> ...
> Both agree, however, that society must begin to make more conscious
> choices about what it wants the Internet to be.
we don't know who "society" is, how it can become more conscious of anything -- whatever that may mean -- or how it can implement its desires; unless by "society" the authors means the State as the government or the assemblage of corporate leadership, which is what it sometimes meant in the past. I have a feeling that it is here a sort of ghost, the ghost of bourgeois cultural leadership.
> Mr. Lessig's main
> point in "Code" is that the Internet does not have a "nature." The
> world we think of as "cyberspace," he said, is an environment created
> by the architecture of the computer code that gave birth to the World
> Wide Web.
>
> Mr. Lessig's point is that because the Internet is based on "open
> source" computer protocols that allow anyone to tap into it, it has a
> specific character that can be, and is, modified all the time.
> Internet providers can write software to allow users maximum privacy
> or to track and restrict their movements to an extraordinary degree.
> The software engineers, as Percy Bysshe Shelley said of poets, are the
> unacknowledged legislators of our time. We must, Mr. Lessig said,
> acknowledge this reality and try to shape it.
This is confused. Software engineers (and other engineers) do all kinds of things, but they don't legislate much. They especially don't legislate the content of most applications (that is, the stuff you actually are in contact with when you use the software and hardware.) There has been (as far as I know) a considerable lack of coherent agency and subjectivity in the creation of the Internet. When it was first conceived by the military, an offline class, command and control structure ordering the society of users was assumed, which of course doesn't exist in its present incarnation.
> "We can build, or architect, or code cyberspace to protect values that
> we believe are fundamental, or we can build, or architect, or code
> cyberspace to allow those values to disappear," he writes.
Again, we don't know who the subject here, called "we", actually is. Maybe the author is more specific elsewhere, where he may also explain how the architecture of cyberspace could "protect values that we" (!) "believe are fundamental". Presumably some kind of force or bribery applied from on high are anticipated, following the illusion that "software engineers" are already in control. No wonder the fellows at freerepublic.com were excited.
By contrast, the opening paradox of the article is clear and reflects an observable phenomenon:
> The discussion illustrated the phenomenon that Mr. Sunstein and
> various social scientists have called "group polarization" in which
> like-minded people in an isolated group reinforce one another's views,
> which then harden into more extreme positions. Even one of his critics
> on the site acknowledged the shift. "Amazingly enough," he wrote, "it
> looks like Sunstein has polarized this group into unanimous agreement
> about him." An expletive followed.
In other words, a very old story: a group of people emphasize their differences with outsiders in order to minimize their differences with each other and establish social cohesion, something for which most humans have a considerable appetite. We see the same thing in ethniticy, racism, nationalism, religion, politics, sports, sex, and taste in (other) arts and entertainments -- even in casual random conversations. It would be more surprising if it hadn't appeared on the Net, and it seems very doubtful that software engineers can govern it in spite of some of their pretensions.