Larry Lessig delivered a 60-minute lecture with the title “Coding Against Corruption” at this year’s ETech conference in that inimitable Lessig style — terse, punchy wording punctuated by rapid flips between one- to two-word slides. As you’ve probably heard, Lessig has switched gears from copyright to corruption — a significant escalation.
While Lessig did a fantastic job of drawing the audience to the inevitable necessity of making a serious effort to reform Congress, the Change Congress movement itself is pretty simple. Loosely, the campaign will challenge candidates for office to brand themselves with Change Congress badges on the basis of which three reforms they support, specifically:
- refusing money from lobbyists or political action committees (PACs)
- abolishing earmarks
- endorsing public financing for campaigns
Simply, it’s a campaign to unite disparate reform movements through common branding, and it’s simple enough to get some traction.
But Lessig also mentioned some things that I hadn’t heard before — a piece of the puzzle he described as additional “layers”. The branding is the first layer, which is to be supported by a second “carrot” layer and a third “stick” layer.
The carrot is conventional enough — a pledge of funds for candidates that take up one, two, or all reforms as part of their campaign.
The stick, however, is a bit more unconventional and interesting. People have rightfully challenged the Change Congress badge idea at the outset — why would a campaign pay any attention to these badges and/or why would anyone pay attention to whether or not the candidate is badged? Lessig posits that people should “escalate the cost of running without a badge” by running themselves. When candidates ignore the campaign and avoid taking positions on those reforms, regular citizens can and should run as single-issue candidates, bringing the issue to the surface.
It’s interesting and hard to pooh-pooh, frankly, because of technology. One observation is that small communities really are engaging in a broader discourse through blogging, tagging, and commenting; another is that local media are paying more attention “downward” to their readers and local constituents because they provide valuable resources in the form of news leads, online comments and flamewars, and pageviews. Imagine housewives, programmers, sysadmins, grandpas, high school kids, having some baked-in media juice (and maybe even some money) thanks to a national “Change Congress” campaign…? It doesn’t seem that far-fetched and most of all — it sounds pretty fun.
Stay tuned — I’ll try to update with audio and/or video when it’s posted.
tech activist, nerd, gamer