Laws vs Communication
(Up to: Alternative Culture Society Is ATechnology Thing Politics Vs The Tao Scribblings Society And Control Language To Control Fears )
The law as we know it has always relied on force to uphold it. Anyone breaking the law must be arrested physically, else the law is useless. Under this system, there can be no law without law enforcement.
I think that the reason why the net is, inherently, more powerful than the law is because this physicality no longer applies. The net has made an determined effort to separate actions from the realms of the physical, and as such within its own context there can be no law in the traditional sense, as it cannot be applied.
So now, those in control of society find that traditional laws must be extended to bridge the gap between the internet and the physical world. Laws as we know the systems will only work on the internet if each person can be tied to a particular location. This is why electronic surveillance systems are so vital to politicians - their old regimes of control are rendered useless otherwise. This is the transferral of law from governing action to governing method.
But, it seems, the history of the human race is a history of communication. Even when people were sending messages via horseback, or by pigeon, or by leaving carvings in a particular place, the relationship with physicality was breaking down. Communication has always wanted to separate itself from the location of the message author, to carry the idea contained within the message rather than the person. In this, the internet is nothing new as such, just another evolutionary step.
Take, for example, the idea of hate speech in mediaeval times. If, say, a death threat was illegal (I am not a historian so I don't know if it was or not, but the legal history specifics aren't important here) when the fastest way to get a message from one city to another was by giving it to a horse-riding messenger, then there would have already been a problem with enforcing the law. Assuming the integrity of the horse-rider was sound, tracking the origin of a death threat come in from another city would be near impossible, due to the fact that the message had been completely separated from its sender.
As such, there is a constant compromise made, over just how far the law (based on physical enforcement) can reach.
So if the tendency for communication is to detach the message further and further from the author, then what chance does a system based on physically-enforced laws stand? If the freedoms and advantages given to us through faster, wider-reaching communication systems are so beneficial, and so natural, then perhaps we should be carefully inspecting the mechanisms of our society that, by their very nature, now serve to restrict our interests more than they do serve them.
Let us not forget that laws are anything but "law". They are not laws in the scientific sense, static and unchangeable by those fated to live under their roof. Rather they are whims, temporary constructs of the society that created them. Laws are thought up, destroyed and modified every day of the week, in accordance with the thinking of the current time. Nor are they the only system of power that one has over other people (the "governed" perhaps). They are the traditional system only because our societies have - up til now - been restricted physically and so the law has on the whole been quite workable. It has been defined within the technology available to it, and the technology available to those under its jurisdiction; within the scope of what people are able to achieve, and how easy it is to control them doing it.
We are living in a world (not a town, nor a city) in which thoughts, feelings, morals and deeds can be wholely contained within the message. Things traditionally restricted along with our physical movement are being translated into streams of bipolar states of existence or non-existence ("to be or not to be..."?), set quite apart from our bodies. And as such, we need to stop believing that processes that depend upon physical factors will work, and start to encourage new ways of regulating our behaviour across these non-physical interactions. But it is vital that these new methods must be allowed to emerge from the technology, just as traditional laws emerged from the physical means we had available to us from the beginning. We must, to some extent, start with a clean sheet.
I am not saying that laws as we know them should be abolished. Just because communication is reaching new levels doesn't mean that the physical world is to be left behind. But I do think that the two forms of community should be understood for their own strengths and weaknesses, and that governance in either should be wrought naturally from the freedoms and restrictions inherent to each. To employ traditional law methods to new network technology is to kill the virtual world stone dead, for without its freedom from the physical, it can be nothing but a loose appendage of our culture, wanting independence, but forever tethered to a conservative fear of willingness to find new systems of control.
I believe that in order to truly use the communications we have made, or that we ever shall make, we must now have the courage to render its control unto itself.
N.B. Things to chase up: a Counterpoint - if the net is simply another communications method with its endpoints in the real world, exactly how much can we split it from the physical world? Maybe we should think about actually changing the way our tradiitonal laws work, rather than coming up with a separate system for each.
Also, I think this ties in heavily with nyms and reputation networks, so need to investigate them a lot. Note to self: investigate nyms more.
(See also: Spam And Legality Emergent Network Protocols )
