Good onlife governance: On law, spontaneous orders, and design

Abstract

This chapter examines the legal challenges of the information revolution in terms of governance, spontaneous orders, and design. An increasing set of issues, such as connectivity and availability of resources, affect the whole infrastructure and environment of current legal systems and, thus, have to be tackled at international and transnational levels. Moreover, the intricacy of these issues is often increased by the emergence of spontaneous orders and the technicalities of design mechanisms, e.g., the principle of “privacy by design.” In light of these issues, the purpose of this chapter is to stress that governance actors, as game designers dealing with the twofold features of generative ICTs, ought to preventively understand the nature of the field in which they aim to intervene, i.e., “Onlife,” and consider the use of self-enforcing technologies as the exception, or a last resort option, for coping with the impact of the information revolution.