My thought is this: Does it make sense in such analogies to include a fifth factor beyond market, architecture, law, and social norms? That fifth would be something along the lines of “nature” or “physics.” In other words, while both are big factors in the way people behave in a built environment, there seems to be a big difference between the placement of walls on the one hand, and gravity on the other, which we appreciate in physical spaces, but not in online ones.

Or, to use a different example, look at energy-saving lightbulbs or Energy Star appliances. They do the same job as their less environmentally friendly counterparts. If I’m moving about in a building that employs them, it makes no direct difference in the way I behave. Collectively, though, such things have a big impact on the environment we live in, and things like the cost of energy. Because of this, those small, imperceptible differences in the physics of the built environment do have a sizable impact on our behavior indirectly, and they change the ecology of other traditional Lessig factors, like market, for instance.

I imagine there’s an analog for this division between code and nature in the digital world, having to do with things like the speed of computers, the efficiency of software code, the aggregate, indirect effects of Google’s code choices, and so on. But I’ve yet to fully think it through.