The Theory of Generativity

Abstract

This paper was written in response to a request from the editors of the Fordham Law Review, who were organizing a symposium (held in Dec. 2009) focused on my book (In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace) and Jonathan Zittrain’s (The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It). Zittrain and I often joked, while were working on our respective books, that we were actually preparing different versions of the same book, and though it was just a joke, as it turns out there was something to it. In this essay, I describe the ways in which In Search of . . . is really all about “generativity” (though the term doesn’t appear therein), and the ways in which The Future of . . . has more Jefferson in it than might be apparent at first glance.

Keywords: Cyberspace, Cyberspace Law, Jefferson, Generativity, Internet Law, Scale

JEL Classification: K19, K39, K49