I read the book with great interest and consider it a highly important contribution to rethinking new forms of governance and society enabled by emerging technologies and blockchain—particularly beyond the capitalist-driven models that currently shape our societies.
What I especially appreciated about the book was its careful balance between critically examining challenges and highlighting forward-thinking approaches, as well as its effort to propose solutions to mitigate the identified issues. Additionally, I found it particularly compelling how the book engages with fundamental legal and governance concepts, redefining and repositioning them in the context of the new possibilities created by technologies like blockchain. As the book states: „Blockchain is increasingly challenging our conceptual understanding of law and regulation.“ Against this backdrop, the focus is placed on key terms such as sovereignty, legitimacy, and trust.
In my response, I’d like to go a bit deeper into two specific points from the book. My aim is to highlight two aspects that, in my view, represent major obstacles to implementing the blockchain-based scenarios the book proposes.
After that, I’d like to turn to the practical dimension of what the authors suggest.
In the book, the authors draw an analogy between rule of law vs. rule by law and rule of code vs. rule by code. To sum up briefly: Rule of code is the model the authors favor – “made of predefined, automated and transparent rules encoded directly into the technological fabric.”
This model is presented as analogous to the rule of law, because, as the book states, “there is no single actor (or group of actors) who can control or influence their operations, in a discretionary and unilateral manner.” By contrast, rule by law is compared to autocratic regimes, where laws are used to legitimize the actions of those in power. And in the same vein, rule by code refers to the instrumentalization of computer code by powerful tech companies – “a regime where online operators have the power (and the tendency) to design and amend the code and technological infrastructure of their online platforms, primarily as a means to serve their own economic or political interests.”
Is code law?
To take a closer look at this idea, I would first like to take a step back and look at the analogy of law and code. In other words: I would like to raise the question whether code is really law?
The book already points out an important limitation here. We’re reading that in the attempt “to codify human laws into the strict and formal language of code,” there’s a gain in “accuracy and precision” – but “flexibility and granularity” are lost. And I add another quote “As such, code cannot adequately capture the nuances of human values, ethical principles, and morality that can only be expressed in natural language.”
I would like to take that point a little further – and insist on these differences between law and code. To then raise the questions of what these differences lead to.
Speaking from a legal philosophical point of view, I would like to point out that law has traditionnally been based on representation – and on text. That means: law emerges from a community of people gathered in a shared space that have agreed on a certain symbolic and value-based order. This order is then laid down in the textual corpus of law. Once this is done, every member of this community is subject to the law. In a democracy, this subjection to law is only deemed legitimate if people actually feel represented by that system – in other words: if the values and rights it upholds align with their own worldview.
Therefore, this connection between individual and collective world views has to be continuously re-established. And this is where politics comes into play. Politics ensure that shifting perspectives and societal changes are reflected in laws and governance. At its core, the political is a discursive force – it operates through language and text. And it is precisely language and text that connect law, politics, individuals, and society in their representational logic. And through this connection, they guarantee the possibility of change. Because: language isn’t just a tool we use; but while using it, we also shape it – through new words, metaphors, and ways of speaking.
Now, if we turn to blockchain, the idea of course is that representation is also at the core of these projets. And even in a more direct way – by bypassing state institutions that no longer enjoy the same level of trust. However, instead of text and of language, the law in this context is laid down in code. And in my view, this doesn’t just result in a loss of flexibility but also in a loss of the law’s readability and speakability. And therefore to a loss of the mentioned connection.
Code – and here I’d like to refer to the work of philosopher Jean Lassègue – differs from traditional writing in that it is a mute form of writing. It separates the material act of writing from its meaning, and its processing takes place in abstraction from meaning. Of course, it can be translated back into readable text, but this requires multiple steps – and, therefore, multiple people who inevitably exert influence in the process. Moreover, these individuals are often not elected representatives but rather individuals with IT expertise who occupy central roles in such projects.
The readability and speakability of traditional law results from its deep entanglement with language and text. And this is precisely what gives the subjects of a legal community their binary role – as being both subject to and constitutive of law. And this, I think, is lost when law is transformed into code.
The question I therefore keep coming back to is whether there are ways to preserve this connection within these new frameworks. This seems to be the idea behind the authors’ writings on the rule of code and the concept of off-chain constitutions. But I wonder whether this can truly be considered “the political” in the proper sense.
First, this kind of political dynamic can only exist either a priori or a posteriori in blockchain-based systems. Because law and law enforcement necessarily collapse into one process, through smart contracts. Meaning that rules can only be set in advance or corrected afterwards.
