Rational Points on a Napkin

Lessig's Speech at iSummit '07

Upon discussion with my friends, I have finally posted Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig's speech at the iCommons iSummit this summer. It is an eloquent speech where he begins with the question of respect for the Open Culture movement and the difference between the "commercial economy" and the "sharing economy." The last five minutes of the speech contain his declaration for the next 10 years of his life, to devote himself to corruption, what he calls the "economy of influence."

Conservative and Liberal Are No Longer Relevant

In the past year, my eyes have been opened to corruption, not as a part of our system, which we can find a way to cut out, but as an inseparable weave of the whole. This perspective has come from conversations with others, including in The Wealth of Networks, in my Assignment Zero interview with a State Representative of Utah, and in conversations with colleagues. For me, this is the most important problem worth considering when talking about our political system and issues in the upcoming election. Lawrence Lessig, in his post about Clinton and the problems with her connection to lobbyists, distinguishes between two forms of corruption..."not corruption in the bribe sense. But corruption in the economy of influence sense I've described before." I also am choosing this latter sense and would like to distinguish this form of corruption as something that cannot be used in a partisan sense.

Our current distinctions about politicians or political organizations do not allow us to get to the real problem that is plaguing the ideals of this country and our practical spaces for taking care of these ethics. We label people as conservative or a liberal or a moderate. This labels them as "good" or "evil," based on our check mark for a party affiliation on our voter registration sheet. However, this labelling is misleading and disorients us from actually good and bad politicians. My definition of a good politician is that person whose practices enrich the Commons. A bad politician is the opposite: a person whose practices pillage the Commons.

An example of enriching our Communal spaces: A politician who sees him/herself as a provider to his customers (the citizens who elect them) and continually works to refine and improve his service to them. An inspirational example for me is again Steve Urquhart, Republican State Congressman of Utah (see above for link).

An example of pillaging the Commons: using our Communal spaces, such as our natural resources, which we all own, and producing a toxic product that we pay you for while adding pollutants into our Communal space.

In order to deal with these problems, we can redistinguish our wastes. And that comes to moving from, "I support liberals" or "I support conservatives," to "I support those politicians that will take care of the Communal spaces we share."

"Being and Time" going online

Hubert Dreyfus is teaching his bi-annual course on Heidegger's "Being and Time." And he is podcasting his lectures, which will appear online several days after his course. You can find the syllabus to the course here, and if are a gung-ho on phenomenology, you can follow along.

Update: You can also find the podcasts on iTunes at iTunes U in the UC Berkeley's Arts and Humanities section.

Our Bodies, Democracy, and Entertainment as Historical Phenomena

I picked up a book last week that I had purchased a while ago on a whim and which has been sitting on my bookcase ever since. Love, Sex, & Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives by Simon Goldhill is a book that opens up many different aspects of our lives to the historical phenomena that they are. He claims that such things as the Western world's image of the perfect male body, marriage, democracy (as crazy as that might seem), and entertainment can find interesting roots and reflections when one looks at Ancient Greece and Rome.

Aspects of my life that I had seen as fixed transcendental truths and "shoulds" were fanned out over a historical period. For example, marriage for me has been "the thing people do." Goldhill opened this to question by first showing Greeks understanding of marriage as a civic duty which should be devoid of lust, and then early Christianity's take on it where marriage was less godly than abstinence but a necessary invention for those who must fornicate. Marriage was no longer a permanent, fixed, ahistorical "thing," but habits, customs, and practices from our pasts that can be explored and questioned and reshaped as we see fit.

It has been a fun and easy read that have broken some certainties in my life, and brought many more interesting questions.

A Personal Experience in Regulating By Architecture

As you can see from a previous post, I finished Lessig's Code 2.0 about a month ago. In the book, he made the distinctions of four different modes of regulation: law, market, norms, and architecture. These distinctions have been interesting for me and have brought a new observer, one instance which I plan to show in this post.

I live in a three-story, two-unit, 13-person house. Crazy? A little. But over time, we have all built different practices for respecting the diverse standards of others while producing an environment that is acceptable to everyone. Anyway, Lessig's distinctions brought an interesting observer to a new episode at the house. With so many people moving in and out of the house, ranging in age from 19 to 28, each with a different standard of security, there has always been some uncertainty as to whether the door is locked at night or not.

