Joi: Hi, I'm Joi Ito.
I am the director of the MIT Media Lab,
and welcome to the first Media Lab conversations.
It's a sort of talk, conversation series
that we're gonna be running at the Media Lab.
Jenny's running the program.
And thanks for everybody else who's helped
pull this together.
This is live streaming on Twitter,
and so people, if you can retweet the feed,
we can try to get more people to watch
because we're gonna be also soliciting questions
to have come up at the conversation part of the talk.
But today, we're gonna be having Lawrence Lessig,
who I will call Larry from now on,
give a talk and then I'll come up on stage
and we'll discuss and bring questions in.
Larry's official title is director
of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center
for Ethics at Harvard University
and a professor of law at Harvard Law School.
But, and you can read his whole illustrious history
online in Wikipedia.
I'll just highlight a couple of things
that I think are his key contributions.
For me, I first remember Code,
which was a very important book,
because this was Larry's book where he describes
writing software and code as being
very much like writing law,
because, and you can correct me later if you want,
if I do this wrong, because just like law,
code can enable or prevent you from doing things,
and that software architecture was like politics.
And Larry tells a story where a software engineer
comes up and says, I don't wanna be political.
I think Larry said something like tough noogies,
something like that, but the idea of kind of
putting together this notion of code and law
was a really important contribution from that book.
Later, Larry argues the Sonny Bono Act in the Supreme Court,
which is really the Mickey Mouse Term Extension Act,
and as a sort of product of that,
he co-founds Creative Commons, which was working
on the copyright issue.
And again, you can read a lot about that online.
And so Larry focused on copyright for many years,
co-founding and heading Creative Commons.
And then, recently, he's been focused on corruption,
which he'll be talking about today.
I met Larry, I think, in 2002, when Larry was in Japan.
Because I was very focused on corruption
and trying to fix the Japanese government,
and Larry being a constitutional law professor,
and Japan having inherited our constitution
from the Americans, I was trying to explain to Larry
how important corruption was, and fixing government was,
but Larry said, no, no, no, this copyright thing
is really important, you have to join our board.
And so I joined the copyright movement,
and joined the Creative Commons board,
and then Larry goes, you know, I'm gonna work on corruption.
Can you stay here and work on copyright?
And so then I ran Creative Commons for a while.
And so now I'm the chair of Creative Commons,
and Larry's happily is still on the board.
But anyway, I'm not gonna keep talking.
I'm gonna let Larry come up and give one
of his fabulous talks, and so people, think about questions.
Feel free to tweet them, and we'll be trying
to collect them for the conversation later, thanks.
(audience applause)
Larry: Thanks, Joi.
It's wonderful to be here.
In a certain sense, it's kind of
an embarrassment to be here.
In an ideal world, it would be absurd
for you to sit in an audience and listen to me.
Because what's happening here, what's happening
in places like this all around the world,
is some of the most important, innovative,
creative, technological advanced ideas that there are.
And it's absurd that you should take time away
from that project to listen to stories
about government and corruption and politics.
It's absurd, but necessary.
Because the thing I wanna try to do today
is to recruit you to look up from the machines
for a minute to recognize how absolutely critical it is
that people like you pay attention
and help contribute to the solution of this
extraordinarily important problem.
I was saying in an earlier meeting,
if societies every hundred years or so
find themselves in positions like this,
think about Europe at the beginning of the last century,
where geniuses were working on things like relativity,
and all of a sudden found themselves forced
to think about the problems of fascism,
or the rise of nationalism.
And that disturbed them from their pure and important work.
And they hated being disturbed.
But they had to look up and focus on those questions.
And I think we're at a similar point now in America
with our government.
And I wanna tell a story that I hope brings you
to a place that you, too, will look up.
So the story begins with two texts, framing texts.
The first, "there are a thousand hacking at the branches
of evil," Henry David Thoreau, 1846, On Walden.
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil
"to one who is striking at the root."
Let's call that one a root striker.
That's the first text.
Here's the second.
This little snippet, barely visible here,
that says, "any king, prince, or foreign state."
That snippet was penned in 1787
in the Constitutional Convention in the Constitution,
Article one, section nine, says,
"And no person holding any office of profit
"or trust under them shall, without the consent of Congress,
"accept any present, emoluments, office,
"or title of any kind whatever
"from any king, prince, or foreign state."
Now this clause was inspired, it turns out,
by Ben Franklin, who in 1784 was the minister in France,
and received as a gift from Louis XVI a small snuff box
with diamonds encrusted circling a portrait of Louis XVI.
Turned out that others before had done the same thing.
Arthur Lee, when he was the minister in France
had done the same thing, and members in Congress
began to have a fear that our government officials
would develop a certain kind of dependency,
a dependency on these foreign interests
that would distract them from their intended dependence,
attention on the people.
And so to avoid that dependency, they enacted this clause
that says they can't have those ties.
So to avoid this dependence, they built this clause
to produce a certain independence in our governments.
Okay, those are the texts.
Here's the argument.
In July of last year, Rasmussen reported
that 46% of Americans thought that most
in Congress were corrupt.
Now, in the sense of which most mean that,
I think most Americans, then, are wrong.
Our Congress is not filled with the likes
of Rod Blagojevich, it's completely wrong
to think of the institution as populated
by these criminals, people engaging in behavior
that is proscribed by the law.
Instead, I agree with my colleague Dennis Thompson,
who believes that Congress, this Congress,
has an integrity and competence that's as high
as it has ever been.
It is filled with people who went to Washington
believing in what they wanted to do,
with a purpose, and their purpose is a public purpose.
They are not criminals.
And so if we have to have ask the question Nixon asked,
Nixon: Because people have gotta know
whether or not their president's a crook.
Well, I'm not a crook.
Larry: So he's not a crook.
Neither is this Congress a crook.
But there is, I wanna say, a sense of corruption
that is true about this institution of Congress.
Not true of the people, but true of the institution.
The framers of our constitution gave us
what they called a republic.
By a republic they meant a representative democracy,
and by a representative democracy,
what Federalist 52 says, is a democracy
with a branch of government that would be dependent
upon the people alone.
So here's the model of government.
There is the people, and there is the government.
Do my own slides, it's really cool the way
that bounces like that, right?
So the people in government, this marionette relationship,
that ensures that the representatives are focused
on the controllers of this marionette.
Here's the problem.
This Congress has evolved a different dependence.
Not just a dependence upon the people,
but increasingly, a dependence on the funders.
As members spend between 30 and 70% of their time
raising money to get back into Congress,
or to get their government back into the control
of their party, the develop, as any of us would,
a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do
will affect their ability to raise money.
They become, in the words of The X Files,
shape shifters, as they constantly adjust their views
in light of what they know will raise money,
not on issues one to 10, but on issues 11 to 1,000,
where they know nobody will notice
how their slight view on some tax provision
is inconsistent with their more fundamental views
about liberal or conservative policies.
As Leslie Byrne, a Democrat for Virginia describes,
when she went to Congress, she was told, quote,
"Always lean to the green."
And then to clarify, she went on,
he was not an environmentalist who told her that.
Now the point is this is a dependence, too.
But it's a different and conflicting dependence
from a dependence upon the people alone
because, surprise, surprise, the funders are not the people.
.26% of Americans give more than $200
in a Congressional campaign.
.05% of Americans, I know you're thinking,
he's a lawyer, does he really know that percent
is after you've done the decimal point.
Yeah, I know this, it's really .05% of Americans
max out in any Congressional campaign.
.01%, the 1% of the 1%, give more than $10,000
in an election cycle.
And my favorite new statistic here,
I don't even know what that is,
whatever the point, blah, blah, blah,
six three percent, who gave 80% of the Super PAC money
so far in this election.
196 Americans responsible for 80% of Super PAC money.
So the Occupy Wall Street people are so proud
of their we are the 99%.
Bad marketing, right?
They are either the 99.74% or the 99.95%
or the 99.99% or the 99.9999937% of Americans
who don't have the access or influence
that the other side does because
they don't fund the elections.
Now this is, Supreme Court doesn't get this yet,
but this is corruption.
