¶ The Laboratorium (3d ser.)

I’ve changed my mission statement. The old one read:

I study how laws regulating software affect freedom, wealth, and power. I try to help lawyers and technologists understand each other. My research interests include content moderation, digital copyright, generative AI, digital property, and other topics in computer and Internet law.

The new one reads:

I try to bring technical, legal, and conceptual clarity to the foundations of information and Internet law. I want to help lawyers and technologists understand each other. My research areas include generative AI, content moderation, platform regulation, online copyright, and digital property.

My old statement focused on the policy consequences of legal rules; my new one focuses on the legal rules themselves. To be clear, this is a change in emphasis. I’ve always cared about both policy and law and I expect that I always will. Nor is this a sudden shift in what I’m doing. Instead, I’ve updated the description to catch up with a gradual evolution in how I understand my scholarly contributions.

Still, the difference is real. I care most about getting the analytical parts of technology law right, I enjoy working on it, and I’m good (enough) at it. Anything I might write about technology policy, many other people can do better—but my ideas about technology law itself are weird enough that they simply will not get written unless I do it myself.

To give more of a sense of what my new statement means, let me unpack the invidual phrases, in a kind of Reporter’s Note:

• The critical word is “clarity.” I used to want to be smart. Now I want to be clear. I strive hard for clarity in my work. I try to pare down my models to the provably minimal number of moving parts, to organize my arguments with step-by-step logical rigor, and to describe my ideas in “full, clear, concise, and exact terms.”
• This clarity (hopefully) comes in three forms, of which the first and foremost is “doctrinal” clarity. I’m a “Professor of Law,” and to me what makes law distinctive as a discipline is its comprehensive engagement with doctrine: what is the law on a specific issue? I take doctrine seriously but not literally; I prefer to look past unimportant linguistic variations to the actual rules that the legal system is attempting to establish and apply.
• Second, there is “technical” clarity. Another way of describing my research is that I study issues where “the legal treatment of software depends on the technical details of how that software works.” With a few exceptions, I don’t do novel computer-science scholarship. Instead, I explain the relevant technical ideas for non-technical audiences, as accurately and clearly as I can.
• And third, there is “conceptual” clarity. I read a lot of analytic philosophy, and I try to bring out the underlying conceptual architecture that caselaw is groping towards. I’ve read too much legal realism and history of science to think that concepts alone should determine doctrine. Instead, I think that good concepts are useful; they work because they encapsulate widely shared beliefs about legal rules in a way that can be consistently applied.
• My field of study—“information and Internet law”—may sound broad, but my job title is literally to work on “digital and information law.” Larry Lessig famously argued that Internet law was worth studying because it could “illuminate the entire law.” Today, as computer technologies and the information that passes through them extend ever further into personal, social, and civic life, these fields increasingly are the entire law. The distinction is meaningful, too, because I work extensively on information law (e.g., IP and speech), on Internet law (e.g., platforms like search engines and social media), and on their intersection (e.g., AI and digital property).
• To ground that broad summary, my list of research areas—“generative AI, content moderation, platform regulation, online copyright, and digital property”—identifies the major topics that I write on. The list doesn’t include my one-offs, on topics like class actions or research ethics. Instead, it lists the topics on which I have a sustained body of work that I expect to keep working on.
• I work on “foundations” more than on applications. I would rather clean up the threshold issues that every case on an issue raises than analyze a single lawsuit in comprehensive detail. Often, this means nailing down the conceptual question that numerous doctrines are asking, or being precise about how classes of computer systems do or don’t match common legal descriptions of them.
• I say that I “try” to bring clarity because I know that I may not succeed. This is an aspirational statement for myself, not a guarantee of future results.
• Finally, “I want to help lawyers and technologists understand each other.” I was trained in both fields, and my origin story involved realizing that despite some mutual suspicion, they have a great deal in common. I want to bridge the gap between them because I think that it will be helpful to both communities. Ultimately, I’m committed to conceptual clarity and to foundations rather than applications because I think it’s the most useful way I can address real-world problems: by giving lawyers and technologists the mutual understanding they need to face their shared challenges.

One reason that I revised my statement is that I realized people were picking up on the wrong words in it. They’d ask me to write or speak about big, sweeping policy issues when there are other scholars who would be better fits. Freedom, wealth, and power matter enormously and are all important to my work, but I’m not an expert on any of them as such, and I’m afraid the old statement gave the misleading impression that I am. I hope the new version gives a better sense of what it is I do, and why.

