Bob Berring on the Structure of Law

This is an excellent video on the structure of the law.



I think what Prof. Berring is addressing at the end is the way that technology interpenetrates society as it, and society, progress. As Edelcrantz (the librarian of the Royal Academy of Turku, Finland, by the way) noted all the way back in 1796, technology follows a path of (as Stephen Jay Gould put it) punctuated equilibrium: technology and culture stay the same for a long time, then change rapidly. (Of course, one can also make the argument that what we're seeing lately is merely the exponential growth of technology; the pace of technological growth, the slope of the curve, is merely becoming steeper.)

Or, as I quoted in the chapter of my undergraduate thesis that explained what hypertext was (back in 1994), with respect to the social acceptance of technology,

It often happens, with regard to new inventions, that one part of the general public finds them useless and another part considers them to be impossible. When it becomes clear that the possibility and the usefulness can no longer be denied, most agree that the whole thing was fairly easy to discover and that they knew about it all along.

- Abraham Edelcrantz (Abraham Niclas Clewberg), A Treatise on Telegraphs (1796), quoted in Holzmann, Gerard J., and Björn Pehrson, "The First Data Networks," Scientific American, v. 270, no. 1 (January 1994): 124-129.