It is not the corruption of cash secreted around
in brown paper bags.
That used to be the problem of corruption
a hundred years ago in Congress.
It's not the corruption of Rod Blagojevich's
constantly trying to sell access or importance
inside of the government.
It's the corruption of an institution.
Because this institution, which had as the framers command
to be dependent upon the people alone,
now has the wrong dependence.
It is a dependence corruption.
It is a corruption constituted by this relationship,
and when you think about the corruption
of this relationship, and set it against
the corruption our framers were concerned about,
the corruption of "kings, princes, or foreign states,"
that corruption is tiny compared
with the corruption that defines
the way our government functions today.
Now, this corruption has an effect.
Political scientists are not sure they
can measure the effect, and some take
what the political scientists say and translate it into
there is certainly no effect from money on policy.
So Brad Smith, the former chairman
of the Federal Election Commission said this
on a radio interview, "The evidence is pretty overwhelming
"that money does not play much of a role
"in what goes on in terms of legislative voting patterns
"and legislative behavior.
"The consensus about that among people
"who have studied it is roughly the same
"as the consensus among scientists
"that global warming is taking place."
Now Brad Smith is not a global warming skeptic;
he is a corruption skeptic.
And I was so astonished.
I was on the radio show with him when he did this
and I had to tweet it, but then I got in trouble
for my hashtag, but that just stands for Brad Smith,
that's all that means here.
All right, so let's say that the political scientists
are uncertain about whether they can show
the relationship between particular contributions
and particular results.
What there is no uncertainty about is, number one,
Americans believe money buys results in Congress.
In a poll that we conducted for a book
I published last year, 75% of Americans assented
to that question, a little bit more Democrats
than Republicans, but I guarantee you,
before the Republicans took over the House,
it was just as many Republicans as Democrats.
So whether it's two-thirds or three-fourths,
here is the one thing we all Americans believe,
we all agree, money buys results in Congress.
Which leads to number two.
That belief erodes trust in the institution.
So, last year Gallup said that 11% of Americans
had confidence in Congress.
That same poll had an uptick at the end of last year,
but then the New York Times and ABC said
that the number's actually 9% of Americans
who have confidence in Congress.
I should put that in context, 9%?
There were certainly more people who believed
in the British crown at the time of the Revolution
than who believe in this Congress today.
And that leads to number three.
This low trust erodes participation.
Rock the Vote, which organizes and turns out young voters,
and turned out the most young voters in the 2008 election
in the history of the United States,
arguably, I think certainly delivering
the election for Barack Obama,
found in 2010 a significant number of their new voters
were not gonna vote.
So they asked them why.
The number one issue by far, two to one
over the second highest issue was, quote,
"No matter who wins, corporate interests
"will still have too much power and prevent real change."
And it's not just kids.
The vast majority who could've voted in 2010
did not vote, in part, at least, because of this belief.
Now my belief is, that effect, the effect
of one, two, and three together,
alone, is enough to justify reform.
Even if all we were talking about was the consequences
of a public who believes the system is corrupt,
that would be enough to justify reform.
But I think we can go beyond that and see the way
reform is essential when we recognize
that regardless of the issue,
whether it's from the left or the right,
whether it's healthcare reform for people on the left,
or government bailouts for people on the right,
whether it's global warming for people on the left,
or a complex tax system for people on the right,
whether it's financial reform for people on the left,
or financial reform for people on the right,
whatever the issue is, this picture of the map of influence
that defines our government today
will systematically block change.
We will never have global warming legislation
in the United States so long as
this is the system of government.
We will never have effective reform of healthcare
so long as this is the system of government.
We will never have simpler taxes or smaller government
for people on the right,
so long as this is the system of government.
This will systematically block change,
and for people like you, you should recognize
the way it will systematically block reason
from operating inside of the government.
Now, you don't think about yourselves like this much,
but you should recognize the way you are not the 99%.
You are the 1%.
You are the 1% of America that gets to do their job,
thinking only about what makes sense.
What is the right answer?
What's the best way to address a problem
and how to implement it?
The vast majority of America doesn't get
to ask that question.
They have to ask the question, what's gonna be allowed?
What can I get away with?
What will the politicians permit?
What will the lobbyists not kick me out for?
And when you recognize the privilege
of living life focused on what makes sense,
and recognizing that our government practically never
gets to ask that question,
and the consequence from a government
that can never ask the question what makes sense,
and see that nothing will happen here
until we change this.
So, America's wrong.
Our government is not corrupt in the old-fashioned
boring Rod Blagojevich sense of corruption,
these are decent, honest, hard-working souls
working for what they believe in.
They are not individually at fault.
But this institution, which was the crown jewel
of our democracy, the thing our framers put
as article one in our Constitution,
this institution is fundamentally corrupt
and they are responsible for that corruption.
Okay, that's point one, here's point two.
What would we do, what could we do about this?
Well, if the problem here is a system,
not corrupt individuals, but a systemic problem,
then the systemic problem is that the funders
are not the people.
And the systemic solution is to find a way
to make the funders the people.
To give them a way, I know that looks
a little bit like give Congress a way,
and I know many people would love to do that,
but that's not what I mean.
I mean give Congress a way to fund
their campaigns without Faust,
without constantly selling their souls,
and thereby alienating America,
because we believe money has bought
the results they produce.
And one way to do that, and I think, increasingly,
the only way to do that, is to embrace
what I wanna call here citizen-funded campaigns.
Now what does that mean?
Okay, well, look, campaigns have to be funded.
I know there are people out there who think,
oh, geez, the internet's gonna make it possible
to run totally free political campaigns.
You know, maybe, maybe, but we're nowhere close.
So, campaigns have to be funded.
The questions is by whom?
So we could say, between citizens or non-citizens,
who should fund the campaigns?
You know, should the Chinese or the French
be funding campaigns?
Our Constitution seems to have a pretty clear bias
against such funding.
And when you recognize the category non-citizens,
we should also recognize that corporations are,
whether they're persons are not,
technically not citizens in our republic.
So, non-citizens seems to be a non-starter
for funding campaigns.
So then the question is, how do citizens
fund their campaigns?
So citizen funding is in fact the way
we fund campaigns right now.
Privately funded, but private funding of our campaigns
is now done through large dollar funded campaigns,
funded by a small percentage of Americans.
So point two six, point oh five, point oh one.
The point is, we have a system that systematically
distorts the influence of voters in the political process.
So while our Constitution works extremely hard
to make all voters equal in their influence
on election days, our system produces a world
where a tiny slice of America has a wildly disproportionate
influence on the money elections that determine
how elections get conducted and how policy gets made.
The tiniest slice of the 1%, guiding policy
because of this influence.
This is the picture of how
this political system now functions.
Which leads some people to say, well,
we oughta have the opposite, government funding.
Ya know, take citizens money through the government
funded way of running elections.
This is what the public funding
of presidential elections is like.
You know, you have that little check off box,
money goes, the government decides how much
each candidate gets, but the problem
with government funding here is that many people
rightly think it's arbitrary.
The government decides you get 40 million dollars,
you get 50 million dollars, how do they get these numbers?
And they also complain because my money
gets used to subsidize your speech,
and why should my money be used to subsidize speech
I don't believe in?
And, of course, what we've seen with every government
funding system is it gets to be bloated
and bureaucratic in a way that nobody can celebrate
or rally around as a system for facilitating
citizen funded elections.
So, what I think we need to think of,
is this kind of mixed alternative to government funding
or pure private funding.
And we've begun to see models of this alternative
in alternatives in the states.
So these are what we should call voluntary
small dollar funded campaigns.
These are systems where candidates voluntarily
opt into a regime where they accept small dollar
contributions only, but then those contributions
get amplified by the system so that they can afford
to run campaigns and win
taking small dollar contributions only.
So there are many versions.
Arizona, Maine, and Connecticut each have a version
of this where candidates take small contributions only.
When Connecticut adopted this, in the first year,
78% of elected representatives,
Democrats and Republicans alike, opted into a system
where they took no large dollar contributions
and funded winning campaigns.
