Electronic contracts and cloud computing

The maxim that 'information is power' is relevant now more than ever. Until recently, most information was scattered, disorganized and awkward to find then acquire. Google was one of the first to realize how digital technology changed that by encoding information as 1s and 0s. Google's corporate mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. The relations between Google, Facebook and other social spheres on the internet emphasize their 'relative autonomy.' The intuition behind the 'relative autonomy' formula is that they are neither wholly independent of, nor entirely reducible to, political, legal, economic and other social processes. This article examines the relation between Google, Facebook and other social spheres. The theory examined will be Niklas Luhmann's theory of 'autopoiesis.' This article presents autopoietic theory with particular attention to the way in which Luhmann reformulates the 'relative autonomy' problem. Throughout, the article focuses on the connections between autopoietic theory and issues of Google, Facebook and contemporary legal theory.