the real world becomes impossible or sensibly, becomes impossible. And and so I think there needs to be some capacity to assure that, yes, you're living in your little network state. You have your own little sovereignties going on, but but they, you know, exist with a physical world that we also have to take account of and and recognize.
I will I will also like to argue that the opposite is also true, meaning that today it is difficult for, municipality for sure, but even for our nation to actually, be able to internationally coordinate in order to cope with those global challenges, because it's it's just too too small of a unit. And in an ideal implementation of those network state system, I can also see how because of student, you're actually creating transnational networks of people in different countries that choose to coordinate with one another because they identify as a network nation. All of Sudan, they also can enable some form of political cross pollination, if you like, in which because I'm coordinating with people all over the world, which we all live in a particular country nonetheless, then there is some kind of, like, backward possession in which the the the political agenda that we have as a network state inherently will have repercussion on each individual nation state, which might actually facilitate international coordination if properly designed.
I'm sure that's true to some degree. I was much more optimistic of its force prior to the Ukraine war. I mean, I thought what would happen with the Ukraine war is that all the budding yuppie middle class Russians would feel the consequence of them being cut off from the rest of the their community, which was all the Starbucks consuming people around the world. And that that being cut off would turn them into political resistance fighters inside their own nation. Right? Didn't happen like that. I mean, very quickly, the the local dominance identity overwhelms this international identity. Now it might be just too early. Maybe Ukraine war in twenty years, if we are alive in twenty years, would be more more openly and and effectively resisted by the internal, forces within a country like Russia. But I think it's hard to say that we're there right now.
I really wanted to go into, a direction a bit more into, like, the specifics of blockchain. So, like, I mean, I imagine you are aware of, like, how people use the term code is law in crypto world, generally as a kind of like justification for why nothing should change essentially about like the Bitcoin Bitcoin code or for example, like I'm sure you've read about like the DAO hack. I'm curious what what your thoughts are in like those types of situations where they use that term code is law in this like, in this type of context where it's not an it's not a nation state, but it's like a very high stakes Mhmm. I mean, financial
game going on, I guess. Yeah. I mean, you know, that was, I think, a classic example of what people like Sunstein have called the incompletely theorized agreements of life. Like, everybody in the Ethereum space would have uttered code as law and believed I mean, people did say expressly that this was a unimutable platform that we were this is why you could trust it. And some of the people, the Ethereum Classic people, really believe that all the way down. I mean, you know, if all of a sudden it turned out Ethereum was gonna launch nuclear weapons on all of Western Europe, like, it just turned out the code was gonna do that or enable that, would they still insist we're gonna lock it down? We're gonna we're not gonna allow it to change? I I don't know. But at least within the realm of, like, financial loss from something like the DAO hack, they're willing to say, hell yeah. And then other people, that was too high a price to pay. Now they didn't have to resolve that during the early stages of Ethereum because it didn't really come up. It didn't really matter. But once it came up, once this latent ambiguity surfaced, then it seemed the community was not as united as it was in its split. And, and I think that is always gonna be present with this CODIS law framework, because, you know, nobody is really saying regardless of the consequences, even the end of civilization. Nobody's saying that. It's they're saying something less. And depending on the context, you know, I I would be a theory in classic if we're talking about a Roblox, game or if talking about mine, Minecraft and, you know, the consequences. I lose my whole community, but hell, that's code is law. That's just the way it is. But, you know, once you realize that you are affecting people outside of the game, for example, you're affecting, you know, the ability of people to retire. You're affecting all sorts of real world things. I totally understand why you shift into a different mode. And the law would certainly step in and say, yeah, it's very interesting you have this little game going on. But the consequence of your little game is that we've lost, you know, $400,000,000
of, productive assets or something. Right. So do you think, like, the the, the decision to reverse the blockchain or it's like to go back and remove the the hack, would does that still, does that
still fall under code being law, I guess? Well, I would say what it shows is that code is law and not the only law. Right? So there was a code that created the opportunity to to perform that hack, and but there was another law on the outside that was saying that hack is actually violative of certain pretty fundamental principles of the economy. And so when you decided to when when they decided to reverse the hack or to to fork so that you could reverse the hack, that was respecting the external law, and trying to protect the interests that the external law is trying to protect while violating, you know, the internal code is law principle. So one code wins and the other code loses. And I think that conflict is gonna be inevitable.
So if we bring this back to the network state question, it feels that on the one hand, if you want to be a network state, you need to have this sovereign infrastructure. At the same time, the only way in which this sovereign infrastructure is really, really sovereign is that it is as, as much reducing capacity for individual intervention, which also means that somehow this leads to this very paradoxical situation in which the only way you can be fully self sovereign as a network state is to have this completely immutable, governmental structure or institutional scaffolding. Because the more the more you leave room for human intervention, the more you leave room for a particular government to regulate the humans that can intervene into the system and therefore also reducing the self sovereignty.
Which yes. And which is a good reason never to imagine you're going to have a completely self sovereign network state. Because to the extent we all live on this planet still, and to the extent governments remain powerful, they will need to intervene at certain places. They will most aggressively intervene to protect tax revenues or to protect vulnerable people like children. But I think they will more systematically intervene too to protect other less significant interests, whether it's like labor rights or whatever. But all of those are reasons why the government will intervene. And if you expect you're gonna build a state that's immune from all of that, I don't think you're long for this world.