In 2010, the House came very close to passing
something called the Fair Elections Now Act,
which was modeled on those state bills,
again, allowing people to run campaigns
that were funded by small dollar contributions only.
I've taken those models, and in my book Republic Lost
tried to rev them a bit to make them more responsive
to the criticisms of people on the right.
So I've described this system I call
the Grant and Franklin Project.
So here's how the Grant and Franklin project works.
You have to stipulate with me that every American
contributes, quote, unquote, contributes
at least 50 dollars of revenue to the federal treasury.
Whether it's income tax or payroll tax,
social security tax, cigarette tax, whatever,
at least 50 dollars comes from all of us
and goes to the federal treasury.
So under the Grant and Franklin Project,
we take that first 50 dollars and we rebate it,
government rebate in the form of a democracy voucher.
And that voucher, then we can allocate
all or part of it to candidates, so long as the candidates
voluntarily agree to fund their campaigns with vouchers only
and with contributions limited to 100 dollars per citizen.
So Grant and Franklin.
Now, 50 dollars a voter is seven billion dollars
in the election system.
2010, the total amount raised
to fund Congressional elections was 1.8 billion dollars,
so this is three times the amount raised in 2010,
meaning this is real money in the system
that would facilitate a campaign where no one would need
to take large contributions,
yet there would be adequate money to fund and win elections.
Now this is the kind of citizen funding elections
that I think we need to think about and be pushing for.
Because here's the thing we would buy
with that seven billion dollars.
If we could have a system funded
with small dollar contributions only,
then whenever Congress did something crazy,
we could all believe, as we all want to believe,
that whether it was because there are
too many Republicans or too many Democrats,
the one reason we would not credit any more would be
because of the money, because we would've removed the source
of that consistent cynicism by making it a system
where it can't be the money that's explaining results.
Now that's what I mean by citizen funded campaigns.
And then the question is raised, is that enough?
Given the non-citizen funded Super PACs that are out there,
could citizen-funded campaigns be enough against them?
And I think the lesson that we've seen so far
in this election cycle is no.
That we've entered the age of the Super PAC,
and not just the cute Super PAC that Colbert would run,
but we've entered an age where there's a dynamic
of the Super PAC that evokes much more
the kind of Tony Soprano model of influence
than the kind of Stephen Colbert model of influence.
And this model of influence was described to me
most powerfully by Evan Bayh, who was a senator
from Indiana who retired recently
from the United States Senate, and I saw him
on a panel describing, in response to someone
who said there's no good evidence
that money buys results in Congress.
He said, you have no idea how Citizens United,
the Supreme Court case that liberated these Super PACs
has changed the way Washington works.
He said every incumbent now is terrified
that 30 days before an election,
some Super PAC will come in and drop
a million dollars in the district against that incumbent.
And so what does the incumbent do
to protect him or herself against that Super PAC bomb?
Well, the incumbent needs to get some kind
of Super PAC insurance, because the Super PAC isn't just
available for them to turn to whenever the attack happens,
and they can't turn to their maximum contributors,
'cause by definition they've already maxed out,
so they have to line up Super PAC insurance
so that when a bomb is dropped on one side,
they can reliably expect somebody to drop
a bomb on the other side, hopefully neutralizing
the effect of these attacks.
Well, how do you buy insurance?
As we all know, you pay your premium in advance.
So how do you pay your premium in advance
in the context of Super PAC insurance?
You do the things the Super PACs on your side
of the aisle want you to do, so that when the time comes
to call on them, you are their sort of ally.
Would love to help you, senator, but we can only
support people who support us at 80%.
You have a score card.
You know exactly what you need to do
to be able to count on them.
The protection racket they have built
to guarantee they will be there to support you,
and this is the genius of this system,
without spending one dollar,
the Super PACs have succeeded in aligning votes
towards their positions because there's no other way
that the incumbents can survive.
This is what Citizens United gave us.
And I think what this means, is that we're gonna need
more than just citizen funded campaigns,
we are eventually gonna need
an amendment to the Constitution,
and in my view, what that amendment has gotta do
is to make it possible for Congress to limit,
but not to ban, independent expenditures,
at least within a period around an election.
So it's important that they not be allowed to ban,
because I don't think Congress should be allowed
to silence any speech, whether it be from non-citizens
or corporations, or dolphins, everybody should be allowed,
maybe robots can be banned, but nobody else
should be banned in the context of this political speech.
But we need to be able to limit it so that Congressmen
are not shape-shifting to bend to the interests
of the Super PACs the way they are now shape-shifting
to bend to the interest of those who would fund
from the 1% of the 1%.
Both of these changes are essential.
I think they both should be bundled
into one single amendment, to make public funding
mandatory and to limit expenditures,
but if we had both, it would make trust, I think,
in the system possible.
But here's the real question of possibility.
Is it politically possible to imagine producing this?
'Cause I don't think it's hard to see the problem.
I don't think it's hard once you see the problem
to describe what would be a solution to that problem.
What's hard, and what might be impossibly hard,
is to imagine politically bringing that solution about.
And that's for a reason suggested to me
by one of my favorite Congressmen,
that's saying something good, actually.
Jim Cooper, who's a Democrat from Tennessee,
who's been in Congress for as long
as all but about 20 other members of Congress,
when he was explaining to me
the character of Congress today,
he said, you have to understand the way Capitol Hill
has become a kind of Farm League for K Street.
So the claim was, K Street, where all the lobbyists live,
members and staffers and bureaucrats increasingly
have a common business model,
a business model focused on their life after government,
their life as lobbyists.
So 50% of members of the Senate,
Public Citizen calculated between 1998 and 2004,
42% of the House left to become lobbyists,
so that they can leave and get paid the large money
that lobbyists get paid so that they have some place
to retire to that actually makes it profitable
to be inside of government.
And when you think about all the people
who have this business model,
you begin to recognize how everyone depends
upon this system surviving.
And so when the policy makers depend
upon this corrupt system surviving,
how is it we can depend upon the corruption to change?
Well, that's the point that I try to address
in this little booklet, book-schon that I just published.
on Byliner, One Way Forward.
One, as in one among a number of ways,
not this is the only way forward,
but here's one way forward.
And a point that I wanna open the book with
is a recognition that thought the chattering classes
wanna divide America into the left versus right,
I think the most important political division
in America right now is between the inside and the outside.
Not left side versus right side,
but inside versus outside.
And inside here, referring to life within that Beltway.
And the point is to recognize the way outside
has its own kind of politics.
And it's a politics not of politicians
or politician wannabes, these are not people
who are finding their way like they used to
through the Rotary to become a senator
or a congressman, these are people who are finally
so disgusted with the way things are
that they're putting aside their life for a minute
to try to fight for something that would bring about change.
Citizen politics, citizens demanding that politics change.
Now, these outsider movements, I think, come in waves.
They're not coordinated, they're not summoned,
they're not commanded, but they come in waves.
And in our lifetime, I thinK 1998 was the first of these
with Move On, and then 2009 we saw the same thing
with the Tea Party, and I think 2011,
we saw the same wave with the Occupy movement.
And over time, these waves begin to build.
And the challenge is for them to begin to have
a certain awareness, to have an awareness about
their place and their potential.
And for each of these waves to practice
a certain understanding, each wave to have this recognition
of what they are contributing to.
Now these waves right now are extremely passionate,
Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, but the problem here
is that each of these waves are also polarized.
Pointing to the left or pointing to the right,
so Move On, which gets born out of disgust
for the idea that you're impeaching a president
because of his affair with an intern,
at first is quite cross-partisan, but quickly falls
to become a kind of outsider on the left movement.
And the Tea Party Patriots, of course,
were first born as outsiders on the right
and then quickly fell to be kind of
insider right movement.
And the Occupy Wall Street movement were first outsiders
on the left, and then quickly fell
to becoming kind of a blur.
We'll see what they are this next cycle,
but nobody was quite sure where they were before.
But the point is to look at each of these waves
and recognize they actually have a cross-partisan potential.
They have a potential to move and act together,
even if right now there's a very low recognition
of that potential.
But this is the thing, this low recognition
that we have to change.
