A Caveat About Nuance

(Again, Still, Always)

Just a lawyerly caveat before we begin (I know, I know, I can hear the moaning and groaning already, but hear me out) — and I know some of you have heard this before in a Tweet-thread version, but I’m going to say it again here on Substack anyway.

Law is a complex and sprawling thing and in almost every way (both inherently and intentionally) resists simplification. IMO, you can see this is the recent trend toward the reductive belief that “code” could be law. It’s the fever dream of the DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations).

The idea that laws governing human beings could be reduced to code is perhaps a brilliant aspirational notion — something to aim for, perhaps, in a teleological sense, to hit only asymptotically, if ever, lest we turn humans into robots in the process. So what do we do in the meanwhile?