Larry Lessig v. Jonathan Zittrain

law.stanford.edu

2 points·andrewfong··5 comments

The topic is almost irrelevant. Anyone in the area who has even a passing interest in the intersection of the internet and society should go see this, if only to hear Zittrain. The guy is a really gifted orator with wit and delivery that could rival Alan Shore's. The debate won't be boring.

What is the topic of this talk? I don't see anything on any of the sites involved, or Zittrain or Lessig's blog.

Lessig is a bit of a mystery to me. The obvious solution to corruption is lessening the power of the government. There is no way to remove incentive to steal when the money is so abundant.

It's like it's not even on his radar.

I am sympathetic to your point -- power corrupts, therefore let us limit the amount of power -- but it's stil not the whole story. Because corruption itself produces power imbalances.

By corruption, Lessig does not mean simple bribery. He means the corruption of institutional purpose.

An example would be how current American governments engage in gerrymandering with impunity, and are placing reliable partisans in positions where they would be judging the validity of elections. There isn't really any imaginable government that doesn't control the electoral process in this way, so limiting the power of government isn't the answer.

Limiting the power of government would reduce the power of the office, and reduce the incentive to cheat to get into office.

And I didn't just mean bribery when talking about poor incentives of moneyed interests.

My complaint is that he is trying to solve some fundamental issues with obvious solutions to a subset of the problems.

His work is like searching for the roots of aging to extend life span when the patient has a gaping knife wound in the back.

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