20 years of the Laws of Cyberspace – Harvard’s Berkman Klein event celebrates how Lawrence Lessig’s groundbreaking paper provided structure to the Center’s field of study.

What if an architecture emerges that permits constant monitoring; an architecture that facilitates the constant tracking of behavior and movement. What if an architecture emerged that would costlessly collect data about individuals, about their behavior, about who they wanted to become. And what if the architecture could do that invisibly, without interfering with an individual’s daily life at all? … This architecture is the world that the net is becoming. This is the picture of control it is growing into. As in real space, we will have passports in cyberspace. As in real space, these passports can be used to track our behavior. But in cyberspace, unlike real space, this monitoring, this tracking, this control of behavior, will all be much less expensive. This control will occur in the background, effectively and invisibly. -Lawrence Lessig, “The Laws of Cyberspace,” 1998