Hu Ling 胡凌 著 

Beijing: Peking University Press, 2024.

Reviewed by: Nishant Dilip Sharma (PhD Candidate, O.P. Jindal Global University) 

Twenty-five years after Lawrence Lessig taught lawyers that code is law, Hu Ling’s Digital Architecture and Law (数字架构与法律) asks who code is law for. To answer that question, Hu moves beyond Lessig’s liberal constitutionalist framework, which focuses on the rights of citizens. Adopting a historical materialist lens, Hu focuses on the tech giants that own the infrastructure, demonstrating how they enclose users in a digital feudal economy where labor and data are appropriated by platform monopolies in pursuit of dominance and capital accumulation. To conceptualize this, Hu introduces the paradigm of “Architecture 2.0.” While framing Lessig’s vision of code as social control as the first iteration, Hu argues that architecture itself now operates as a mode of production designed to extract economic value. 

To substantiate this thesis, Hu structures the book’s fifteen chapters across three evolutionary stages of digital capitalism. Part I lays the historical foundation, arguing that China’s tech giants achieved their scale through an “illicit rise” (feifa xingqi) where corporates accumulated data through questionable means. Hu argues that in this phase these “architectural enterprises” (jiagou xing qiye) indulged in “primitive accumulation” and subsequently successfully lobbied the legal system to ratify their newly forged empires. With the foundation set, Part II focuses on the technical infrastructure, dissecting how this power is maintained at the user level. Hu meticulously breaks down the four core elements constituting the production mechanism of this architecture, namely: accounts, data pools, algorithms, and scoring systems. Analyzing these four elements together, Hu reveals how they seamlessly fuse Foucauldian behavioral discipline with Marxist surplus extraction. In his framework, nudging a user’s conduct is not just about social control but also the primary mechanism for generating profit. In Part III, Hu projects these micro-mechanisms into the macro-trajectory of the internet, exploring the inevitable consequence of digital capital accumulation, which he frames as a “digital enclosure” (shuzi quandi yundong). It is within these digital fiefdoms, Hu claims, that tech monopolies enclose users in a digital feudal economy, severely limiting individual autonomy. 

While to a Western audience, the solution of antitrust laws seems natural and an obvious fix, Hu lays out an elaborate critique arguing that such laws are structurally ill-equipped to dismantle the “walled gardens” of the modern internet. Citing the well-known Tencent-Qihoo “3Q War,” Hu makes the case that courts repeatedly struggle to calculate market dominance in cyberspace, and end up utilizing antitrust logic to protect corporate property and validate platform expansion. The solution that Hu offers is “interconnection” (hulian hutong), with government intervention. 

Hu proposes this intervention in the form of a state-provided, unified digital identity that would break open the corporate walled gardens and ensure factor mobility. Through this proposal and the Architecture 2.0 framework, Hu attempts to balance both the economic and social-control functions of the digital infrastructure. By giving the state custody of the foundational identity layer, Hu casts the state as the guarantor of factor mobility. In fact, in his account, the state not only acts as the arbiter but also adopts the very architecture it regulates, evolving into a “platform-type state” (pingtai xing guojia) that pools data to strengthen the center and remakes the country into a single, tiered administrative platform. 

From a standard Western liberal standpoint, objections would emerge both immediately and emphatically, arguing against a state that is also a sovereign panopticon in the digital space. Such concerns, coming from a long lineage of scholarship such as Bentham’s panopticon, Foucault’s disciplinary society, and David Lyon’s surveillance-studies tradition, are already anticipated by Hu, who argues that states have now moved away from “severe ex-post punishment” (shihou yanli de chengfa) and now actively favor “ex-ante prevention” (shixian yufang), setting the pretext for a larger intervention. This, and the Chinese context, wherein “tyranny of the state” is, arguably, a less salient frame than the security the state furnishes, allows for such state intervention, which in any case rests closer to absolute than obsolete. 

However, even from within Hu’s own historical materialism, the justification for the state’s increased intervention falls short of addressing the projected problems it aims to resolve. The promise that a unified digital identity would free trapped data and resources rests on a very particular character of the state’s apparatus. It would hold only of a state devoid of its own vested interests, which, as Hu acknowledges, it is not. As the primary sovereign, it is more likely to prioritize political legitimacy and security over macroeconomic flow. Even when Hu argues that economic value and social control are deeply enmeshed, the unified digital identity does not liberate the fief but becomes the purest version of it. In this pure form, it places the sovereign’s own architecture beyond the charge it levels at capital and assumes that while capital extracts value, only the state can keep order. Yet, that distinction wanes in the very years Hu surveys: China designated data a factor of production in 2020 and, under the 2022 “Data Twenty Measures,” built tradable property rights around it. As the state itself becomes the valorizer of the same data, which the framework reserves for capital forces, the character of the sovereign begets greater scrutiny and thought. 

At a more fundamental level, it is also important not to discount the very actor the framework is designed to protect. The workers who form a major cog in the digital economy exercise notable agency as they navigate these corporate fiefdoms to earn their living, and plausibly keep the very corporates in check. In a remarkably well-thought-out critique, the book does not fail to see the state, but as it descends down the digital architecture to serve the foundation, it stops short of climbing it through the agency of the class it seeks to protect. 

None of this diminishes the book. The curiosity and debate it invites are a tribute to its serious and novel engagement with the subject matter. By welding Lessig to Marx and Foucault, Hu has produced something rare: a theory of the platform as a mode of production that simultaneously is a theory of the law sustaining it, and is among the most fully realized accounts of its kind in the Chinese-language scholarship and an original contribution well past it. Digital Architecture and Law is not a book to be agreed with or waved away, but one to be argued with, and it will set the terms of that argument for years to come.