I just read this lovely essay by Tom Vanderbilt on Hans Monderman, traffic, distance, and the responsibility to care for one another. I am still turning it over because I have been wondering about what makes the small difference that tips us back and forth between from caring most for one another and defending ourselves. It’s often, of course, the difference between an explicit or legal contract and an implicit social contract. But what is it that makes the breach of those broad contracts irreversible? It’s the knowing I suppose, the knowledge of good and evil.

“There are so many things that can be forbidden. The stranger thing is that we believe everything that isn’t forbidden is allowed.”

That’s true. Why? Is this lack of explicit rules part of why we see a generosity online that is almost unthinkable in the real world? I can’t unknow that if I offer to fix the bit of my neighbor’s roof that’s raining bricks into my back yard, she can sue me if anything goes wrong. I can’t unknow how many people of my acquaintance have actually sued or been sued. Sometimes behaving with innocence is demonstrably safer than arming ourselves against all possible attack, but that’s calculated. It’s a matter of knowing the lower accident statistics of the traffic circle and still feeling afraid and wanting the traffic circle instead of the stoplight. In real life, even if we behave with the best intentions toward one another, we weigh the possibilities for humiliation (or worse) and consider the risk “rent to the ideal.”

‘It’s better to be fooled than to be suspicious’—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence-trick is the work of the devil. (E. M. Forster again.)

Yet online the relationship between individuals is somehow still more innocent. Is it because the internet is still a frontier place? What will happen when there are suddenly sets of explicit rules for interacting with our peers? What will happen when the corporate drunk drivers take advantage of the generosity of individuals to swerve all over us? (Drugstore.com, give me one good reason why I should do unpaid work writing product reviews for you? I’ll do it if I damn well please. Stop harassing me.) Corporations are increasingly functioning in very personal spaces. No collective entity that exists to earn money, no matter how careful, can have the sensitivity of an individual to the nuances of these fluid, invisible agreements. Mostly they don’t even try, or worse– assume the rules simply don’t apply to them. Will we get burnt out and defensive? How long have we got? And what can we get done in the meantime?