Lawrence Lessig: … just over a year ago I reported that I was shifting my academic (and activist) work from free culture related issues to (what I called) “corruption.” At Stanford, a year ago, I outlined what this work would be: To focus on the many institutions in public life that depend upon trust to succeed, but which are jeopardizing that trust through an improper dependence on money.
While this is certainly an admirable project—and I have some idea that Larry Lessig is a saint to the web—this statement is baffling to anyone who lives in the real world. Who has kept their eyes open for a decade or two, or three or four. It is possible to be totally hopeful and also know the structure of this society for what it is: totally corrupted, totally corruptible.
Or is this some kind of academic-speak. Those parenthesis and the quote marks make me intensely uncomfortable.
“Improper dependency on money.” In the larger sense, an intelligent person thinks about little else, working to emotionally balance what it is to live in a capitalist system—fully exploiting, entirely complicit to its own violation of human rights, and above all, silent.
Where, silently, them that has, gets. And gets and gets.
… think of medical researchers receiving money from drug companies whose drugs they review; legal academics receiving money to provide public policy advice from the very institutions affected by that advice; or Congress filled with Members focused obsessively on how to raise money to secure their (or their party’s) tenure. In all these cases, dependency on money in these ways tends to weaken public trust. Or so was my hypothesis when I launched on this project.
There’s not a god damn thing hypothetical about it. As I say, I don’t really know the man. But this sounds staggeringly naive—or like the words of a limousine liberal. You know. Someone whose feet never touch the dirty, shitty, earthy, gorgeous ground.