The blog has moved.

The last time it moved was in 2015. I had just taken a long break from Facebook and I liked remembering what it felt like to blog. As I write this seven years later, Eloi Morlock, mister iPod Submarine himself, may be just weeks away from becoming the unwilling and unqualified owner of Twitter. If and when that happens, I plan to take a long break from Twitter. Reconnecting with my blogging roots sounds like a good idea again.

But I’m also older, sadder, and wiser about something else: the mortality of all software. For as long as I have been blogging, I have been struggling with the problem of how to keep the blog going even as blogging platforms come and go. I started with a homebrew solution that involved hand-coding XML, running it through a stylesheet processor, and uploading the resulting HTML to a web server. It worked, if barely, but it was also beyond my capacity to maintain or extend. So after a couple of years of limping along (and an unfortunate experiment in turning the blog into a wiki), I threw in the towel and switched to Movable Type, which ran on my server and had a user-friendly web interface.

I used Movable Type for almost a decade. I thought that because it was open-source I would always be able to just keep on running it happily in my own corner. But Six Apart’s pivot to the enterprise market and paid subscription models left me stranded. The software worked, but without ongoing development support it became increasingly hard to deal with spam, security, and the endless accumulation of cruft.

In 2015, I moved over to Tumblr. In part I did it because I found a stunning Tumblr theme. And in part, I wanted the security and reliability of having a blog backed by a major Internet platform. It involved some significant sacrifices: I had to settle for static archives rather than importing all of my old posts. But at least I thought I achieved some measure of stability. Tumblr was a billion-dollar company, after all.

I’m going to pause now for those of you who know the corporate history to wipe the tears of laughter from your eyes. Suffice it to say that Tumblr is worth perhaps one percent of what Yahoo once paid for it, has an actively antagonistic userbase, and has stagnated technically since basically the day I started using it. So I have known for a while that my days there were numbered. Better to make an orderly exit at a time of my own choosing. The news about Twitter was just the final nudge to make me do something I had been planning for a while.

So this is all by way of saying that the Laboratorium is now powered by Jekyll and I have never been happier with the technical setup. Jekyll runs on my own computer, from the command line, just like the good old first-generation XML scripts I wrote back at the turn of the century, when “blog” was still a neologism and the “blogosphere” was still a thing. It has an elegant template language that recalls everything that was good about Movable Type’s templates and nothing that was bad about them. It’s supported by an active and thriving open-source development community. And best of all, it stores every post in a simple and easy-to-parse text format. On that day when Jekyll too falls into ruin and decay, as is the inevitable fate of all software, I will be able to pack up my things again and move on.

This is something I have come to understand since the last iteration of this blog. Knowledge is not something that is created and then simply endures. It must be curated, transmitted, maintained. In every generation, you must retell the stories and transcribe the manuscripts. Copying my archives from server to server and from format to format is part of what keeps them alive.

Welcome to the Laboratorium, Third Series.

2014 was a long year. If you are the sort of person who reads this blog, I doubt I need to say why. Instead, allow me to offer a brief personal take on the year everything went wrong and everyone was mad all the time.

In July, I took a break from Facebook. I’m on it still. I’d been writing about the emotional contagion experiment and I’d come to feel uneasy logging in knowing that I might be the subject of psychological experiments. It wasn’t that I objected to being experimented on. Instead, knowing about Facebook’s manipulations in the name of science made me uncomfortably conscious of its other manipulations in the name of increasing my “engagement” and selling me things.

I regret not seeing pictures of my friends’ kids; I regret hearing second-hand about the changes in their lives. But after a few weeks, I realized that these regrets were more than outweighed by the relief I felt at escaping Facebook news. I like reading the news, don’t get me wrong, but Facebook is a singularly infuriating place to encounter it. Someone is always wrong on the Internet; and someone else is always complaining about it on Facebook. I’d log in to Facebook to unwind for a few minutes, and it would wind me up instead. Stepping away was like remembering to breathe–at least until I checked Twitter.

I’ve always felt good about the way I engage with the world through this blog. It’s brought out the best in my thinking and my writing; it’s introduced me to some wonderful people. It’s everything I love and have always loved about the Internet–which is saying a lot after a year in which the Internet was so hard to love. In my experience, Facebook and Twitter are loud and exciting; blogging is slow and calm. But I think I’m ready for slow and calm again. So I’m going back to my circa-2004 social media.

Welcome to the Laboratorium, Second Series.