Revisiting Lawrence Lessig’s “Code is Law”: Distributed Consensus Networks and the Future of Law
Fifteen years ago Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional professor at Harvard University, published a book about the laws of cyberspace. The…
Revisiting Lawrence Lessig’s “Code”: Distributed Consensus Networks and the Future of Law
Fifteen years ago Lawrence Lessig, a constitutional professor at Harvard University, published a book about the laws of cyberspace. The book reflects on the general opinions held at the time by the internet community as well as the imminent regulation of cyberspace by state actors world-wide. Lessig introduced helpful analogies for those of his readers that were unfamiliar with the new paradigms inherent to the digital nature of cyberspace, such as the metaphor of architecture for the way code was regulating the behavior of agents in the virtual realm (i.e. ex-ante as opposed to ex-post).
The visionary power demonstrated by Lessig when writing his book is nothing short of stunning and, truthfully, intimidating to everyone following in his footsteps. Yet, fifteen years later, it seems appropriate to re-evaluate Lessig’s central hypothesis that “Code is Law” and how his model holds up to today’s realities and the future developments as far as they can be predicted with our current understanding of what is happening.
Back in 1999, when Lessig published his book, Napster, the first application of peer-to-peer technology geared towards adoption by a mainstream audience, was just getting started and the subsequent insight that the Internet would, for the first time in human history, realize the ubiquitous nature of intellectual goods was yet to be understood to its full extent.
This might be the reason why peer-to-peer as an enabling technology received no special mention in Lessig’s book. Or it may be because so many of the phenomena he was describing were actually based on peer-to-peer-like technology, such as the architecture behind Usenet (not fully P2P in today’s understanding), that he didn’t see the need to go into the details regarding the difference between centralized and decentralized services.
Exported from Medium on January 3, 2025.