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This is a novel and striking re-evaluation of some fundamental social, legal and ethical conceptions. It is persuasive that our traditional, deeply-held, and politically-entrenched ways of looking at the world are not fit for purpose any more. | This is a novel and striking re-evaluation of some fundamental social, legal and ethical conceptions. It is persuasive that our traditional, deeply-held, and politically-entrenched ways of looking at the world are not fit for purpose any more. | ||
Intellectually, this is therefore an extraordinary, eye-opening, paradigm shifting, challenging, exhilarating read. Some say it is a book for lawyers: I’m a lawyer, so maybe that’s me, but this is no ordinary legal text. It should be of interest to all who have a political, philosophical or scientific bone in their body. | Intellectually, this is therefore an extraordinary, eye-opening, paradigm-shifting, challenging, exhilarating read. Some say it is a book for lawyers: I’m a lawyer, so maybe that’s me, but this is no ordinary legal text. It should be of interest to all who have a political, philosophical or scientific bone in their body. | ||
Lessig charts the technical and epistemological grounds for thinking that the internet revolution (and specifically the “Web 2.0” revolution) is as significant as any societal shift in human history. Generally, this is not news for people in the IT industry, who deal with its implications day to day, but for our legal brethren, who tend of be of a conservative (if not technophobic) stripe, this ought to be as revelatory (and revolutionary) as Wat Tyler’s march on London. Now we have a hyperlinked, editable digital commons, the assumptions with which we have constructed our society need to be rethunk. | Lessig charts the technical and epistemological grounds for thinking that the internet revolution (and specifically the “Web 2.0” revolution) is as significant as any societal shift in human history. Generally, this is not news for people in the IT industry, who deal with its implications day to day, but for our legal brethren, who tend of be of a conservative (if not technophobic) stripe, this ought to be as revelatory (and revolutionary) as Wat Tyler’s march on London. Now we have a hyperlinked, editable digital commons, the assumptions with which we have constructed our society need to be rethunk. | ||
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Just as he rightly brings the Utopians to book for believing their hype about this golden new age of freedom — of course, governments and vested interests will figure out the net and how to effectively regulate it, like they have every other social revolution since Wat Tyler’s time — I think his own vision is needlessly dystopian. It assumes that code will be able, at some point, to regularly, systematically, reliably and effortlessly know every single fact about every one of us — and hence we are ultimately regulable. | Just as he rightly brings the Utopians to book for believing their hype about this golden new age of freedom — of course, governments and vested interests will figure out the net and how to effectively regulate it, like they have every other social revolution since Wat Tyler’s time — I think his own vision is needlessly dystopian. It assumes that code will be able, at some point, to regularly, systematically, reliably and effortlessly know every single fact about every one of us — and hence we are ultimately regulable. | ||
But this isn’t realistic. Just as it would be impossible to accurately predict the trajectory of | But this isn’t realistic. Just as it would be impossible to accurately predict the trajectory of [[the proverbial crisp packet blowing across St Mark’s Square]], no matter how sophisticated your equipment and scientific knowledge, the web is too weird, people’s applications for it too dynamic and unpredictable and the “true meaning” of our communications too innately susceptible of multiple interpretations for any code to ever fully get the better of us (not even really close). For example, in my organisation I have spent months, with considerable IT infrastructural support, trying to figure how to reliably capture simple, non-controversial attributes of regular documents which routinely and predictably pass between an easily identified and small community of users across a tightly defined and fully monitored part of our internal computer system — and this has proved so far to be quite impossible. The idea that one might reliably capture deliberately masked communications even from this minute sample seems absurd, and the idea that one could do this across the whole worldwide web preposterous. | ||
Just as the spammers and virus programmers keep ahead of the filters, our freedom is adaptable and valuable enough to keep ahead of The Man. | Just as the spammers and virus programmers keep ahead of the filters, our freedom is adaptable and valuable enough to keep ahead of The Man. | ||
Well, that’s the hope, anyway. But in the | Well, that’s the hope, anyway. But in the meantime this book is certainly food for thought. | ||