Of course, this has clear advantages: it increases efficiency and eliminates corruption. But at the same time, the space for interpretation is lost, for argument, for discussion – in short, the space of the political.
Second, the political – at least in Rancière’s sense – necessarily implies dissent. And I wonder whether that is truly possible here. In the book, the authors argue that these communities consist of “people from all kinds of backgrounds”,but from what I can see, these groups tend to be constituted by like-minded people rather than being spaces of genuine disagreement.
Rule of code and rule by code
The second point I’d like to raise refers to the idea of prefering rule of code over rule by code.
As mentioned before, the authors favor the rule of code model because it emphasizes democratic governance and participation. And I fully agree – this is the crucial issue when it comes to blockchain: Blockchain can only be a legitimate alternative if its governance is itself democratic.
But unless I’m missing something, rule of code doesn’t really cancel out rule by code – unless we abandon the core idea of blockchain altogether. Because if the focus shifts entirely to the entities managing the blockchain, then we no longer need blockchain. That’s the paradox pointed out by Vili Lehdonvirta.
And that’s why I’d like to draw attention to the practical consequences that arise when communities are ruled by code – even if that code is designed or maintained by a democratic entity. First, we seem to end up with a strange mix of rigidity and flexibility. On the one hand, we’re dealing with an automated form of law, which is inevitably rigid. But on the other hand, these virtual societies claim to protect freedom based on the fact that they are opt-in collectives. In the authors’ words:
“We don’t need to be citizens of nation-states with defined territories and the rights and duties that traditional citizenship entails. Instead, we can move between ‘digital tribes’ and ‘network archipelagos,’ which may exist anywhere, at any time.”
But this raises a fundamental question: Can law and opt-in communities really go together?
Because when we talk about property, rights, and obligations – then we also have to ask: how can these be protected or enforced? How can law be enforced if there are no borders? If people’s identity remain pseudonymous? And if they can simply leave the community the moment they are threatened with sanctions or punishment?
And in this context, there’s another issue I’d like to raise. In the end, what we’re seeing here is the emergence of two parallel legal worlds. The book briefly mentions that in the context of NFTs.
On the one hand, the virtual world of blockchain law – lex cryptographia. This includes a process of de-corporealization: a detachment from nation-state jurisdictions, from territory and legal corpora – but also from the physical body of the subject. In other words, we’re dealing with the idea of a virtual subjectivity, freed from institutional and material constraints. But of course, in reality, the subject remains bound to the body – and therefore, necessarily, embedded in some territorial jurisdiction.
(Unless, of course, they move to a physical territory that has been bought through crowdfunding by a so-called network state – a scenario, which, perhaps, we can discuss later on.)
But this leads to the following situation: The subject, in their physical presence, belongs to one legal order – while in their blockchain identity, they belong to another. And with emerging technologies – IoT, VR, AR – this virtual lex cryptographia can increasingly extend into the material world. This must, in my opinion, inevitably lead to clashes. For example, when it comes to blockchainified property. And here I quote another book by P de Filippi:
„Thanks to distributed ledger, [certain data] could be used to prevent [] automated doors from opening for people whom a smart-contract risk-assessment service rates below a threshold of desirability.“
In such cases, we end up with a situation where a body – subject to one jurisdiction – is confronted with objects governed by a different legal regime. And that regime does not offer the body any protection.
Rule of code
To conclude, I would like to turn to a more practical question. Many studies have shown that, over time, blockchain ecosystems tend to recentralize.
And I wonder – could this have something to do with the fact that blockchain itself is deeply rooted in a capitalist paradigm? Blockchain technology implies that blocks are being mined, and miners are incentivized to participate through the promise of financial reward. If value creation or maximization plays such a huge role in blockchain projects, then of course participants will always compete for greater influence. So what if blockchain were used for commoning purposes instead? Would that change the dynamics? And is this even possible given the mining infrastructure?
The authors already hint at some scenarios in the book, such as projects that focus on rewilding the planet or creating new states. In their words: “these systems involve participants who have motivations other than that of the competitive homo economicus.”
And if I then turn the focus back to the issues I made before, I would like to raise a more provocative question: Would we perhaps need to let go of the ideal of global decentralization in favor of more local projects – that lead to a kind of recorporealization? In other words, could we need to give up the fiction of democratic permissionless decentralization and turn to more locally rooted permissioned blockchains – which might be able to manage the underlying power structures more transparently?