Just neat

An interesting article from Slate on how lockbreaking is becoming a sport/hobby through internet communications. Check it out

I try not to advocate giving money willy-nilly but...

This guy made me laugh with his cartoons about his run for office in Kansas (via BoingBoing). I may not give the $8.34 he's asking for but I might give something.

Update: Grrr.... it looks like all the boingboing visitors crashed his site

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.

Obama responds to protesters on his site

I was really interested to see how Obama would deal with this situation. Now I have the answer.

One of the (many) long term trends I follow is the development of citizen governance (or "open-source politics") as described in the recent works of John Varley (Rolling Thunder). I think it's a really interesting idea and might be one of the ways we, as a civilization, move toward sustainability. That is, in fact, one of the reasons I support Obama, I think his principles mesh well with open-source politics (or at least better than many other candidates) so I was really looking for how he would handle this situation. A more conventional politician would have ignored it, or maybe given in/pandered. Obama has incorporated the protest into his dialog with voters. To me that says that he listened to it which is very interesting.

Also consider the political economics of the situation. A small group of ordinary people, with no money, and no more organization than a facebook group, intentionally generated national media coverage and a response from a national politician, just by protesting on his website. One of things that seems radical about that to me is how low the ROI was for the online group. Yes tiny groups of lobbyists can get good ROI but that's an oversimplification of lobbyists as we know them. It takes a great deal of person-hours to become an effective lobbyist. There's an institution behind the kind of lobbying that goes on in K Street. On a fundamental level, I would argue, this incident seems like a more efficient way of conducting politics, and that is really what open-source governance is about; increasing the productivity and efficiency of how politics is conducted.