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Lessig @ OSCON
passthecrackpipe writes "Leonard Lin has put up the presentation Lawrence Lessig gave at OSCON (mirror). It is great. It requires Flash." Nice Flash work, very impressive, and of course Lessig is a superior speaker. Worth your time and the 8Mb download.
What have you done?
.1% of the 1.x billion-person market) on the Slashdot masses, we should be able to buy us some politicians too!
I just sent EFF $100. If we invoke "Chinese arithmetic" (anyone who's looked at a business plan involving China knows what I'm talking about- "if we could just capture
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
I really liked when he asked the audience.... (approximately): "who's donated to EFF?" "Ok, who has given as much money to EFF this year as they gave the cable monopolies for shitty bandwidth?"
I thought that was an awesome way to measure it. As far as I'm concerned, my bandwidth bill just doubled... any amount I spend on that, I'll match in donations to EFF.
Bandwidth means little without the freedom to use it.
I think it's a great idea, which is why I'm bringing it up again. Lobbying congress and educating them on these matters just isn't going to work. Politicians aren't passing things like the DMCA because they're ignorant -- they are doing it because they are bad politicians. After failing to do the right thing over and over, we can't give them the benefit of the doubt anymore. We can't reform corporate shills, but maybe we can replace them.
Instead of pleading with them to do the right thing, we need to at least try to make them do the right thing. In a case when it's hard to identify the good politician -- especially the good and effective politician -- it's a lot easier to identify the bad guy. There's lots of politicians that aren't standing up for the public's rights. But there's only a few that are standing up to actively take those rights away. We should focus on them.
When we do, we can run online ads, radio ads, and grassroot ads, anything to try to defeat this person. It doesn't have to be that expensive. We play the negative game -- it doesn't matter who the opponent is, this is a question of symbolism, of asserting our power. Because if we can cost that one politician the election, that will really mean something. Sure, there'll be more to step up in his place, but maybe we can get them out too -- do it a couple times, and people will be afraid to be the corporate media lacky.
And yeah, that's not the nicest political game. It's classic "special interest" tactics. But shit... if politics was so nice, we wouldn't be having these problems. And we're not doing this to get ourselves subsidies or for other selfish reasons (mostly) -- we're doing it for the public. And there's nothing wrong with negative politics -- that's how this country has worked since the beginning.
Unlike all the other techniques -- that dream of the day when there's massive participation -- this doesn't seem that remote. I bet $50,000 and a lot of volunteer manpower could could counter $500,000 in campaign finances, if the target was right and the manpower clever.