But there are other sorts of laws in real space as well. You bought this book, I trust, or you borrowed it from someone who did.If you stole it, you are a thief, whether you are caught or not. Our language is a norm; norms are collectively determined. As our norms have been determined, your “stealing” makes you a thief, and not just because you took it. There are plenty of ways to take something but not be thought of as a thief.If you came across a dollar blowing in the wind, taking the money will not make you a thief; indeed, not taking the money makes you a chump. But stealing this book from the bookstore (even when there are so many left for others) marks you as a thief. Social norms make it so, and we live life subject to these norms.
Some of these norms can be changed collectively, if not individually. I can choose to burn my draft card, but I cannot choose whether doing so will make me a hero or a traitor. I can refuse an invitation to lunch, but I cannot choose whether doing so will make me rude.I have choices in real life, but escaping the consequences of the choices I make is not one of them. Norms in this sense constrain us in ways that are so familiar as to be all but invisible.
But here we get back to Martha and Dank. In their exchange—when Martha blamed Dank for having a dog that died with pain—they revealed what was most amazing about that particular MMOG. Martha’s remarks (“Why do you have a dog that suffers when dying? Get yourself a pain-free-death dog, and my petals will cause no harm”) should have struck you as odd. You may have thought, “How weird that someone would think that the fault lay not in the poisonous petals but in a dog that died with pain. ”But in this space, Dank did have a choice about how his dog would die. Maybe not a choice about whether “poison” would “kill” a dog, but a choice about whether the dog would “suffer”when it “died.” He also had a choice about whether a copy of the dog could be made, so that if it died it could be “revived.”
In MMOG space, these possibilities are not given by God. Or rather, if they are defined by God, then the players share the power of God. For the possibilities in MMOG space are determined by the code—the software, or architecture, that makes the MMOG space what it is. “What happens when” is a statement of logic; it asserts a relationship that is manifested in code. In real space we don’t have much control over that code. In MMOG space we do.
So, when Martha said what she said about the dog, Dank made what seemed to me an obvious response. “Why do your flowers have to stay poisonous once they leave your land? Why not make the petals poisonous only when on your land? When they leave your land—when, for example, they are blown onto my land—why not make them harmless?” It was an idea. But it didn’t really help. For Martha made her living selling these poisonous plants. Others (ok not many, but some) also liked the idea of this art tied to death. So it was no solution to make poisonous plants that were poisonous only on Martha’s property, unless Martha was also interested in collecting a lot of very weird people on her land.
But the idea did suggest another. “Okay,” said Dank, “why not make the petals poisonous only when in the possession of someone who has ‘purchased’ them? If they are stolen, or if they blow away, then let the petals lose their poison. But when kept by the owner of the plant, the petals keep their poison. Isn’t that a solution to the problem that both of us face?” The idea was ingenious. Not only did it help Dank, it helped Martha as well.
As the code existed, it allowed theft. (People want reality in that virtual space; there will be time enough for heaven when heaven comes.) But if Martha could modify the code slightly so that theft removed a plant’s poison, then “theft” would also remove the plant’s value. That change would protect the profit in her plants as well as protect Dank’s dogs.
Here was a solution that made both neighbors better off—what economists call a pareto superior move. And it was a solution that was as possible as any other. All it required was a change of code. Think for a second about what’s involved here. “Theft” entails(at minimum) a change in possession. But in MMOG space “possession” is just a relation defined by the software that defines the space. That same code must also define the properties that possession yields. It might, like real space, distinguish between having a cake and eating it. Or it might erase that distinction, meaning you can “eat” your cake, but once it’s “eaten,” it magically reappears. In MMOG space you can feed a crowd with five loaves and two fishes, and it isn’t even a miracle.
So why not craft the same solution to Martha and Dank’s problem? Why not define ownership to include the quality of poisonousness, and possession without ownership to be possession without poison? If the world is designed this way, then it could resolve the dispute between Martha and Dank, not by making one of them change his or her behavior, but by changing the laws of nature to eliminate the conflict altogether.
But it is a book about cyberspace. My claim is that both “on the Internet” and “in cyberspace,”we will confront precisely the questions that Martha and Dank faced, as well as the questions that their solution raised. Both “on the Internet” and “in cyberspace,” technology constitutes the environment of the space, and it will give us a much wider range of control over how interactions work in that space than in real space. Problems can be programmed or “coded” into the story, and they can be “coded” away. And while the experience with gamers so far is that they don’t want virtual worlds to deviate too far from the real, the important point for now is that there is the capacity to make these worlds different. It is this capacity that raises the question that is at the core of this book: What does it mean to live in a world where problems can be coded away? And when, in that world, should we code problems away, rather than learn to work them out, or punish those who cause them?