Against Lessig: The perils of faith in government
Tuesday, 13 October 2009
This week’s New Republic features Larry Lessig’s new screed Against Transparency: The perils of openness in government.
The essay is approximately a jillion words long and doesn’t make any sense. As best as I can tell, here are its salient points:
1. Transparency will negatively impact “faith in our political system.”
2. You see, sometimes people use information in ways I don’t want them to.
3. For instance, if you “observed” that someone made a large contribution to a Senator before he voted in their favor, you might conclude that he’d been bought off. But you don’t know that for sure!
4. In fact, using “information,” you could quite plausibly conclude that Hillary Clinton was corrupt. What an unacceptable conclusion!
5. Something about the JAMA.
6. Craigslist and/or the internet killed newspapers.
7. Craigslist and/or the internet killed the music industry.
8. Did I mention that I support Voluntary [sic] Collective Licensing? It has nothing to do with my main thesis, but I’d like to give it a plug.
9. Drug development is expensive.
10. Publicly-funded elections (for which I founded an advocacy organization, but I’m not going to bother to mention that) would give people the impression that their Congressional representatives are trustworthy.
11. In fact, publicly-funded elections can be seen as the political equivalent of Voluntary [sic] Collective Licensing, which I’d like to plug again.
12. Even though it’s impossible to dislike Craigslist, I sort of dislike Craigslist. Damn you, Craig, for not warning us that you were going to put newspapers out of business! That was the only place I could get an accurate horoscope!
13. Swamps smell bad.
14. Therefore, transparency is no good! Voluntary [sic] Collective Licensing is good! Publicly-funded elections are awesome!
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It is hard to find a common thread here (other than Voluntary [sic] Collective Licensing), but if I had to guess I’d say that Lessig’s intent is to maintain “faith in our political system.”
Lessig obviously has such faith, as you’d be hard-pressed to believe “there’s no personal corruption [in Congress]” based on evidence or reason or transparency. I don’t really get why New Republic lets him proselytize, though.
