When Legal Meets Marketing

Entertainment and technology converge with culture and politics.

Jesse Walker | November 20, 2006

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Whether or not these particular cyberplaces manage to thrive, virtual worlds will continue to attract new users, to evolve, and to raise some intriguing political questions. In Synthetic Worlds, a thoughtful, engaging, and occasionally absurd book about these emerging online environments, the economist Edward Castronova asks, "Should a synthetic world government be held to the same standards of performance as we apply to Earth governments? Or is the objective simply to have fun? Do all good governments, as defined by the great, and dead, political philosophers of the Western tradition, maximize the amount of fun to be had?" It isn't a familiar political question, but it's the kind of query that's raised when the "governments" you're describing are not states but proprietary communities and informal adhocracies.

In the last and best segment of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick called for "a wide and diverse range of communities which people can enter if they are admitted, leave if they wish to, shape according to their wishes; a society in which utopian experimentation can be tried, different styles of life can be lived, and alternative visions of the good can be individually or jointly pursued." He didn't mention giant robots, pimped up hobbits, or the other avatars who dwell in today's synthetic worlds, but the same idea applies: Different covenants compete within a larger framework of freedom.

Even if the Cartoon Network's lawyers never send another nastygram, even if every content company stops cracking down on fan fiction, even if every threat to Internet freedom fades, these developments should be of enormous interest to every friend of liberty. Self-directed action, emergent behavior, competing voluntary communities -- there's a lot we can learn from this alternate universe unfolding online. We'll have to learn from it: As the Internet creeps off our desktops and into our pockets and cyberspace seeps into the physical world, those two universes will also inevitably converge. And like Friendster or MySpace, the institutions that rule the physical plane have a choice. They can react by inviting more participation, or they can react by imposing yet more controls.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of Reason.