Wednesday 2 March 2011
Saturday 6 March 2010
This is a profound denial. The gambling on Wall Street was not caused by the equivalent of errors in arithmetic. It was caused by a corruption of the system by which we regulate those markets. No true theorist of free markets — and certainly none of the heroes of even the libertarian right — believe that infrastructure markets like financial systems can be left free of any regulation, including the regulation of rules against fraud. Yet that ignorant anarchy was the precise rule that governed a large part of our financial system. And not by accident: An enormous amount of political influence was brought to bear on the regulators of these core institutions of a free market to get them to turn a blind eye to Wall Street’s “innovations.” People who should have known better yielded to this political pressure. Smart people did stupid things because “the politics” of doing right was impossible. Why? Why was their no political return from sensible policy? The answer is so obvious that one feels stupid to even remark it. Politicians are addicts. Their dependency is campaign cash. And in their obsessive search for campaign funds, they let these funders convince them that for the first time in capitalism’s history, markets didn’t need the basic array of trust-producing regulation. They believed this insanity because it made it easier for them — in good faith — to accept the money and steer financial policy over the cliff. Lawrence Lessig ☀
Friday 5 February 2010
At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress. Not financially bankrupt, at least not yet, but politically bankrupt. Bush v. Gore notwithstanding, Americans’ faith in the Supreme Court remains extraordinarily high—76 percent have a fair or great deal of “trust and confidence” in the Court. Their faith in the presidency is also high—61 percent. But consistently and increasingly over the past decade, faith in Congress has collapsed—slowly, and then all at once. Today it is at a record low. Just 45 percent of Americans have “trust and confidence” in Congress; just 25 percent approve of how Congress is handling its job. A higher percentage of Americans likely supported the British Crown at the time of the Revolution than support our Congress today. The source of America’s cynicism is not hard to find. Americans despise the inauthentic. Gregory House, of the eponymous TV medical drama, is a hero not because he is nice (he isn’t) but because he is true. Tiger Woods is a disappointment not because he is evil (he isn’t) but because he proved false. We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity. And this is because most believe our Congress is a simple pretense. That rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution “dependent on the People,” the institution has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The US Congress has become the Fundraising Congress. And it answers—as Republican and Democratic presidents alike have discovered—not to the People, and not even to the president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests that fund the key races that determine which party will be in power. Lawrence Lessig ☀
Wednesday 27 January 2010
We need to trust our democracy. We need to believe that its representatives are guided if not by truth, then at least by what their constituents want. Our Framers gave us a Republic in which the government was to be “dependent,” as the Federalist Papers put it, “upon the People.” They were obsessed with assuring that the government be independent of anything else. But the vast majority of Americans do not believe that their government is “dependent upon the People.” The vast majority believes the government is dependent upon money. Most believe “money buys results in Congress.” Most therefore doubt the integrity of this the most important democratic institution established by our Framers. This is a corruption — a corruption of the very institution of our democracy. And this corruption makes it harder for both Reagan Republicans and Progressive Democrats to achieve the substantive ends that each seeks. For 20 out of the last 29 years, we’ve had conservative Republican Presidents. But Reagan Republicans have yet to see the size of government shrink, or the tax code simplified — because Congress has no interest in smaller government or simpler taxes, since both would make it harder to raise campaign funds. Likewise, despite the election of Barack Obama with a super-majority Democratic Congress, Progressive Democrats have watched with disgust as every substantive reform of this administration has been stymied by special interests expert in preserving the status quo. Lawrence Lessig ☀
Sunday 19 July 2009
This rhetoric of liberation has led many a talented and idealistic young person to believe that coding, especially for free, is a political statement. In the guise of an anti-establishment, scrappy, can-do underdog attitude, LL [Lawrence Lessig], KK [Kevin Kelly] and their colleagues have created an environment in which well-intentioned people really believe that the commercialization of friendship by Facebook is a democratizing force, that it’s progressive for technology entrepreneurs to make billions from the work of artists who get nothing, and that posting book reviews on Amazon and movie reviews on Amazon-owned IMDB is contributing to a public good. In which otherwise intelligent people believe that Google and Twitter are somehow morally different from Microsoft and Wal-Mart because their employees are younger and because they use phrases like “radical transparency” without living up to them. Some of those young people have created great things. Others have been suckered into digital sharecropping efforts believing that they are doing something worthwhile, painting a fence for some Tom Sawyer with a venture capitalist behind him who makes a mint off their efforts. And others have become those rich young men (almost always men) with their private jets. Whimsley ☀
Friday 29 May 2009
It is a fact that in America the term “socialism” is a smear. I’m not defending that fact. I wouldn’t give up defending programs merely because they could be so smeared. But I do think that now is not the time to engage in a playful redefinition of a term that has such a distinctive and clear sense. Whatever “socialism” could have become, had it not been hijacked by revolutions in the east, what it is in the minds of 95% of America is not what Wikipedia is. And indeed, when I look around at the real socialism of the past decade, I am almost Declan-esque in my revulsion towards it: America has plenty of “socialism.” The most recent versions we should all be very skeptical of. This is the general practice of socializing risk, and privatizing benefits. I’d be happy to join the “anti-socialist” movement if we could agree to end that perversion first. But that deal notwithstanding, I will never agree to call what millions have voluntarily created on the Net “socialism.” That term insults the creators, and confuses the rest. Lessig ☀
Wednesday 20 May 2009
Tuesday 19 May 2009
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Thomas Jefferson ☀
Friday 15 May 2009
Who are your tech heroes? ☀
Dave Winer wrote:
Here’s how to decide:
1. Someone who has made largely selfless contributions to open technology — i.e. tech that people can reuse without limits or fees. Examples would be BitTorrent or HTTP.
2. Someone who you think would “do the right thing” whatever that is, most of the time. That is, someone you trust.
3. Other criteria?
My short list:
- Tim Berners Lee - creator of the world wide web, could have sold out and become a king, but motivated solely by a vision of connecting computer users
- Richard Stallman - the original free software hippie, creator of the C compiler and Emacs editor, required tools needed before any hacker could create a free operating system
- Linus Torvalds - creator of Linux, the OS that powers much of the common folk internet experience today
- Vint Cerf - along with Bob Kahn, created the TCP/IP (communications protocol that enables the internet) protocol that is taken for granted (or derided as archaic), but was revolutionary at its inception, in defiance of corporate powers like IBM, MCI, AT&T that were more interested in thwarting open efforts in lieu of their own proprietary solutions
- Yukihiro Matsumoto - creator of the Ruby programming language
- Philip Greenspun - now a smug, snotty internet millionaire, but his “Guide to Web Publishing” (published 10+ years ago) was instrumental in my transformation from mainframe programmer to web developer
- Lawrence Lessig - a legal champion for F/OSS, and an activist for free and open in all digital realms, now his focus is on reducing government corruption
- Larry Wall - creator of Perl
- Rasmus Lerdorf - creator of PHP
- Brian Kernighan & Dennis Ritchie - authors of the seminal “The C Programming Language” that 30+ years later, still serves as the ideal model of a programming language guide
- J.C.R. Licklider - psychologist, ARPA head, who envisioned modern computing and the World Wide Web way back in the 1960s
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Friday 1 May 2009
Tuesday 9 September 2008
Saturday 14 June 2008
What I mean by “the Kozinski mess” is the total inability of the media — including we, the media, bloggers — to get the basic facts right, and keep the reality in perspective. The real story here is how easily we let such a baseless smear travel - and our need is for a better developed immunity (in the sense of immunity from a virus) from this sort of garbage. Lessig ☀
Monday 15 October 2007
Lessig on “corruption”
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