aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, May 01, 2005

An architecture of freedom

Ithiel de Sola Pool‘s 1983 study of the effects of communications technology on social, political, and economic life, Technologies of Freedom, was a defining read in my understanding of the structure of communications technologies. Similarly, Lawrence Lessig‘s 1999 Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, now undergoing a first of its kind online collaborative update, transformed my understanding of the methods of regulating human behavior.

Before Lessig I was familiar with the big three: Law, the old favorite (make it illegal or not); The Market, the new favorite (make it expensive or not); and Social Norms, once the darling of the social conservatives (make it shameful or not). Having lost that battle social conservatives (who don’t fancy the soulless market either for such things) have turned with a vengeance to the old favorite, law.

To these three Larry Lessig added a fourth, one I hadn’t conceptualized before and the one that is, in fact, the most potent of all - architecture. The architectural form his book focuses on is computer code:

...there is regulation in cyberspace, but that regulation is imposed primarily through code...Some architectures of cyberspace are more regulable than others; some architectures enable better control than others. Thus, whether a part of cyberspace-or cyberspace generally-can be regulated turns on the nature of its code. Its architecture will affect whether behavior can be controlled. To follow Mitch Kapor, its architecture is its politics. [p.20]

Architecture as regulator is, of course, nothing new - Robert Moses famously built low bridges over his parkways to keep the teaming hordes from taking busses to the beach, and we’re all familiar with the regulatory intent of the Medieval moat - but it hadn’t occurred to me in that way before.

Today we have the media industry, to enforce its near total victory in the copyright arena, developing and implementing a variety of architectural schemes that fall under the umbrella term Digital Rights Management or DRM (for more start at EFF and Wikipedia) which means things that on their face sound good, sometimes are not. From PVRblog this week:

The Open Media Network launched Tuesday with a broad plan to enable many things we’ve been talking about here recently, like downloadable television shows, movies, and podcasts. Marc Andressen (a Netscape founder) is on the board and when I first heard about this, I assumed it would be a lot like Kontiki, a DRM-friendly media distribution system that keeps you from doing anything with files once you’ve downloaded them (I recall the first time I saw Kontiki, their product boasted features that would automatically delete downloaded movies after playing them x number of times).

The site doesn’t work for me in Firefox and won’t let me download a demo movie (which even includes “DRM” in the filename). In Internet Explorer, I’m asked to install a custom activeX control from a company I’m already having trouble trusting. Oh, and it’s windows only.

There’s action on the hardware side, too. From Dan Lockton of the Cambridge-MIT Technology Policy program who is working on a dissertation on “Architectures of Control” (via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing):

Examples with primarily commercial control intentions range from the technology-intensive-such as Hewlett-Packard’s alleged use of embedded chips in printer cartridges which ‘expire’ the cartridge, even if unused, on a certain date, thus forcing the user to buy new cartridges-to the simple, such as the Audi A2’s bonnet which cannot be opened by the car’s owner, only by an Audi dealer.

There are, equally, numerous examples with more socially beneficial intentions, such as breathalyser or seat belt interlocks for car ignitions, blue lighting in nightclub toilets (to make intravenous drug use difficult), and growing opportunities in terms of coercing consumers to behave in more environmentally friendly ways-e.g., products could cease to function if the intended operation would cause excessive energy use.

The only way to an architecture of freedom is through an awareness of the architecture of control. Let’s all please be sure to pay attention.