Monday, July 14, 2008

Lawrence Lessigs new project

Soooo Lawrence Lessig has done some things that I admire, mostly having to do with taking IP law in a good direction. He's starting a new project called Change Congress, basically to fight the implicit corruption that (arguably) exists in Congress today.

I think I'm going to sign the pledge he has up, why? First of all I think the way Congress conducts politics is pretty fucked right now. I won't make all the arguments about why I think it's fucked (Mr. Lessig actually makes them pretty well in this long lecture) but suffice it to say that I agree with him. The question I have ask myself is why is it worth to sign onto the pledge, I mean it's tiny operation that is highly likely to fail. Two reasons:

1. Mr Lessig has accomplished quite a bit and I'm not willing to say this has a 100% chance of failure.
2. This is related to the kind of open-source politics that I believe, why? Simply it has a very high RIO for us as citizens. As Mr. Lessig says in his lecture I can spend 20mins at home in my underwear and potentially change the way politics is conducted. The key is that I'm connecting myself. If I've understood anything about innovation generation is that connections matter. You lose the potential to influence a process when you disconnect yourself from it. This is a tiny way of connecting myself to something much larger but I'll take it, because the RIO is so high.

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