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, information addict, game dork
not trying to hate on the dude, but it always seems to me like he’s just starting to grow up politically. he’s a mental giant, supposedly, but politically, he’s just getting started.
but it’s actually much worse than that, because now the Great Satan is not copyright or whatever, it’s ‘corruption’. so, he’ll spend the next ten years battling and trying to catch up with ‘corruption’, and maybe he’ll be able to make some progress. And then?
And then he’ll find something just a bit more worthwhile, a bit more relevant, a bit more meaningful. It’ll be another baby step – some incremental bourgeoisie ‘safe’ step that people will consider ‘respectable’.
And then ten years later still he’ll start to realize, like all other would-be do-gooders before him, that ‘the system is broken’.
How about being different?
How about read some books that you’re not supposed to read? Leave the comfy confines of Stanford for 3 seconds so he can get a taste of what ‘democracy’ actually looks like. Look at independent analyses of U.S. domestic and foreign policy from home and abroad so he can reprogram his brain such that he can start thinking independently again. Put down ‘The World is Flat’ and pick up Stiglitz. Shoot – pick up anything but what he’s apparently been confined to reading for the past fifty years.
Those ’3 steps’ are so ambiguous, so water-down, so tame and uninteresting that they are almost completely worthless.
It’s a shame. The dude’s got too many yes men surrounding him. He could do so much more. He could be so much more.