Change Congress
I am very much motivated by the backbone of Lawrence Lessig’s book Code. I am excited by the thought he introduces, which before hadn’t crossed my mind in a fundamental way, that is how architecture (and in his specific purpose code) determines behavior. I am particularly excited about the last chapter, which talks about the corruption of government. He describes the problem as the “world” not the legislators. This seems at first a contradiction. Of course it is the lawmakers who are bending to the lobbyist. If only we could get them out of office, then our government would be fixed. From Lessig’s point of view, this is a skewed way of thinking. It is skewed because it comes at it from the perspective that these people are evil. Evil might be too harsh a word, but at the very least people who do not have the best interest of their constituents at heart. Lessig’s view in this book and the focus of his recent work is compelling, because it starts from the perspective that these people are not evil, but rather influenced (more and more it seems) by the world, more specifically the legislative system. A system which is influenced unfairly by the distribution of money. I mentioned Lessig’s new work, which has shifted from Free Culture and intellectual property to this idea of corruption. This youtube video is one of the first public comments Lessig has made on the topic. As always (for fans of Lessig talks) the presentation is very approachable.
The reason I think this is important goes back to the idea of code. It seems interesting to me that the more I understand how code (architecture) of the net defines the behaviors that are available, the more I am able to apply these ways of thinking to physical bounded spaces. That isn’t to say this thinking is revolutionary, and that people haven’t thought about code and physical space. But I think the net allows us to change these spaces through code and experiment with the results. I am reminded by the comments of Will Wright who describes his games (Sims, Sim City, Spore, etc…) as games that allow experimentation of new worlds. In the same way maybe that Star Trek allowed writers to imagine what alien worlds might be like, and thus what might be possible in our own world. The net is doing that for more people arguably in a more significant way. Allowing us as individuals to imagine different worlds in a variety of contexts, whether for play (Sims) or slightly more serious (maybe) with Sim City. The point of all this is maybe it will encourage us to challenge both synthetic as well as physical spaces in ways we did not previously imagine we had the power to do. In the end the onus is on ourselves. I am reminded of the phrase I was told very often as a young computer user complaining about how the computer did something (delete my homework for example). 99% of computer problems are user error. Indeed.
Writer,
ouvyt
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