Code: Act 2

The final curtain has now gone down on my reading of Lessig's Code, and I really found myself grabbing for straws toward the end. Although I realize he was probably just trying to connect his ideas throughout the book to make it more comprehensible, I found it extremely repetitive at times and over-descriptively technical at other times. Somewhat contradictory statements also were very apparent, although Lessig called his own bluff on this point. I do feel that he was simply trying to make the reader think a bit more about these concepts rather than peddling his theories, however, so that is to be expected when both sides are being presented.

One general sentiment that I struggled with throughout the work was Lessig's argument that, if nothing is done, cyberspace will continue to evolve along a certain path toward a anarchical dystrophy of over-regulation and a severe lack of privacy. He also, however, says that humans' creation of code is the force behind any and all change in technology and the Internet, which seems to be contadictory to me. In a way, it seems as though he buying into the same teleological fallacy that he is arguing against. The world is filled with thousands upon millions of programmers who are constantly working at new and innovative ways for us to take in the world around us, and this, to me, exists in a completely separate realm from the apocalyptical trajectory that Lessig fears.

The answer to the growing "crisis" of code overpowering our lives seems to fall within a gray area. I agree that we do need some form of governmental regulation to protect many of the values that our society holds dear (privacy, intellectual property, sovereignty), but some of Lessig's prescriptions for this sort of regulation have dangerous repercussions. With the problem of losing the right of free speech, for example, Lessig suggests that a certification program be instilled so that readers of any publisher would be made aware of that author's level of "certification" in the field of interest, in order to ensure additional credibility (p. 172). This sounds like a nice idea, but it is unclear to me who would decide how credibility is determined. If it is left in the hands of a small group of individuals, this would invite biases and certainly wouldn't be too democractic of us, but would there really be any other way to regulate such a practice?

In the end, after reading the entire tiny-print text, I'm left wondering what exactly Lessig wants readers to "do about it" after taking in all of the information. Are we to be depressed at the way that commerce seems to have taken a stranglehold on the development of the net, thus forming norms (through advertising and PR) to match their interests? By doing so, are we supposed to ignore the fact that corporate power is increasingly tied in with the legal and governmental powers that create our real-space code by which we live?