“A world wherein 'the market' is free and the 'evil' of presidency is defeated could be a world of perfect freedom for them.” — Lawrence Lessig, Code: Version 2.0
I recently had the chance to preview James Craig's upcoming documentary, Code is Law. The film, arriving October 21 on Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video and YouTube Movies, tells two different but related stories of crypto hacks: the people involved and the ethos of the perpetrators.
Your position is evident, however the query deserves further study. If code shouldn’t be law, should it’s?
After the Mt. Gox hack in 2014, the primary hack examined in Code is Law, the DAO hack might be probably the most famous in cryptocurrency history. The DAO was the primary decentralized autonomous organization and have become the namesake. In 2016, when Ethereum was still young, it was certainly one of the primary decentralized applications to realize traction.
The film deals with hackers and people who oppose them. Source: Code is law
The story follows founder Griff Green's perspective as early adoption of decentralized governance grows, raises $160 million, then suddenly falls victim to a devastating hack.
The film uses the human perspective to border a debate that was prevalent on the time. Is it unsuitable for an attacker to take money out of a wise contract, counting on the contract's internal logic to acquire tokens without the creator's intention? Should the attacker be reprimanded, legally or otherwise, or is that simply fair?
The cycle repeats itself within the early 2020s with the investigation of a lesser-known hack of Indexed Finance. The exploit was allegedly perpetrated by an attacker named Umbril Upsilon, or Zeta Zeros, who would eventually be identified as teenager Andean Medjedovic.
The film uses Medjedovic as a cipher for the concept that code is law. His worldview, portrayed as childish, is anarchistic and brutal. “If I could bear it, I had the proper to.”
The film is an argument based solely on moral intuition, has no basis in principle and is defended only by tautology. None of the proponents of those ideas make a normative argument for why code must be law, but there have to be an instrumental basis for this philosophy that goes beyond moralism.
A century is coming to an end and code is law
The phrase “code is law” is usually attributed to scholar Lawrence Lessig. The first chapter of his 1999 book “Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace” is entitled “Code is Law” and draws an analogy between the facility vacuum that existed in Eastern Europe on the time (someone should read up on this) and the Internet.
People have at all times searched for boundaries to search out freedom. This is because societies are fundamentally structures that organize violence to contain the desires of people in favor of the priorities of those in power. In general, this has at the very least some pro-social qualities: the police play a privileged role as monopolists on violence, so we can purchase deodorant at Walgreens without ringing for an attendant. But that doesn't change what it’s.
At the limit, where these structures are usually not yet established, strong individuals could make maximum use of this strength to dominate others. This is freedom for many who want it or who otherwise hold heterodox views and wish to exercise them outside the watchful eyes of decency.
And that is where the moral origins of freedom are revealed. Freedom shouldn’t be a positive quality that might be achieved in a vacuum; it’s the absence of a negative. The removal of a restriction of any kind represents a rise in freedom. And so, for nerds and sociopaths, a whole absence of state authority, as existed in cyberspace in 1999 or in decentralized finance in 2016, may be desirable.
These at the moment are the proponents of a code-is-law ethos, those that imagine that freedom from restraint is helpful precisely since it is asymmetrical. They disproportionately wish to pursue activities which can be criticized by society, so a less strong social conscience disproportionately advantages them.
But Lessig's viewpoint was the other:
“We can construct, design, or program cyberspace to guard values that we imagine are fundamental. Or we are able to construct, design, or program cyberspace to make those values disappear. There isn’t any middle ground. There isn’t any alternative that doesn’t involve some sort of constructing. Code isn’t found; it is barely ever created, and only ever by us.”
In this construction, code doesn’t necessarily mean a removal of negative restrictions, but simply one other example of regulation within the broadest sense. A reticence, in other words, that raises the identical questions as another type of reticence.
The problem
However, there are two core problems that prevent code from being an efficient law even within the generous Lessig form.
The first, as Craig's film highlights, is that it’s incredibly difficult to develop code that is powerful enough to control human behavior in the assorted circumstances it’s more likely to encounter. This problem arises from a mismatch between the rigid logical nature of code and the fluidity of human behavior.
If a developer deploys an immutable contract, the moment an exploit is discovered, the whole system becomes unusable and not using a legal framework to support participants. And it's unrealistic to expect developers to develop perfect code. It is far easier and simpler to implement flexible rules that might be managed by humans (i.e. laws) than to assume upfront every possible risk scenario that would ever arise.
Such flexible authority annoys libertarians because discretion means power. Laws create arbitrators who necessarily have the facility to impose or overturn costs on other people.
If you've ever been pulled over by a foul cop, you already know exactly how this could go unsuitable, but the reality is that today there isn’t a rigid system as effective as a versatile one. Perhaps in the future computers developing large language models or other artificial intelligences will probably be able to equally effective discretion, but for now code as law is solely worse.
But the second problem with the code-is-law idea is more devastating. While the regulatory model proposed here has to this point been based on a reactive system that emerges to satisfy the necessity for authority, some political scientists – realists – see it in another way.
Authority is the emerging product of various violent capacities of people and groups. This gradient of violence creates coercion, wherein the perpetrators of violence impose rules on the topics. And while the Code dictates internal rules inside its own logic, it doesn’t have a monopoly on violence on the planet at large.
Whether you admit it or not, software is provided by developers and utilized by communities for specific purposes. And when hackers with different agendas exploit the software to steal things from these communities, a number of the victims will turn to the federal government for help. And sometimes these governments respond by sending men with guns to round up and lock up the hackers.
While we abstract it in our discussions, this final step, force, is the essential quantum of all regulation. And so long as governments have armies and developers and hackers don't, those that imagine code is law won't have the opportunity to impose their priorities on the remaining of us.
At least for now, that's a superb thing.
