The medieval merchants who developed the Law Merchant never voted on which customs to follow, and the Icelanders who operated without a king for three centuries never needed a standing army to keep the peace. The internet's protocols emerged from rough consensus and working code rather than legislative decree. The question that haunts modern political theory, of how to create binding rules for diverse populations, was solved repeatedly throughout history by people who never thought to ask permission.
The legal order we inherited operates on a simple premise: one territory, one law, one enforcer. Jurisdiction follows geography, rules flow downward from legislators to subjects, and compliance is secured through surveillance and the threat of punishment. This model made sense when populations were homogenous, when change happened slowly, and when the alternative to centralized order was genuine chaos. None of these conditions hold today. The accelerating pace of technological and social change renders yesterday's regulations obsolete before the ink dries. The unprecedented diversity of modern life, in culture, profession, values, and preferences, means that rules calibrated for one population inevitably chafe another. And the growing interconnection of everything creates a brittle system where a single error cascades across the entire structure because nothing can be insulated from anything else.
The failure mode of monolithic law produces two outcomes, and both are corrosive. Rules that do not work destroy respect for the legal order itself, training people to treat law as an obstacle to navigate rather than a framework for cooperation. Rules that most people ignore are worse still, because they create a population of technical lawbreakers who can be prosecuted selectively, which means prosecuted politically. The twentieth century's experiments in comprehensive legislation have not eliminated social problems but have generated new ones: overcriminalization, regulatory capture, the replacement of informal cooperation with formal compliance, and the quiet extinction of the local knowledge that once allowed communities to solve their own problems.
The network engineer looks at this situation and sees a familiar pattern. A monolithic architecture with a single point of control is precisely what you build when you want fragility, stagnation, and eventual catastrophic failure. The internet itself was designed against this pattern. Its protocols emerged not from any central authority but from a process the IETF describes as "rough consensus and running code." Nobody votes. Working implementations carry more weight than elegant arguments. Standards spread because people adopt them voluntarily, and they persist because they prove useful. When a protocol becomes inadequate, developers can fork it: copy the existing specification, modify what needs changing, and offer the result as an alternative. Compatible protocols remain interoperable. Incompatible protocols insulate themselves from each other and serve different communities with different needs.
This is not merely how computers communicate. It is how human beings have always created functional legal orders when they were not constrained to use the political method.
Consider medieval Iceland, which operated from 930 to 1262 without a king or executive branch. The country was divided among competing chieftains called goðar, but crucially, the goðorð was not a territorial unit. A free farmer could choose which chieftain to follow regardless of where he lived, and he could change his allegiance whenever he preferred, provided he settled any outstanding obligations first. This created something unprecedented: competitive governance, where leaders had to satisfy their followers or lose them to rivals. The courts existed to resolve disputes, but enforcement was private. Damages were paid to victims as restitution, not to the state as punishment. The right to collect restitution could itself be transferred, which meant that weaker parties could sell their claims to stronger champions who had the resources to pursue them. For three centuries this system produced a flourishing literary culture, resolved conflicts through compensation rather than vendetta, and maintained order across a dispersed population of independent farmers.
The Lex Mercatoria, the Law Merchant of medieval Europe, solved a different problem with similar methods. Cross-border commerce required rules that merchants from different kingdoms could all accept, but no king's law ran across all territories. The solution was voluntary adoption of shared customs, private arbitration through merchant courts, and enforcement through reputation and the threat of exclusion from trade. The courts of piepowder (literally dusty feet, from the traveling merchants who used them) operated at fairs and markets, providing swift justice based on commercial custom rather than local law. What made this system work was not the threat of violence but the merchant's need for future transactions: cheat once and you would never trade again.
The pattern that emerges from these cases is not the absence of rules but a different relationship between individuals and the rules they live under. Jurisdiction follows relationships rather than territory. Rules emerge from what people actually do and voluntarily adopt, which is why Bruno Leoni could observe that "individuals make the law insofar as they make successful claims." Standards spread through imitation of what works, formalize through rough consensus, and persist through voluntary compliance. Exit remains possible: dissatisfied parties can fork to alternative rules or insulate themselves from incompatible systems. What holds everything together is not the monopoly of force but a thin set of meta-rules that everyone accepts: respect for the personal sphere of those under different rulesets, the right to exit without being held hostage, and cooperation in enforcing these minimum requirements even across the boundaries of otherwise incompatible systems.
We might call this polycentric law, following the terminology of Michael Polanyi and Tom Bell, or we might call it RuleScaping, which captures the essential idea that jurisdiction is a landscape to be navigated rather than a cage to be locked in. The mechanism consists of a small set of operations: subscribe to a ruleset by choosing to participate in the community that follows it, fork when the existing rules no longer serve your needs, split and insulate from incompatible systems to prevent spillover effects, merge with compatible systems to reduce fragmentation, synchronize by fulfilling obligations before you change allegiance, and unsubscribe when you find better alternatives. None of this requires permission from a central authority. What it requires is the recognition that different communities can follow different rules while still interacting at the boundaries, that the cost of exit is the check on bad governance that democracy was supposed to provide but manifestly does not, and that the diversity preserved by polycentric systems is a source of resilience rather than a problem to be solved through enforced uniformity.
The objection is obvious: surely this produces chaos, fragmentation, a war of all against all. But history suggests precisely the opposite. Medieval Iceland was, according to historian Birgir Solvason, more peaceful and cooperative than contemporary feudal societies with their kings and armies. The Law Merchant facilitated the commercial revolution that ended medieval poverty. The internet protocols that emerged from rough consensus proved more robust and adaptable than the centrally planned alternatives that competing standards bodies proposed. What produces chaos is not the absence of monopoly enforcement but the imposition of uniform rules on populations that do not share uniform values, which is to say, the condition we actually live under now.
The technology exists to navigate multiple rulesets simultaneously. Cryptographic identity allows individuals to maintain persistent reputation across different systems. Smart contracts can encode agreements that execute automatically when conditions are met. Web of trust networks propagate information about who can be relied upon and who cannot. Protocols like Nostr demonstrate that censorship-resistant communication does not require anyone's permission to operate, only the willingness to run nodes and write code. The question is not whether such systems are technically possible but whether people will build them, whether the theoretical possibility will become practical reality through the accumulated labor of those who would rather create alternatives than petition for reform.
The builders of medieval Iceland did not wait for Harald Fairhair's permission to leave Norway. The merchants who created the Law Merchant did not petition their kings for a universal commercial code. The engineers who built the internet did not ask Congress to design its protocols. In every case, functional order emerged from the bottom up because people who needed coordination found ways to achieve it without surrendering sovereignty to monopolists of force. What worked once can work again, not through nostalgia for a past that cannot be recovered, but through the application of tested principles to present circumstances.
