Communication Ethics book part for A Thousand Cuts. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

So why did I bother enumerating all the properties of expressions, such as locality and encapsulation, and going to such effort to show how the expression model works? To show how each and every one of them is broken by modern communication.

Digital expressions enable many more relationships between expressions. While conventional law might be modified to take one or two of these into account, I think you'll agree that when all is said and done, there is a qualitative difference between static and dynamic expressions, just as there is a qualitative difference between dead and living matter. Trying to patch the concepts and thus the law is a lost cause.