Code 2.0

Начало книги

This is a translation of an old book — indeed, in Internet time, it is a translation of an ancient text. The first edition of this book was published in 1999. It was written in a very different context, and, in many ways, it was written in opposition to that context. As I describe in the first chapter, the dominant idea among those who raved about cyberspace then was that cyberspace was beyond the reach of real-space regulation. Governments couldn’t touch life online. And hence, life online would be different, and separate, from the dynamic of life offline. Code v1 was an argument against that then common view.

In the years since, that common view has faded. The confidence of the Internet exceptionalists has waned. The idea — and even the desire — that the Internet would remain unregulated is gone. And thus, in accepting the invitation to update this book, I faced a difficult choice: whether to write a new book, or to update the old, to make it relevant and readable in a radically different time.

Читать дальше →