Geeklawyer attended the, sur­pris­ingly and very dis­ap­point­ingly lightly attended, SCL annual lec­ture at the IET on Wednes­day to hear Pro­fes­sor Lawrence Lessig’s thought­ful Cor­rup­tion 2.0 talk. That very light atten­dance bore an omi­nous por­tent for his theme, to which GL shall return shortly.

As an aside Geeklawyer really would rec­om­mend every­one, IT/IP/whatever lawyer or geek regard­less, putting the SCL on their RSS feed to spot com­ing talks. He has never yet been to one that sucks; at least other than the one he was invited to speak at last year & even that only sucked for his part (yes, don’t you hate false mod­esty?) And Geeklawyer was charmed by Pan­gloss’ blog post:

“… any oppor­tu­nity to see Our Great­est Liv­ing Fore­head per­form … is too good to miss. Most of London’s IT law roy­alty seem to have agreed, as they were out in force, with every­one to gos­sip to from Richard Susskind to Chris Reed to blog king Geeklawyer …”

(in descend­ing order obv., but nonethe­less con­firm­ing Geeklawyer’s view of Pro­fes­sor Lil­ian Edwards as hav­ing unques­tion­able judge­ment.) Com­ments on the UK blaw­gos­phere (sorry) so far have been some­what mixed. Alex New­son seemed under­whelmed over­all. He is from up North and, so far as Geeklawyer knows, didn’t go to a uni­ver­sity in the South but nonethe­less his view is to be respected with that qual­i­fi­ca­tion in mind.

Young Alex (who is cur­rently learn­ing to shave, so cal­low is his youth) took the view that Larry was likely to repeat the mis­take of naivete. Well, good­ness: a world with­out ide­al­ism would be a bleak place indeed; one whose ten­ancy was pos­sessed (in com­mon per­haps?) by your author, Alex and polit­i­cal lob­by­ists. The ben­e­fit of ivory tower aca­d­e­mics is that while we lawyer grunts snuf­fle in the trough, they say what it ought to be like; charm­ing and moti­va­tional. Alex’s the­sis is that Lessig failed through an, admit­ted, obses­sion with aca­d­e­mic rigour rather than tac­ti­cal effec­tive­ness. He says:

” A friend who attended the Lec­ture over­heard another audi­ence mem­ber com­ment: “It’s all very well, but doesn’t Larry realise that the world just doesn’t *work* like that?” ”

One sus­pects that he does, very much, realise that. Geeklawyer does not agree with Alex that these approaches are mutu­ally and inevitably exclu­sive. The idea that cor­rup­tion is so endemic and embed­ded as to be inca­pable of effec­tive and non-token chal­lenge is abhor­rent to all democrats

To argue, as does Alex, that one needs to pro­mote the idea of ‘Free­dom’ rather than anti-corruption is to argue that eat­ing hot curry is bet­ter than watch­ing the Simp­sons: there is no com­par­i­son, they have noth­ing in common.

Lessig did exhort geeks (and seemed to hint also at activist IP/IT lawyers? :) ) to take up the baton to com­bat cor­rup­tion. Cor­rup­tion here being of the good old fash­ion lob­by­ist advice that when decid­ing pol­icy one should “go green”: not green as in ecol­ogy, but green as in the colour of the dol­lar that might land in some politician’s bank account.

Lil­ian Edwards’ arti­cle rather sadly res­onated with Geeklawyer’s real world expe­ri­ence that Geeks pre­fer to huff and puff than act. In part this from inex­pe­ri­ence. Most geeks deal with binary deci­sions: “if ($thing) then do {$oth­erthing} else {$oth­erthing}”, fuzzy ‘sort of’ deci­sions they don’t do so well. But, in fact, that is not any longer utterly true: the Open Rights Group takes it’s base sup­port from clued up geeks and many are pre­pared to par­tic­i­pate in pol­i­tics via, e.g., any one of Tom Steinberg’s bil­lion MySo­ci­ety sites such as “Write to Them” or Harry Met­calfe’s “Tell Them What you Think”.

Nonethe­less, Lilian’s point is well made and Geeklawyer strug­gled some­what to imag­ine what it was that would make geeks do rather than talk. Per­haps it is unfair to sin­gle geeks out since many polit­i­cal activists bemoan the lethargy of the Low­ing Herd. Per­haps geeks need to become more effec­tive at adopt­ing the tools needed to inform politi­cians to abro­gate the malign influ­ence of ‘green(back)’ lob­by­ists. It is a cul­tural change and Geeklawyer doesn’t think that the Asperger ten­den­cies of geeks pre­vents them from engag­ing with the process, indeed per­haps exactly the oppo­site; but they just seem to know the need, and how to pull the levers.

Other than that the prob­lem seems to be the gen­eral one of engag­ing the pop­u­lous with the issues that affect them, not an easy issue. Lessig may be fac­ing a more for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge in this than he did with the Eldred case.

Of course, the dour Calvin­ist abstemious Geeklawyer is not all about earnest debate and high minded dis­course. After the Talk he was per­suaded and deceived by the cor­rupt debase and amoral Mar­tin Kee­gan to attend the Cel­lar­Door (a con­verted toi­let appar­ently) in the Strand. In this vile den of iniq­uity he was unwill­ingly coerced into con­sum­ing a sig­nif­i­cant quan­tity of cock­tails such that he became a tad intox­i­cated. Oh the shame.

Above all you must under­stand that Geeklawyer has not given a pos­i­tive review of Lessig merely because he signed Geeklawyer’s copy of “the Future of Ideas” which you should buy rather than engage in any of that silly com­mu­nist Cre­ative Com­mons down­load­ing tosh.