For class presentaton on December 1
As emphasized in our study of last week's topic, government in real space is geographically bounded. Territories traditionally have defined the scope of government's legislative authority; and where governments have attempted to reach beyond territories, it has only been when behavior outside territories has affected life within the government's domain.
As mobility has increased, this model for sovereignty has been put under great strain. When people live in one area, yet work in another, and then send their kids to school in a third, a system of democratic government which restricts their influence to the first increasingly makes less and less sense. This has lead some scholars to question, even in real space, the exclusive reliance on geography as a basis for legislative jurisdiction, or citizenship participation.
In cyberspace, the problem is only worse. One's behavior while in cyberspace can affect many in many other jurisdictions. And while one is always also in real space while one is in cyberspace, the behavior in cyberspace is increasingly behavior that is not really regulated properly by any individual sovereign, or set of sovereigns. There is emerging in cyberspace an existence that is outside of the life of any particular real world sovereign.
This call will be the most speculative of our term. The aim is to think about structures that might assure continued democratic control over an increasingly nongeographic life, or existence. To the extent architectures of cyberspace become their own regulators, what architectures would assure a minimum of democratic control or responsibility for the architectures that emerge?
One tool that we will explore in this context is the device of deliberative polling, as developed by James Fishkin at the University of Texas. Would deliberative polling help solve some of the problems of democratic accountability in cyberspace? Are their architectures that might eliminate the "problem" by restoring control to local jurisdictions? Can cyberspace be zoned in to a world that maps onto real space jurisdictions, such that the only democratic control necessary is control at the local level? Is there an international legal presence that emerges once a significant population enters into the world of cyberspace? And how would that population be governed?
Mike Fischer
Director, Program on Science, Technology, and Society
MIT
mfischer@mit.edu
Return to Course home page
Send comments about this site to 6805-webmaster@martigny.ai.mit.edu.
Last modified: October 18 1998, 8:22 PM