Because if we are to succeed,
this giant, which is the sovereign,
which for most of a country's life is sleeping,
awaiting its being awoken by times
that make it so it can't sleep anymore,
this giant has to build an alliance
among these different outsider movements.
An alliance that's focused on common ground.
An alliance which means diverse yet cross-partisan,
so think of this alliance, you know,
imagine sitting with Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and Winston Churchill, an alliance like that.
Not an alliance like this, right?
Or for us, imagine an alliance that can draw together
characters like these, and get them to stand
on a common ground, not by insisting that they
have a common end, we don't have a common end in America,
we are very polarized, we have very different views
about what we want our country to become.
But to get people on the left and the right
to recognize they have a common enemy,
and the common enemy is this root, this corruption,
this picture, this root that blocks people
from the left and the right from getting what they want.
The common enemy that gets taught and recognized
if we build a recognition of the root striker
into this movement.
Now, I tried to convince Jon Stewart of this.
He didn't like the name, he said we should be Batmen.
And I've tried Batmen, and then I get yelled at,
no, Batperson, okay, whatever.
Root Striker, Batmen, Batperson,
I'm gonna stick with Root Striker for a minute,
but the point is, this must be the work
of these outsider political movements,
to build a cross-partisan corruption focused movement.
Now who, or how, or how do we do it now?
The truth is, I have no idea what this story looks like
in its complete arc.
All I think we can see is first steps.
And I think the first first step here
is that we have to engage more ordinary citizens
in this practice of teaching.
So I run this group rootstrikers.org,
what we're doing is recruiting teachers.
Not people in schools, but people who will engage
in the practice of teaching other citizens
how all of the things that they care about
get tied, eventually, to this root.
So if there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil
to one who is striking at the root,
we have a pretty clear number of how many teachers we need,
so we need just about 311 thousand root strikers
in our project to engage in the activity
of convincing Americans about how there is this root
that they must strike at,
to explain and persuade and recruit.
So that's one step.
A second step is to begin to get Americans
to pledge to a campaign like this.
And it begins by recognizing that there is in fact,
internationally now, a very strong
anti-corruption movement.
It could have even a Creative Commons-like logo
that could associate with it.
But the anti-corruption movement in each country
focuses on a different kind of corruption.
In India, it's not the corruption we're talking about,
but translated, it is corruption.
All across the world, people rising up in fury
at the corruption that has become their government.
And what we're gonna start launching this week,
is an ability for people to begin to pledge
in a way towards the activities necessary
to fight in this corruption, to take a pledge,
to say specifically what kind of reform
they believe ending corruption here would be,
with the hope that if we could find 30 million such souls
across the country to make this part
of their self-identification, we begin to make this
a mainstream issue for politicians to care about.
And then number three, most important right now,
is to find a way to engage with these communities
and to persuade them that they need to form
what is this cross-partisan alliance.
Again, not focused on a common end,
but focused on their common enemy.
And to recognize, there can't be more than 3,000 leaders
of these movements in the country.
It's not a big number.
3,000 people convinced of this as the architecture
of this campaign would push us to a place
where these outsider politicians could begin to push
in the way that made this reform possible.
It's this we must begin to focus,
one way forward to make it so that
this is the issue American resolves.
And then, finally, to own the movement,
because this, like every one of these waves,
is not a movement with generals,
it's gonna be a movement with citizens at its core,
who take commands or direction from nobody,
but get inspired by what they see here can be possible.
So let me end here with one more point.
It's a point about responsibility in this movement.
So I'm sure some of you might remember
the image, this picture,
actually most of you probably don't.
This is March 1989, when a ship under the command
of Captain Joseph Hazelwood ran aground
in Prince Williams Sound
and spilled about 11 million gallons of oil
into Prince William Sound, the Exxon Valdez.
This is the radio transmission of Hazelwood
after the accident:
Hazelwood: Yeah, it's Valdez.
We've, it should be on your radar there,
we've fetched up hard aground north of Goose island
off Bligh Reef, and, evidently, we're leaking some oil,
and we're gonna be here for a while,
and just want you notified, over.
Larry: So, and so uh, if you're notified, over.
Now, I'm sure running through your heads
is the same question that ran through the heads
of many people when this accident occurred
and they listened to that recording, namely,
the question of whether Captain Joseph Hazelwood
was intoxicated at the time
that he was captaining the supertanker.
He denied it, he said he'd only had four vodkas
before he got on board the ship.
Blood alcohol level indicated he must have been
at least six times the legal limit when he got on board,
but he fought it, his lawyers battled in court,
he was never convicted of this,
so let's say that there is some doubt
about whether Hazelwood was drunk.
What there is no doubt about, is that Hazelwood
had a problem with alcohol.
His mother testified he had a problem with alcohol.
1985, four years before the accident,
Exxon had treated him for his alcohol problem.
After the accident, Exxon said he thought
he had mastered the problem, but in 1986,
he had his driver's license revoked for a DUI.
In 1988, he had his driver's license revoked for a DUI,
one year before the accident.
At the time he was captaining a supertanker,
he was not allowed to drive a VW Beetle on the highways.
Now, okay, forget, though, Captain Hazelwood.
What I want you to think about are those around Hazelwood.
The other officers, the people who could have
picked up a phone.
People who, while a drunk
was driving a supertanker, did nothing.
And I want you to think about what you think about them.
And I ask this question in this way,
because as I think about these issues
that I've talked about today, I increasingly think
that we are they.
Our nation, our world, faces these critical problems
requiring serious attention, but we have these institutions
incapable of that attention,
institutions that are distracted, unable to focus,
too busy doing the stuff they shouldn't be doing
to do the stuff they should be doing, and so, too, are we.
Too busy doing the real work, the real work
that you do here or in our lives,
the stuff that really produces value
and contributes to the world,
we are too busy doing this real work
to focus on this critical problem,
to give it the serious attention it needs.
None of us, neither them nor us,
pay the attention to this problem
that this problem requires.
And who is, then, to blame for this problem?
Who is responsible?
It is too easy to point to the evil people.
They have their share of responsibility here,
but the real people to point to in this story
are the good people, the decent people,
the people who could've picked up a phone,
to us, we, the most privileged,
have the obligation to fix this.
Because the most outrageous part here
is that these corruptions may have been primed
by the most privileged, but they had been permitted
by the passivity of the most privileged, too.
They have been permitted by us.
When Franklin was carried from the Constitutional Convention
in Philadelphia, stopped on a street by a woman
who said, Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?
And Franklin said, a republic, madam,
if you can keep it, a republic.
A representative democracy, a government
dependent upon the people alone.
We have lost that republic,
and it's time that all of us act to get it back.
Thank you very much.
(audience applause)
-: Thanks, Larry. -: Thanks, Joi.
Joi: Jenny, slight change of plan.
If there's a good Twitter question,
can you go up to the mic and say--
for anybody here that wants to ask questions,
because we don't allow disobedience at the Media Lab,
we're gonna get everybody to come up to the mics
and ask the questions here.
And until I get some questions, I'm just gonna
start asking. -: Start.
Joi: And I'm gonna try to channel the Media Lab
a little bit here as, now when you wrote Code,
you told us that writing code was actually normative,
that we should be thinking about the social impact.
Turn this around.
So you've got a social problem, and we've got
a lot of people here who actually write software,
do write code, and it seems to me,
well, first of all, you called the corruption evil,
but that's a normative word for something
that looks more like a bug.
Right, it's this broken system,
and engineers are good at fixing broken systems.
And if you think about it more as a system
and how do you fix it, right?
And I think that, I don't know if you noticed
but we changed, Ethan, when he joined,
he changed the Center for Civic Media,
this new name, it used to be The Center
for Future Civic Media, and he just said, no, no, no,
let's create stuff that works now, not in the future.
And the Media Lab is very much focused
on building stuff that has future impact,
but that we can build now and do stuff with.
And so I think everybody here is very motivated
to build stuff, and not to criticize what you're doing,
it's a really important problem,
but you're approaching it in a somewhat 20th century way,
writing books, giving talks, going on TV,
and the argument's beautiful, but I think
what was great about Creative Commons
was you came up with a technical solution
to massively scale the distribution.
