Code Version 2.0, by Lawrence Lessig

Anyone who has visited a major website recently has surely seen the new batch of "Mac vs. PC" ads. Originally from the US, they have been rendered for the UK by the comedians Mitchell and Webb, who play the archetypes perfectly: Webb as the lean, chilled, denim-clad creative ("I'm a Mac"), and Mitchell as the plump, prissy, shirt-and-tied-up managercrat ("And I'm a PC" - PC being a euphemism for "Microsoft").

One of the routines shows how insecure PCs are to attack from the web: the managercrat sneezes and snuffles from catching his latest "virus", or freezes and falls over. In the US, there's a particularly acute jibe at Microsoft's new operating system, Vista. Standing behind the weary fat man is a shades-wearing security operative: every time "PC" tries to converse with "Mac", the guard intervenes ("Mac has issued a salutation: cancel or allow?"). This lampoons the intrusive security measures Vista imposes on its users, to ward against the countless viruses that assail Microsoft systems.

So far, so predictable: paranoid, panoptic Microsoft versus liberated, embracing Mac. And one might expect a book from Lawrence Lessig - the Stanford University cyber-lawyer, a hero to the digital classes, who once helped take Microsoft to the Supreme Court in a monopoly suit - to fall in line with the prevailing hipster consensus. But not so. Code Version 2.0 is a complete revision of an earlier book, updated (naturally) by throwing it entirely on to the web and inviting revisions, and is actually one of the most oppressively responsible books on cyber-culture you will ever read. By the end of it, reeling at some of Lessig's recommendations - an "identity passport" needed as you traverse the web, potential government surveillance of all communications - you wonder whether the Net as you know it is about to disappear before your eyes.

But this would be to mistake Lessig's tone for his function. He has often been described as "the Paul Revere of the digital age", the man who shouts that the "redcoats" of digital oppression are coming. His second visit to the Supreme Court was to try to halt media corporations from extending copyright, through all media, for time immemorial. And his stark messages are about stirring the citizenry to action; getting us clearly to recognise, and then stoutly defend, the freedoms of the internet.

He has put his activism where his theories are. Lessig was the founder of Creative Commons in 2001, a new approach to copyright which shifted "all rights reserved" to "some rights reserved". This gave artists and creators the option consciously to permit the "fair use" (ie, educational or amateur) of their material, rather than submit to a model of intellectual property that sought to commercialise every digital usage.

Yet there's a sense in this book that Lessig has somewhat wearied of the kind of bottom-up, anarchic energy we often presume fuels the perpetual revolution of the web. He reminds us of his early days as a young lawyer - touring post-Communist Europe, lending his services to politicians seeking to write new constitutions. Lessig calls a constitution "an architecture of value": a construction that enables and disables certain activities, according to commonly-held and thoroughly-debated principles and beliefs.

Lessig wants us to think of the internet in the same way - and like the good American he is, he wants us to build and defend the constitution of the internet. But constitutions require responsible men and women - the new "framers", as Lessig puts it in Jeffersonian terms - not order-defying libertarians. Indeed, advocates of the internet need to grow up about the need for regulation, rather than constantly counterpose themselves against the powers that be.

The point of Code Version 2.0 is that we don't realise just how regulatory code is. We can understand how legislation, social norms, or the marketplace bring order and consistency to what Lessig calls "real-space". In democratic societies, we can criticise and challenge these structures. But the more our lives move into "cyberspace", the more the programmed codes which structure that space determine our actions. How capable do we feel about subjecting those to civic scrutiny?

Lessig gives scores of great examples of how our inarticulacy about the power of code lets others direct our lives in implicit ways. The behemoth of Google shows just how complex this situation gets. We all know about the keyword filters that Google - along with all other Western search engines - has agreed with the Chinese government. But you may not know that Google has a record of every websearch, from every browser connected to an internet account, in its archives. And that when the National Security Agency asked Google for access to this data in January 2006, in order to do research on porn users, Google said "No". As one sardonic blogger put it, "we should have 'In Google We Trust' on the dollar bill."

Lessig's point is that, in terms of the reach of the state, code now makes possible what was previously only dreamed of, particularly by those wishing to enforce laws of surveillance and property. Like the liberal Supreme Court judge-in-waiting that he clearly is, Lessig's response to this radical situation - where transparency meets control - is to build new institutions, confident enough about understanding code to subject it to the legislature of democracy. His digital passport is one such solution: our privacy can easily be "diminished" in the matrix of the internet, so we should be empowered to control what the world knows of us - hopefully meaning less spam and scam. That this would also be open to state surveillance is something that Lessig seems rather too blithely US-constitutionalist about.

So governments should be active in defending a space of "commons" against copyright, where culture can be freely shared. Is this the dream of infinite self-creation that got many of us excited about cyberspace in the first place? At times, Lessig may well be guilty of the most exasperating legalistic pedantry. But I accept his basic premise. In an age where we are pessimistic and cynical about the power of government, we are in danger of losing the benefits of cyberspace - particularly if we do not value what informed governance can do against the depredations of capitalists, terrorists and just sheer pests. It seems that the chubby, bureaucratic dork, and the cool, expressive dude, might have to hold hands and swing together after all. If only "PC" didn't remind me of a Republican think-tank director.

Pat Kane is author of 'The Play Ethic' (www.theplayethic.com), and one half of the Scottish band Hue and Cry

Interesting? Click here to explore further