Code 2.0: Regulating Social Interactions

Oppressive government regulation in cyberspace may not be a matter of if, but a matter of when.  If you are of the camp that it has already emerged, then the focus shifts to the extent to which regulation will grow.  This regulation typically comes cloaked in a guise of protection—being able to produce or maintain our safety and security.  In these moments, privacy becomes inversely proportional to the amount of regulation present, and it seems that we are more than willing to give it up.

The traditional question of “privacy” was the limit to the law placed upon the ability of others to penetrate your private space.  From the perspective the law, it is the set of legal restrictions on the power of others to invade a protected space.  Those legal restrictions were complemented by physical barriers.  Digital technologies have changed those protections (Lessig, 201).

Perhaps it’s the semantics that get us all mixed up. Regulation implies some sort of order and general well to do for the participants, whereas control has connotations of something forced, something beyond our means.  And coupled with the idea that cyberspace is both simultaneously utopian yet inherent with deviants and mischievousness, the idea of increased regulation becomes polarized—either wholly ignored or desired by any means necessary.  And while I think cyberspace is a massive storage unit for information, I also assume that most of that information isn’t free, or at least the powers that be, don’t want it to remain that way. So, in our current models of commerce and competition, regulation in cyberspace serves as a way to control productivity and profitability.  What I am interested in is the propensity for regulation to manipulate code and networks to force adverse social interactions between different groups.

In the 1940s and 1950s we experienced, “White Flight,” in which there was a large-scale migration of white folks from urban areas to more racially homogenous (white) suburbs.  In many cases, there was also direct regulation and exploitation of housing markets through redlining, mortgage discrimination, and racially restrictive covenants.  In 2006 we started noticing this same phenomenon, online.  “Over time this [once] space of equality has been displaced by economic zoning that aim at segregation” (Lessig, 220). High numbers of white teenagers “upgraded” to Facebook from Myspace, and while of course there were design aesthetics at play, there was an overwhelming rhetoric of race and class in the motivations for the network shift.

Dana Boyd Discusses Digital ‘White Flight’ on CNN

From the clip with Danah Boyd, as well as by reading the full length article in Digital Race Anthology, we see that a lot of students were motivated by pressure from peers.  What would happen if this pressure could be artificially created by cyberspace regulators?  I’ve mentioned “Digital Affirmative Action”  as a way to increase an individual or group’s positional equity in the network, but even I can admit that this also has the potential to turn into a sort of Old Boy’s Club, where those in power directly influence the network dynamics.  “All social hierarchies require information before they can make discriminations of rank.  Having enough information about people required, historically, fairly stable social orders” (Lessig, 221).  The ability to profile in cyberspace changes all of this.  “An efficient and effective system for monitoring makes it possible once again to make these subtle distinctions of rank.  Collecting data cheaply and efficiently will take us back to the past” (Lessig, 221).  When our code is regulated and our digital whereabouts tracked we leave clues around cyberspace that can be aggregated and used against us.  This system design “permits the re-creation of systems of status. They make discrimination possible because they restore information that mobility destroyed” (Lessig, 221).

While the Myspace vs. Facebook shift does not seem like a pressing issue, and still others have denied it altogether, it serves as an example for what could happen to social relationships and structures if government or corporations are able to yield this kind of power in regulating cyberspace.

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