And it seems like, if you're talking to a bunch
of geeks here, do you have an idea
about a technical solution that goes beyond
hiring a social media consultant?
And if not, I mean, how should we, how can we help you
as a bunch of--
Larry: Yeah, it's a great question,
because there are many limits to what I can do.
I discover a new limit almost every day.
And so one of the limits is, all I can do
is try to seed recognition in different communities.
But the essential character of solving this problem
is that these seeded communities,
or these infected communities, infected with this meme,
begin to figure out how to leverage their own recognition
or skill to solve the problem.
So, yeah, when I first spoke at Computer Freedom
and Privacy in 1996, and had this woman coder come up,
literally in tears, because she didn't want
to be doing politics, I said to her,
look, you can't help but be doing politics.
That's what you do, you write code.
I guess what I wanna say now is,
you can't just write code, because we can't choose
not to engage the political system.
We need great code to figure out how to get
more outsiders to engage it in an effective
successful way, but we can't just choose to ignore it
and pretend like it's, we can just hack around it.
It's not like the John Gilmore conception of the internet,
we can just live our life and find our little nodes
that, because, there are hugely important problems
that unless this government engages in a serious way,
it's gonna fuck us.
We don't have a choice about this issue.
So, that's what I was saying in the beginning.
It is an enormously frustrating thing
to be at the middle of the most innovative work
in the world and to be told you need
to be spending cycles doing something
as boring or as destructive or as frustrating
or as unimaginably tedious as trying
to figure out how to get Americans to fix their government.
It sounds like a complete waste of your time,
but we have no other choice, here.
Joi: Yeah, and I guess my point is just
that I don't think it's actually a silly problem.
I think trying to apply technology to fix this thing
is an extremely valid thing for us to be thinking about
as technical people, but so introduce yourself,
and go ahead and ask the question.
Ian: Thank you very much.
I'm Ian Condry, and I teach here
in comparative media studies.
Thank you very much, and I've been following your work,
of course, as well have.
I guess I'm curious to hear about how we might better
model a participatory democracy
as part of the education process.
I agree with getting the money out of politics.
I guess what I'm concerned about is that
once we get the money out of politics,
that then Congress will suddenly start working
or everybody will be responsive finally,
and I'd like to believe that, but I feel like
they're still gonna need that push from the citizenry.
And part of that means, it seems to me,
re-imagining democracy as something much different
than elections or even funding of elections,
but as something that is a kind of daily
or weekly process of including more and more voices.
And it seems to me, if we're gonna have
this root strikers work, and develop
a real ground swell approach to participation,
how can we do that?
And I think that's one of the things that Occupy
capture people's imagination with these mic check ideas.
That people could hear very graphically
the participation of a whole group.
And I don't think that that's the solution,
but it showed that an image and a practice
of participation had a real power
to spread new ideas about what democracy could mean,
and I'm wondering how that might look for you.
Larry: So, I completely agree that
that kind of energy has gotta be seeded
and encouraged and tended to so it grows
in a very important way.
And of course, responding to Joi,
I wanna come and talk here because I think some
of the insights about how to do that
that might come from here are gonna be essential in that.
I am not, though, a utopianist.
I'm not somebody who believes we're gonna fix government
and then have a perfect democracy.
And I'm not actually somebody who thinks
that a perfect democracy is a democracy where
for the rest of our life,
every week we're gonna get together
and debate the issues of the day.
I think a perfect democracy is one
where we can go back to sleep, you know,
we can get back to our lives and do the stuff
we really wanna do, having some confidence
that the institution is functioning
in a relatively decent, and every once in a while
we pay attention, and we throw the bastards out,
but the system is basically functioning.
And it's not, now, functioning, that's the point.
So, yes, let's find a way to replicate
the kind of amazing energy of Occupy
in a thousand domains so that people
become educated enough to say we have to demand
this kind of change, and then let's get the change.
And if we get that change, we give people
a reason to wanna pay attention to government again.
Because right now, it's completely rational
to be ignorant about 99% of what government does,
because what would knowledge give you except frustration?
So why not spend time with your kids
or in your hobby or in your work?
But if we had a system where it wasn't so cynical,
where we could believe that there was a reason
to organize democratically to change
the resolve of government, more people would.
Not 100% of us, not 50% of us, but more of us would.
And so I just wanna get more to the direction
of a well-functioning democracy.
And there are models of that.
You know, other countries around the world
get closer to it, and so, without picturing utopia,
to just recognize the difference between
the pathological state that we're in
and the kind of state of middle age
that most of us are quickly moving in,
or late middle age, that some of us are moving in to.
So not utopia, but just better.
Joi: I think you were next, right?
And then...
Rob: Hi, my name's Rob Goodspeed
and I'm a doctoral student in urban studies
and planning here.
And so thank you for the excellent presentation.
I wanted to ask about the reference to political science.
You're a very rigorous, very tenured senior
researcher/academic, and I was just sort of taken
by the statement that, basically, this diverse field
of thousands of researchers, I guess are there elements
that you think are useful, or do they have certain elements
of their world view or their paradigm
which makes them blind to what you seem very convinced
is a major problem?
Larry: Yeah, so I actually spent a huge chunk
of my hugely long book Republic Lost engaging
with political scientists, and not criticizing them,
because I think what's happened is that
their very careful work is being misused by others.
So their very careful work simply says the following,
we can't show through rigorous empirical
statistical techniques, we can't show
the relationship between contributions
and legislative results, all right?
That doesn't say there is no relationship
between contributions and legislative results,
it just says we can't show it.
So it's the equivalent of saying, geez,
there are people who say that there is sex abuse
going on in the Catholic Church, so let's put some drones
above churches all across the United States.
Let's see if they see any sex abuse.
Oops, no sex abuse, so therefore there is
no sex abuse in the Catholic Church.
It's just a misunderstanding of the claim.
We can't show doesn't mean there is none.
And when you look at the way the data looks at this problem,
there are obvious ways in which the kind of influence
that I'm talking about would not manifest itself
in these kinds of measures.
So in my book, I don't criticize the political scientists,
I say here's their work, here's what their work
is trying to do, here's the limitations they all admit
about their work, but still, we can see why
there are influences here that rationally lead Americans
to believe their system is corrupt.
And it is plainly corrupt relative
to the legal, constitutional perspective
of the kind of dependency that our democracy
was supposed to produce.
So, I don't mean to belittle them.
I mean to belittle those who would misuse
what they say and turn it into everybody knows
that global warming is false
and there is no corruption in the world.
That's the kind of way this gets spinned.
Joi: And I would just add to this.
I don't know if you've seen Cesar Hidalgo's work,
but he's applying data science and visualization
to the economy and really takes,
'cause economics is sort of assuming,
it moves very slowly and hasn't tracked Moore's law,
and what Cesar has done is by using computers,
he's able to show a lot more complexity of the system,
and I know you criticize transparency,
but transparency without analysis is actually
quite misleading, but what we do at the Media Lab
with big data is we are able to take things
that sound scientific, but actually could be much more
by applying things like computers and visualizations,
and I just wonder if you, it seems like political science
could also take advantage of that--
Larry: Yeah, so I don't criticize big data.
I am all for big data.
I think one of the most, if you wanna read
a really amazing legal book,
if you can imagine such a thing,
there's a fantastic book called Supercrunchers by Ian Ayres,
which is showing how big data's gonna radically
change everything in the world and I'm completely convinced.
When I criticized transparency,
I wasn't criticizing transparency, I was criticizing
what we could call the naked transparency movement.
This kind of belief that if we just get transparency,
we're gonna get all the reform we need.
Like if we should just somehow show everybody
the influence inside of Washington,
they will rally and get the right influences of Washington.
So it's like, when you think about the Deepwater Horizon
in the Gulf, and remember, they got that little web cam
that you could see the stuff coming into the Gulf,
and you know, nobody could be against that web cam.
And I, of course, wanna see it.
But the idea that all you want is a kind of HD web cam
is like a confusion.
What we want is the stuff not to be pouring into the Gulf,
that's what we want.
