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.
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