Devastating.
And, and, just perhaps, like, one question concerning the the ontological terminology. Because we've been discussing a lot. Are we talking about network states? Are we talking about something that is not a state? What is it that makes a state a state? And, one hypothesis, which I would love to hear your opinion on, is that, it does make sense to call to call to call those network state a state to the extent that they are they actually have this at least a partial degree of sovereignty. In while it will be weird to say that, a digital community that is governing itself on a particular server in a jurisdiction will be like a network state. You're just an online community. But the fact that there is at least this desire of creating a sovereign institutional framework, even though it's not the only sovereign that can that that that that regulates the people, but having this infrastructure that has some degree of sovereignty, Do you think this is a justification to actually move towards the terminology of the state as opposed to just online community?
I don't think there's any harm referring to it as a state as long as you're rec as long as you recognize that there are competing overlapping state like jurisdictions. And to assert that it's a state is not necessarily to assert its actual capacity to regulate everything that goes on in the state. At the end of, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, I reflected on the experience of, like, going to Vietnam in the nineteen nineties. And, you know, that was at that time, a single unitary, you know, authoritarian like state. So the state had the power to regulate whatever it wanted. But the technology of regulation was really poor. So in fact, people had very free lives. They could do basically whatever they wanted because the ability of the state to do anything about it was very weak. By contrast, The United States sets itself up as being a free society where you can do whatever you want, but the efficiency of regulation all the way down into the most minute corners of your life is overwhelming. So, you know, so they're both states. The difference between them is the technology of regulation or the efficiency of the technology of regulation. And I don't think we question the sovereignty of The United States versus the sovereignty of Vietnam just because we observe that The United States' capacity to regulate is wildly greater than Vietnam's capacity to regulate.
I just wanted to check. Do we have to
be done by Yeah. That's cool.
Okay. Maybe for, thanks so much for spending the time to talk to us. One last question that I had, to be a little bit provocative to ask you, although maybe we have, answered that partially through our conversation, but, like, is code still law for you now, you know, so many years after after writing the original, book and and piece on that? Or or as well, like, if you were to do it again, would you have,
rephrased it or added some added some nuance to the meme? I don't know if I would have rephrased it from the standpoint of all publicity is good publicity. So even the misunderstandings lead to understandings. But no. I think code is more law today than it was then. I mean, think about privacy. Right? We had an effective privacy way back in the day, because of the inefficiency of surveillance. Now the technology of the Internet is an extremely efficient technology for surveillance. It's really hard to hide. Like, you know, I know there are I know people who could effectively hide, but for mere mortals, you are persistently, effectively surveilled in absolutely everything you do. That's because of the code. It's a business model that drove that code, so I don't think we should miss the economic
incentive here. Privatization played a big part in Yeah. Absolutely. This.
And and computer capacity. So the fact that you had computers that could begin to run AI models that would target advertising based on people's preferences drove the technology of, surveillance capitalism. Like that's what made it possible. And and so the code is more significant today than it was back then for sure. And so I don't think there's any less reason to be sensitive and critical of, values implicit in the code. In fact, I think there's more reason to. And like to the extent you can point out, the code embeds values that are inconsistent with what we say our values are. That at least tees up the question, well, what what are we gonna do about that? Are we just gonna accept it? You know, so when you say that the code of surveillance capitalism plus the incentives of the platforms produces a political, marketplace of ideas that has an incentive to keep people ignorant and angry at people on the other side, and and that defeats the possibility of democracy. When you recognize that, then you've got to then say, what am I gonna do about it? You know, nothing. Just gonna sit there and let democracy collapse because of this interaction. And and I think the answer should be no. But the point is pointing out the connections makes it easier to think about how I can intervene. Like, what can I do? And in that particular case, I don't think you're gonna do anything about the technology. You're not gonna blow up AI. You're not gonna blow up processors, general processing units. But you can begin to think about, you know, taxing the business model, taxing the attention economy, you know, quadratic tax on the amount of time that Facebook gets you. So, you know, the more hours it spends is a quadratic price, increase for that. I mean, there are lots of ways to intervene to address this problem, but I think, you know, we gotta tee up the fact we need to intervene.
Nice.
Yeah. So I I also like, Dwayne, which you have been, I guess, adding to this motto of, like, code is law but is not the only law. And in some way, I think it's a nice, reflection on the different way in which we think about network state, where I will say that Balaji is more the code is law, or my network state is my network state. Yeah. It's like there's one one law, and that's either code or, or sovereign state. As opposed to the one which we perceive, the notion of network state, which is more this additional layer of sovereignty, which is you can create your own law, which is made by call code or whatever infrastructure, you you manage to construct. But it's also not the only one, and there are ideally many other network state that you can also belong to, plus the underlying nation state that also will always have, like, the rule of law or whatever Yes. Whatever system they have. So it's kind of like the the the the evolution, I think, of the motor that you're trying to promote now, I think, is is a very, compatible vision of the way in which we try to promote network states as opposed to the absolutist type of, balances. Yes.
Yeah. I'm glad it's helpful because it seems some change in the understanding is necessary, if only for those poor saps that are going to jail now because they thought good was law in the absolute sense.
Alright. Well, thank you so much for taking time again. Is there would you like to share with the audience anything, like, any plugs, any your social media or No. The audience? No plugs. No advertising. No. Wrong.