So of course we wanna see it so long as it's happening,
but we wanna get to the world
where that's not happening, and so I criticize people
in the transparency movement who somehow pretend
that they shouldn't be talking about the need
to have citizen funded elections,
or limits on Citizens United's Super PACs,
who believe that they could just have the easy way
of saying, let's just have transparency.
That's a mistake.
But that's unrelated, I think, to the big data project.
I think big data--
Joi: And so I think that is, it ties,
and maybe we should connect them better,
which is big data's not about the fact
that we have lots of data, it's about
how do you understand that big data.
And we have lots of data about political campaigns,
maybe we should apply some of our thinking to that.
Christopher: I'm Christopher Fry
from the Software Agents group here at the Media Lab.
Oh, I'm a huge fan of yours, Larry,
so I went to the Constitutional Convention Convention
you had at Harvard last fall.
I'd like to pop up a level and reframe the problem.
Government is about making decisions for the governed.
Good government makes good decisions for those people.
I think you need two elements.
One, you need people in government who are well motivated,
and the second is, you need a good process
for them to follow.
If you don't have both of those things, you won't succeed.
We have neither of those things in D.C. right now.
I think that you're attacking corruption is not
the real root, it's maybe a root, but it's part
of the motivation of individuals,
it's not all of the motivation of individuals,
and it doesn't address the process problem.
Larry: Well, okay, I, so, when I'm talking
about the root, what I'm interested in is
the reform that would be generative.
Generative to solving what I agree are a whole
series of problems with our democracy.
There isn't just one problem, there's 40.
And I think that the problems you've identified
are deeply, intimately connected
to the problem that I've pointed to.
So when I was living in California
and my congressman died, it was Tom Lantos,
and I had been working on this project.
John Palfrey over at the Berkman Center
started a Draft Lessig campaign
to get me to run for Congress.
And they raised a bunch of money very quickly,
and so I said, okay, I'd think about,
and Joe Trippi, who ran Dean's campaign,
flew in, appeared at my doorstep,
he said, I would run the campaign.
Now let me sit down with you and tell you
what this gonna be about.
He said, you have to be able to commit
to being on the telephone for two to four hours
every single day, calling people you have never met,
asking for money.
Can you do that?
Now, I'm a sane person, there's an obvious answer
to that question, no, I can't do that.
I could not do that.
I just physically could not constitute myself to do that.
And that made me think, what kind of person can do that?
(audience laughter)
Because those are the people who are in Wa--
So when you say we need great people,
we're filtering for a certain kind of person.
Now, some of them are great, ya know,
I think Lantos was extraordinary,
and he didn't have to do that because of his,
but ya know, when you start thinking
that the sort of person who says, yeah, I'm there for that,
you also wanna wonder, is that the person you want,
ya know, at the lever?
So I think that's one part of the problem.
The other part of the problem is,
ya know, the problem with the process,
the reason why the process is so polarized,
and there's a constant war, perpetual war,
is in part to enable the fund-raising process.
It's to part enable it, make it easier to raise money.
So as I tell in the book Republic Lost,
this problem really has an origin,
it's right after Newt Gingrich becomes Speaker of the House.
Because it's at that point that the parties
are roughly equal and they become fiercely competitive.
And both parties begin to tell their members
their number one job is to raise money,
and they begin to change all the norms
of how the institution operates.
So C-SPAN begins to be used as a device
to facilitate partisan attacks on the other side,
not to be used to persuade anybody of anything,
but to be used to enable the fund-raising game.
So I think these are all tied together.
And so all I'm saying is, what do we need to solve first
to begin to solve these other problems.
And so the analogy which I've used many times,
I didn't use today, but it's like,
think of a person with the wrong kind
of chemical dependency, ya know, an alcoholic.
And you identify the problems the alcoholic is facing.
It might be losing his wife, it might be losing his job,
losing his liver, those are among
the most important problems anybody can be facing in life.
But what we all know, is that he won't solve
any of those problems until he solves his alcoholism first.
So it's not that the alcoholism
is the most important problem,
I don't even know what the metric is,
it's just that it's the first problem.
It enables addressing those other problems.
And it's not clear you can solve all those problems,
but you at least have to be in a position to address them.
And that's what I mean by the root here.
We have to be in a place where it makes sense to say,
what is good policy?
Without somebody snickering and saying,
yeah, you're a professor, you're just naive.
Good pol-- where do you think you are, MIT?
You know, we don't ask that question.
We don't ask what's good policy.
You know, I've got, so you get my point.
It's like we have to make it possible for them
to ask that question again.
Not expecting they're gonna come up with genius answers,
but at least come up with answers
that are in good faith seeking that,
and they can't do that now.
Alex: Hi, my name is Alex Lizt, I am an undergrad
at MIT, and I am working in the fluid interfaces group
upstairs right now.
So, lots of well-endowed individuals and groups
have set out to fix government before,
and they've, according to public opinion,
and definitely seen on your slides,
they haven't been able to affect it very much.
And so, sort of like, what's to blame for that?
So a lot of people have set out.
Are they misdirected in what they think
are the issues they're trying to solve,
or are there other things?
Larry: Well, it's a great question.
Part of it is, there's a time when an issue
can be solved, and there's a time when it can't.
So people have been talking about the need
to change the way we fund elections forever,
and I think 30 years ago, it just wouldn't engage,
and it wouldn't be as salient,
wouldn't be as significant as it is now.
In 1990, it wasn't the same kind of problem.
I just don't think Congress was as corrupted
in the sense that I've said as it is today.
So the problem becomes more salient,
the time becomes more salient.
The problems become more exacerbated,
and the cancer evolves to a place where the institution
can't function at all.
Again, to emphasize, I've said this,
I think, three times now.
There, you pick your issue, we will not solve it
under this system.
We will not solve it.
We will not solve global warming.
So that, for me, I'm finished.
Okay, now I know we have to deal with this issue.
But if that's not important to you, then healthcare,
or broadband, or whatever your issue is.
That wasn't true in the 1970s or in the 1960s.
You have to remember, 1960s, or forget the 1960s.
Let's talk about the 1980s, let's talk about Reagan.
Reagan got the biggest reform of the United States tax code
passed through Congress by striking a deal
with Tip O'Neill and the Democrats.
They worked together to radically change
the way the tax system functioned.
In a kind of environment that is unrecognizable
to a Congressman today.
They don't even know what you're talking about
when you kind of imagine people hanging out together,
working together, thinking about what can we do.
And so you don't have to go that far back
to recognize that we could get into a place
that we could do this system much better.
So part of it's the urgency, part of it's the change,
so I guess I'm not so keen to second guess what has
been done before as much as I'm keen to get people to see
what has to happen right now, and that's what I think
has to happen right now.
Joi: I think you were next, right?
Aningur: Hi, my name is Aningur
and I'm a grad student at Harvard,
and I'm organizing a conference, actually,
on how to end a revolution this April at Harvard,
and so my question relates to your approach
of uniting people against a common enemy,
versus uniting them for a common end.
And your enemy you identified as corruption,
so my thought is that during the French Revolution,
the common enemy was sort of hypocrisy.
So both corruption, as you said it,
and hypocrisy are not really definable elements.
So until when do you strike the roots.
Like, how do you define the end of the process,
when it is enough if you can't even define
what you are sort of fighting against?
And also as you said, you're trying to optimize a system,
and so I guess, when you fix a system,
that means that it works for a certain subgroup of people.
It's always a system that works for certain people, right?
One system does not work for all,
and so how do you exactly define when the destruction
should be over?
Larry: Yeah, so I've actually, I actually think
I have an easier problem than the one you've described.
I said that our system is corrupt,
and by that I mean, relative to the design
of the framers, the system is corrupt.
Because what they said was, a a system dependent
upon the people alone.
Now, political scientists and political philosophers
and constitutional scholars will write billions of books
about what it means to be dependent upon the people alone.
Like, that's a complicated question.
But the one thing we know it's not
is a system where representatives are spending
30 to 70% of their time raising money
from the tiniest slice of America.
Right, that is not dependent upon the people alone.
Whatever else is, that is not.
And so all that I am doing in my fight against corruption
is say let's find a way to end that.
