I've been so interested in reading the various posts this week that I completely forgot my core goal, which is to shill for my book, so here's a message from our sponsor: Buy a copy of Here Comes Everybody, at fine booksellers near you.

Now, on to a point I wanted to make about Tim's post on Norms of Reciprocity in Free Software and the Blogosphere. He says "One of the things that I think is really interesting about the GPL is that formal legal enforcement is practically irrelevant."

This is true in a numerical sense; the amount of fighting about GPLed code is legendary, and very little of that fighting has taken place in the courts. However, I think the key element of contract law is operative here, even in an arena as socialized as Open Source software: One thing that keeps a contract from needing to be legally enforced is that it is obvious that it could be enforced.

In other words, the few tests the GPL has had serve to strengthen communal enforcement, precisely because people know they can call for backup when needed. As with the Tit-for-Tat pattern in the Prisoner's Dilemma, having a visible and simple mechanism for retaliation against bad actors can make it seem as if formal enforcement is "practically irrelevant", because people seem to be cooperating out of pure positive self-interest. In fact, though, they are also calculating the punishment they would suffer for defection -- the presence of a contract itself that makes contractual enforcement less of an issue.

I call this pattern the "Quiet Car" pattern, after the Amtrak Quiet Car on the Northeast Corridor Acela trains. These cars are for riders who want to work in a "library-like atmosphere" -- the rules are no music playing without headphones, no loud conversations, and no cell-phone conversations at all. Now anyone who has lived in an urban area knows that challenging someone on even relatively egregious public behavior is rare, and yet on the quiet car, such challenges are the norm. Even those guys in suits who exude a Masters of the Universe air are regularly confronted, often quite peremptorily, by mere mortals.

The moment, and I've seen it several times, is quite remarkable. Someone who believes that the negative externality of their phone call is a constitutional right suddenly getting shushed often gets ready for an argument, and then the shusher points to the sign: Quiet Car. And the guy (it's always a guy) simply folds, and slinks away.

The Quiet Car works the way the GPL works -- the knowledge that if things hot up the conductor will appear, and there is almost no way that the M. of the U. can win, is enough to get defectors to fold.

One of the things I've decided to dedicate some time to, now that the book is done, is debunking the kind of bottom-up, hive-mind, "people are good" nonsense being promulgated about novel forms of collaboration. Political philosophy isn't about problems, its about dilemmas, which is to say things that can never be solved, only optimized for. The net is astonishing in the number of new optimizations it has offered us for managing social dilemmas is enormous, but it doesn't make those dilemmas go away -- it just keeps them at bay in new ways.