- Post, David G.
In Search of Jefferson's Moose.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
ISBN 978-0-19-534289-5.
-
In 1787, while serving as Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson
took time out from his diplomatic duties to arrange to have shipped
from New Hampshire across the Atlantic Ocean the complete skeleton,
skin, and antlers of a bull moose, which was displayed in his residence
in Paris. Jefferson was involved in a dispute with the
Comte
de Buffon, who argued that the fauna of the New World were
degenerate compared to those of Europe and Asia. Jefferson concluded
that no verbal argument or scientific evidence would be as convincing
of the “structure and majesty of American quadrupeds” as
seeing a moose in the flesh (or at least the bone), so he ordered one
up for display.
Jefferson was a passionate believer in the exceptionality of the
New World and the prospects for building a self-governing republic
in its expansive territory. If it took hauling a moose all the
way to Paris to convince Europeans disdainful of the promise of
his nascent nation, then so be it—bring on the moose!
Among Jefferson's voluminous writings, perhaps none expressed
these beliefs as strongly as his magisterial Notes on the State of
Virginia. The present book, subtitled “Notes on the State
of Cyberspace” takes Jefferson's work as a model and
explores this new virtual place which has been built based
upon a technology which simply sends packets of data from place
to place around the world. The parallels between the
largely unexplored North American continent of Jefferson's
time and today's Internet are strong and striking, as the
author illustrates with extensive quotations from Jefferson
interleaved in the text (set in italics to distinguish them
from the author's own words) which are as applicable to the
Internet today as the land west of the Alleghenies in the
late 18th century.
Jefferson believed in building systems which could scale
to arbitrary size without either losing their essential
nature or becoming vulnerable to centralisation and
the attendant loss of liberty and autonomy. And he believed
that free individuals, living within such a system and
with access to as much information as possible and the
freedom to communicate without restrictions would
self-organise to perpetuate, defend, and extend such a polity.
While Europeans, notably
Montesquieu,
believed that self-governance
was impossible in a society any larger than a city-state, and
organised their national and imperial governments accordingly,
Jefferson's 1784 plan for the government of new Western territory
set forth an explicitly power law fractal architecture which,
he believed, could scale arbitrarily large without depriving
citizens of local control of matters which directly concerned them.
This architecture is stunningly similar to that of the global
Internet, and the bottom-up governance of the Internet to
date (which Post explores in some detail) is about as Jeffersonian
as one can imagine.
As the Internet has become a central part of global commerce and
the flow of information in all forms, the eternal conflict
between the decentralisers and champions of individual liberty
(with confidence that free people will sort things out for
themselves)—the Jeffersonians—and those who
believe that only strong central authority and the
vigorous enforcement of rules can prevent
chaos—Hamiltonians—has
emerged once again in the
contemporary debate about “Internet governance”.
This is a work of analysis, not advocacy. The author, a law professor
and regular contributor to The
Volokh Conspiracy Web log, observes that, despite being
initially funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, the
development of the Internet to date has been one of the most
Jeffersonian processes in history, and has scaled from a handful
of computers in 1969 to a global network with billions of users
and a multitude of applications never imagined by its creators,
and all through consensual decision making and contractual
governance with nary a sovereign gun-wielder in sight. So
perhaps before we look to “fix” the unquestioned
problems and challenges of the Internet by turning the
Hamiltonians loose upon it, we should listen well to the
wisdom of Jefferson, who has much to say which is directly
applicable to exploring, settling, and governing this new
territory which technology has opened up. This book is a
superb way to imbibe the wisdom of Jefferson, while learning the
basics of the Internet architecture and how it, in many ways,
parallels that of aspects of Jefferson's time. Jefferson
even spoke to intellectual property issues which read like
today's news, railing against a “rascal” using
an abusive patent of a long-existing device to extort money
from mill owners (p. 197), and creating and distributing
“freeware” including a design for a uniquely
efficient plough blade based upon Newton's Principia
which he placed in the public domain, having “never thought
of monopolizing by patent any useful idea which happened to
offer itself to me” (p. 196).
So astonishing was Jefferson's intellect that as you read
this book you'll discover that he has a great deal to say
about this new frontier we're opening up today. Good
grief—did you know that the Oxford English Dictionary
even credits Jefferson with being the first person to use
the words “authentication” and
“indecipherable” (p. 124)? The author's
lucid explanations, deft turns of phrase, and agile leaps between
the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries are worthy of the
forbidding standard set by the man so extensively quoted here.
Law professors do love their footnotes, and this is
almost two books in one: the focused main text and the more
rambling but fascinating footnotes, some of which span several
pages. There is also an extensive list of references and
sources for all of the Jefferson quotations in the end notes.
March 2009 