And I think there should be a common ground
that that's a common enemy to both people
on the left and people on the right.
My happiest review of my book just came out
in the American Prospect, a right winger.
A guy at George Mason, who read the book,
and said, absolutely, this should speak directly
to people on the right.
Because it's easy to get people on the left
to get motivated by this, but if you can get
people on the right motivated about this
and recognize that corruption is the common enemy here,
then we can begin to talk about how to get to that--
Now, once we get over that, I wanna get back
to normal politics and start trying to persuade people
that we need to deal with global warming,
or we need more equality in our society,
or we need healthcare for the poor.
I mean, I wanna do all the liberal causes
that you, anybody, could list.
I'm happy to fight for that.
But, I think we need to bracket that for a minute.
And there's a precedent for this in our past.
You think about, people sort of look back
to our founding and think, ya know,
they're all basically the same guy.
74 white elite Americans, Colonial Americans,
sitting in a room, drafting the Constitution.
But we forget, they were radically different people.
There were people in that room
who believed in slavery and there were people in that room
who believed slavery was the moral abomination of the age.
And yet they were able to bracket,
and you can criticize how they bracketed it
or what they did, but they were able to bracket
that fundamental disagreement long enough
to draft a Constitution to save the country
from falling into the ocean, which it was about to do,
as everybody recognized.
Now, whatever our differences are,
there is nothing as profound or as important
as the difference between people who believe in slavery
and people who believe slavery I
a the moral abomination of the age.
There's nothing as significant as that.
And we don't actually have to draft a Constitution.
We just have to fix a tiny corner of the Constitution,
extending the no kings, princes, or foreign states,
to include domestic princes, and corporations,
as the things that you can't become dependent upon.
So it's a tiny problem with smaller differences
that we should be able to master to end
what I'm calling corruption,
and then get back to regular politics.
Saul: Hi, I'm Saul Tannenbuam, I'm just a citizen.
And that was the perfect segue to my question.
Your fix is a constitutional amendment,
which seems a rather high bar in this environment.
I know you've run a conference on
having a constitutional convention.
Could you share your thinking on how, in this environment,
we actually get the constitution amended?
Larry: Yeah, it's hopelessly difficult.
Yeah, because, so the constitution
has two paths to amending.
One is Congress proposes an amendment.
Every single amendment has been ratified by that path.
But the framers said, what if Congress is the problem?
So they created this alternative,
and the alternative is states call for a convention,
the convention then proposes amendments,
and the amendments then get sent to the states
to be ratified.
So it's the end run around Congress.
It's never happened.
We came close, within one vote,
just before Congress made the Senate elected,
and the reason Congress made the Senate elected
was that they were terrified about a convention.
They were like, holy shit, what happens
if they actually have a convention?
So they said, let's quickly stop the convention movement
by giving them what they want,
which is the proposed amendment to...
So my view is I'd be happy for them
to stop the convention movement by giving
us the reform we want, that's fine.
But there's a second part to your,
the way you framed the question, just a citizen,
this is impossibly hard.
I tell this story at the end of my book.
You know, I got a question like this
when I was in Dartmouth, a woman stood up
and she said to me, okay, you've convinced me.
It's completely hopeless.
There's nothing we can do.
And when she said that, I had this kind of flash,
I don't know why, but his flash,
this image of my then seven-year-old son,
and I thought, you know, so imagine a doctor
said to you, your son has terminal brain cancer,
and there's nothing you can do.
And I thought, you know, would I do nothing?
Just accept it?
Shift gears and go on with my life?
And, of course, you recognize of course
you wouldn't do nothing, you would do everything.
And in that, I think you recognize
the sort of thing that love does to you.
Like love leads you to act irrationally
for the thing that you love.
Even if the odds are impossible, it doesn't matter,
that's what you do.
And the point is, you know, we, especially we on the left
have to celebrate the love all of us have for country.
Love for country.
So you might be right.
It might be impossible.
It might be hopelessly impossible.
I don't care, I don't care.
It's not relevant, it's not relevant.
We have to find a way to motivate people
to act, assuming it's impossible,
because we have no choice here.
It is collapsing, not in the technical sense
that we're gonna see, maybe, I don't know,
but not in a technical sense that we're gonna see
troops in the streets next week.
But in the sense that we can't begin to address
the problems we have to address unless we do.
So only a citizen, that's all we need, only a citizen.
Joi: Thank you, Larry.
Man: Well, first of all, I would like to thank you
for a great message about self responsibility
and being aware of the processes
of the systematic problems.
I think this is very important not to get attention.
And my question is, you mention that
being a programmer or writing code
is similar to write law, or at the same time
that you mentioned that the problem we're facing
is a very, it's a systematic problem,
it's a failure of system.
So do you believe that the reform or the revolution
would be done by not the peasants or workers,
as the Russian Revolution, but actually
by programmers and engineers who do understand
the system and know how to fix it and actually,
how could you imagine that would be possible?
Larry: So, in a sense, yes.
Not so much in the sense that I imagine
the programmers with pitchforks in the streets.
But in the sense that it will only be
if the coders enable an infrastructure that can actually
rally and organize people more effectively,
that we can surpass the power on the other side.
Right, and that's why in a certain sense,
this is the sort of problem we can only fix
in this moment of technological transition.
So there's a 20th century model
of how you persuade and control and direct,
and there's a 21st century reality right now,
and if you're Tim Wu, you think that eventually
this kind of extraordinary innovation and potential
is gonna be taken over again
and domesticated by powerful industry.
Well, even if Tim Wu's right, we have five years,
or 10 years, where we can deploy new technologies
that enable people to connect and do things
that nobody right now can imagine.
And it can topple governments as it did,
I don't wanna go all the way
to the Twitter-ended totalitarianism position,
but certainly these are tools that are potential
for people to begin to use, and we need more of them,
and we need better of them, better ones,
to begin to make people more responsible and connected.
So yeah, we need this code.
We need the right kind of code.
And we need code that thinks about how
it's gonna plug itself into waking the giant up
and letting the giant come to recognize
that it has a left hand and a right hand,
and it has to learn how to walk,
and it has to act in some way that's rational,
that isn't just crazy, the way that typically giants
waking up as sovereigns do crazy things.
Like, we gotta avoid that, but we have to wake up,
and this is gonna help us do it.
Man: Follow up, in Wired magazine
there was an article that there is a group
of hackers called Anonymous that announced
that they will do every Friday, this sort of attack
on government sites.
What do you think of this kind of strategy,
where there are programmers who just go to database
and delete data, the database of the whole organizations?
I mean, do you think this is a solution?
Larry: Yeah, so, you know, I might be wrong about this.
I might be wrong about everything, but this I'm really
pretty sure I might be wrong about.
So I don't want to assert anything strongly here.
But maybe to frame it like this.
I wanna believe, I wanna hope that we can make these changes
without violence, and I'm not gonna work for violence
of any kind, just not gonna work for it.
Might be that I have to give up,
and then violence has to come and do something,
but right now, I don't think we need violence.
And the Anonymous movement has done,
you know, Anonymous has done some pretty important things,
and it's quasi-violence in what they've done,
and I'm not criticizing that, god forbid,
no, I'm not criticizing Anonymous.
(audience laughter)
Joi: You just did.
Larry: But I don't think that the next step
should be blowing up ports, not that Anonymous
would do that, but blowing up ports,
or shutting down cities, I don't think that's,
I don't think we're there yet.
Ya know, I think we have a lot we can do
in the ordinary way to get Americans on the side
of this kind of reform.
And the strongest reason to argue for this
is there's an amazing poll done about the Occupy movement
at the end of December, December 15th of last year.
And this was after the Oakland events,
and there were some protests that were reported
as being violent protests.
And what was striking is thought the public support
for the message of the Occupy movement was as high
as it had ever been, the net support
for the Occupy movement had dropped dramatically
once it had begun to be perceived as using
these violent, violence as means.
So, I just don't think strategically
it's the right move right now.
And I don't wanna work for it.
I wanna work for the giant waking up
and doing what Jefferson said we could do,
alter or abolish our government.
I wanna do the altering part.
