The Metaverse Is Not a Place Apart: Law, Code, and the Recursive Governance of Digital Space (A Review Essay on Mark Findlay, Governing the Metaverse: Law, Order and Freedom in Digital Space (2025))

2026-05-10

AI Summary

This study addresses the prevailing dichotomy between virtual and physical realms in current metaverse governance, which overlooks their deep entanglement. It proposes a recursive governance framework that reconceptualizes law, code, platform rules, and public regulation as dynamically interacting components of a hybrid socio-technical order. By integrating algorithmic constitutionalism, pluralist speech act theory, and theories of fuzzy legitimacy, the paper develops a novel jurisprudence suited to the metaverse’s multi-layered, decentralized, defeasible, and inherently unstable normative authority structures. This approach transcends traditional siloed legislative logics and advances a model of cross-level collaborative regulation, thereby addressing critical theoretical gaps in conceptualizing both “new law” and the metaverse itself.

Abstract

This review essay examines Mark Findlay's Governing the Metaverse: Law, Order and Freedom in Digital Space. Findlay offers an ambitious and timely account of the metaverse as a social and imaginative space that should be governed for freedom, personhood, community, and resistance to enclosure. The essay argues, however, that the book's two central categories, "the metaverse" and "new law," remain insufficiently theorised. The book relies on a realspace/virtual distinction that its own analysis repeatedly destabilises. Once digital environments are understood as dependent on physical infrastructures, platform architectures, AI systems, data pipelines, and external legal institutions, and as capable of generating real-world harms for individuals and society, the governance problem is no longer how to devise a separate law for a separate virtual realm. It is how to govern a hybrid socio-technical order in which law, code, platforms, and public oversight recursively interact. The essay further argues that Findlay's account of "new law" does not adequately theorise how normative authority operates across a recursively layered governance architecture in which code, platform rules, and legal oversight interact without any single level exercising decisive control. Drawing on algorithmic constitutionalism, speech-act pluralism, and fuzzy legality, the essay suggests that addressing this architecture requires a jurisprudence capable of reasoning about normative force that is layered, defeasible, and recursively unstable.

Problem

• metaverse
• recursive governance
• law and code
• socio-technical order
• normative authority

Innovation

• recursive governance
• algorithmic constitutionalism
• fuzzy legality
• socio-technical order
• speech-act pluralism