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))

TL;DR

This review essay critiques Mark Findlay's book on metaverse governance, emphasizing the need to understand digital spaces as hybrid socio-technical systems with layered, recursive legal and technical interactions.

Contribution

It highlights the insufficiency of traditional realspace/virtual distinctions and advocates for a jurisprudence that addresses layered, recursive governance architectures in digital environments.

Findings

Digital environments depend on physical infrastructure and legal institutions.

Governance involves recursive interactions among law, code, and platforms.

Addressing harms requires understanding layered, unstable normative authority.

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.