Joi: Jenny?
Jenny: Okay, we have one question from the Twitter feed,
from Steven Swain, I think it might be
at a good point in time.
How can education better model participatory democracy?
Fixing corruption isn't enough.
Must equip the next generation.
Larry: Yeah, so, we have, my compensation
for giving this speech today what that I got to hear
about the projects going on in the Media Lab,
and so one of them was a project around
the central role that games will play
in education and understanding and training.
So I think education needs to game
the process of deliberative thinking.
And that means building these institutions
where people practice the art of reflecting
on what makes sense.
So in both of my books, I talk about the idea
of getting people to the position of supporting
a constitutional convention by running mock conventions.
And mock conventions means randomly selecting
250 people, putting them in a room over a weekend,
you give them information,
you let them deliberate about stuff.
If it's randomly selected and proportional,
what we know from the work of Jim Fishkin
and deliberative polling is that it will produce
amazing stuff, and indeed, this, I think,
is one of those rare sports where the amateur is better
than the professional, 'cause the professional politician
has built in this sixth sense
and awareness of what he can or can't do,
depending on his interests,
and the amateur is liberated from that.
Just thinks, well, what makes sense, what can I do?
And I think that if we could begin to build
the kind of convention in a box,
we drop it in schools all around the country,
it becomes a regular process,
where you have seniors or juniors in high school
engage in a practice of trying to reflect
and think about what, and we begin to collect them
and aggregate them and demonstrate
what amateur citizens, just citizens, can do.
If they think about these problems,
pretty quickly people will notice the solutions
that are produced in that environment
are orders of magnitude better
than the solutions produced by the professionals.
It is wildly out-classed by the amateur.
And I think once do that,
oops, battery went dead.
Okay, here I am back.
Once we do that, we can revive a sense
that just citizens can do something here.
So that's the education project I'd love to see supported.
Nahan: My name is Nahan Arulla and I am
a computer science grad student here,
and I work in two areas.
One is distributed systems and the other is data privacy.
And working in data privacy is a little bit frustrating,
because oftentimes users don't really care
that much about privacy and aren't willing
to take actions in that regard
until something really big happens.
And so, learning from that, I think,
is that in academics we have a lot of trouble
getting people to care about this kind of thing,
and I think there is an analogy
with caring about government.
And what I've seen really work in the private sector
is that, you know, you made a call to arms
for hackers and programmers to build some sort of system
to help people get engaged in government,
and I think, actually, what can be taken from
the tech sector is the ability to SEO,
or like optimize web pages, or get people to click.
It seems like what we really need is a PR movement
to get people to realize that they care
about their government.
Larry: Yeah, so first of all, I think your analogy
to data privacy is perfect, because people say
people don't care about data privacy,
but what that really means is, people kind of recognize
how hard it would be to do anything
about data privacy, and they say,
you know, to hell with it, I'll just go on,
live my life, not that I don't care about it,
and I wouldn't want a world where I could
do something about it, but I don't have that world,
and I've got kids, so I'm gonna go on.
But if we could structure it so that
they could do something about it,
then we'd really know, and that's the same thing
in the context of this politics issue.
So that's a perfect analogy.
And I agree, what we need is lots of great technical support
to figure out how to hack the solution
and get people engaged and do stuff about it.
But what's interesting is, there's a constant tension
between these things seeming professional
and seeming authentic.
And the, so, I showed you some pages from this thing,
this site we're gonna launch against,
the anti-corruption pledge dot org.
It was originally hacked together
by a bunch of Google engineers who said
we'd love to work on this project, give us something to do,
so I said, build this, and so in 10 seconds
they built this amazing site.
But it was, it had the aesthetic of Google engineers.
And it felt authentic.
And then the kind of professional people said,
well, we have to fancy it up.
So they built this really beautiful
way to interface with this.
And I'm constantly torn, because if people feel
like it's professional, will they wanna get engaged?
If they feel like it's amateur,
or you know, in that sense, completely voluntary,
will they be more engaged?
So I think that what we need in this respect
is lots of experimentation and lots of great data
to figure out what's working
and what actually recruits 30,000 or 311,000
or 30 million people to this.
And that's where a war room of activists
would really be quite powerful.
Because the current political activists,
you know, the people who ran Obama's campaign,
now run something called Blue State Digital.
They're fixed on what worked in 2008.
And the next generation of people,
the people who ran Avaaz, and had done
these amazing movements, they're using a new stage
of technology, but we've gotta think of a technology
that's gonna work in 2014 or 2020
and begin to push for that,
because it's gonna look very different
from what we've got right now.
Joi: So we only have around one minute left,
so I think, I'm sorry, this is gonna be the last question.
Apologies.
Andrew: Mr. Lessig, my name's Andrew Letitski,
I'm a journalist, author, and former diplomat,
and I admired the way you framed corruption
as a central challenge to be addressed.
But I would suggest another context
in which corruption can be viewed.
It's interesting to have you invoke Ronald Reagan
as a model of political cooperation
where 30 years ago, it was Reagan, in fact,
and his advisors at Chicago and, I might add,
here at MIT, that ushered in supply-side
neo-liberal economics, which marginalized
the role of government and potilized government,
the private sector in economic activity.
And the result of that model, 30 years later,
is a major recession, and sadly enough,
that recession hasn't been enough
to pose a challenge to this economic model.
And to contrast this model with that of countries in Europe,
such as Germany, Sweden, and Finland,
who have over decades, who have never adopted
neo-liberal economics, but over decades refined
the process of government and private sector collaboration.
They never really suffered a recession.
So maybe the issue of corruption may be framed
in more, more fully in this economic context.
Larry: So, I would still resist it.
I don't think it's fair to hold the Reagan frame
accountable for the corruption that was Wall Street.
The kind of de-regulation that the Reagan,
and of course, it was Carter before Reagan
who started the de-regulation,
but the de-regulation movement they started
would never have de-regulated the banks
the way the banks were de-regulated.
And remember, the big person pushing for de-regulation
of the banks was the Clinton administration.
And why did the Clinton administration
push so hard for this?
Because they saw they needed to raise
an endless amount of money to fight the Republicans
who had just taken control of Congress,
and this was the richest vein to tap.
Become as Republican with respect to financial regulation
as anybody could possibly be, and there was fighting
between the Republicans and Democrats
to de-regulate as much as possible.
And as that happens, the architects
of the Regan Revolution looked at it and said,
whoa, whoa, this is a little crazy,
this is a little crazy.
And so Boyden Gray, who was one of the chief deregulators,
I interviewed Boyden Gray for this book,
and he was like, yeah, that was insane.
It's insane what they did.
Nobody in our administration would have even begun
to talk about doing that kind of stuff.
So I, you know, I'm trying find a way
to make it possible, maybe this is artificial,
but I don't believe it, trying to make it possible
for people to have different political views
and to coexist with their different political views,
while still recognizing this common thing that's wrong.
And I'm kind of uniquely qualified for this
because when I was a kid, I was a right wing Republican.
Don't tell anybody, but when I was a kid,
so I was the youngest member of a delegation
in the 1980 Republican Convention.
I grew up, but that's who I was.
And so I think that I have a kind of sensibility,
sensitivity to how to think about,
and I want to engage that in a way
that makes it possible for me not to have to say
if you believe in less government, you're, ya know,
a criminal, or wrong, or evil.
I wanna persuade you that we need more equality,
we need better healthcare, I wanna persuade you of that,
but in a system we can trust.
We don't have that now.
And so I think all of us should be able to say
we need a system we can trust.
And when we have that system, then let's fight
about what the right answer is.
Joi: Thank you, Larry.
And just as we end, I just wanna make it clear
to whoever is my green card examiner,
I have some friends who are radicals.
I, myself, am not a radical.
(audience laughter)
But thank you, Larry, and just some logistical things.
If you could let Larry get un-miked
and get to the refreshments before you engage him,
then he can have something to drink,
but we'll be hanging out here for about half an hour,
so feel free to interact with Larry.
I'm assuming that that's okay
with you. -: I'd love to.
Thank you very much. -: Thank you, everybody.
(audience applause)