Recently, the landlord, who lives with us, decided to eliminate this uncertainty by changing all doors to automatic locks with the turnover of tenants. Before the change, I didn't have much of a problem with it, but I also hadn't thought much about the consequences of such a change.

However, the moment that the door knobs changed, my and the other tenants' relation with the outside world and that threshold changed. Previously, if we wanted to go stand out in the sun for a moment, step outside to bring the trash out front, or take a phone call in private on the deck, we could do so transparently.

Now, however, we need to carry keys all the time or be wary never to step outside the house by accident. The doorway has become a barrier across a once fluid threshold. We have traded some freedom for "100% security".

Now the landlord could have handled this door in several different ways. He could have written a tenant agreement where we were all responsible for locking the door when leaving the property. Or he could have reminded us of our legal and financial responsibility for the furniture in the house. But the automatic locking door was easier and more efficient than in training people to build new practices. However, I don't think it was the right change. We now have no choice in whether the door can be unlocked or not and the change has disappeared some of our responsibility and capacity to build the community that we would like to live in.

It was a very interesting experience in how architectural changes can immediately and rigidly affect the possibilities of a community.

Update: The house offered two solutions to handle the inconvenience caused by the door. One was to hide a key outdoors in case someone gets locked out while no one else is home. This resolution, while taking care of the extreme circumstances of being locked out, does not decrease much of the restraint people feel to crossing the threshold freely. The other practice that we have now adopted is pretty much to keep the door propped up all day. Now the barrier has decreased quite a bit along with security. But people prefer the decreased security to the automatically locking door. Now, it seems to me that we both have less security and more of a barrier than if we had left the doorknob as it was.

Glimpses Towards the Fragile "We"

In the last couple of years, I have begin to think of human beings as historical, biological beings that are structurally-coupled to others and their environment. (Read Maturana and Varela's Tree of Knowledge for more.) This conviction has dissolved my attachment to a transcendental truth and brought a new sense of tolerance. As our truths and values are historical, formed in our billions of year history and our social linguistic relations with other humans since language, we each are different historical beings.

While I have developed this new appreciation of myself as one of a whole, I have had a different breakdown. If everything is historical, and each individual's values are neither right or wrong against a "perfect" measure, then I fall into a relativistic stance. Does my story lead me to a sanction a mass murder or racial discrimination just because someone has a different historical background? How does one build and live in a communal shared world with others in this context?

I asked this question of my friend and mentor Guillermo and he said, "Your struggle with this story comes from you always thinking about these issues from the individualistic perspective. That's why for you subjectivity exists and for me it doesn't. For me, there is a historical phenomenon in which an individual shows up and dies and gets a little piece of the story." And he suggested I read Lawrence Vogel's The Fragile "We": Ethical Implications of Heidegger's "Being and Time". In the book, Vogel explores three different interpretations of morality possible from Heidegger's Being and Time and what that means for the relation between individual and society.

I still haven't finished it, but as I read, I think part of my resolution to my relativism/subjectivity dilemma will be in letting go of the "I" and this book is giving me glimpses into a new way of doing that. The question of how do I build a communal world with others if we each are different historical beings is the wrong question. I am not "I" separate from my social historical world. I do not "decide" what moral values I should have. My social world makes certain actions moral or immoral and I become who I am only in this context.

Now what about Heidegger's call to be "authentic," which I find to be valuable? Vogel writes, "To be authentic is to open up to the absence of any universal, nonhistorical directive governing who we ought to be," and "authenticity makes possible `liberating solicitude': an orientation in which one is able `to become the conscience of Others' by `letting them be free of their own possibilities.'" He also writes about morality, saying, "A moral code or principle would alleviate the anxiety one feels in becoming aware that one's possibilities are not grounded in any absolute, nonhistorical foundation." Morality keeps up settled in the notion that there is a transcendental truth and produces an inauthentic being. But both our moments of morality and moments of authenticity come from conversations with Others. One can only be authentic if first one is introduced to the distinction by Others; and our moments of unsettlement-towards-authenticity happen in conversations when Others show us where we are blind to our attachments.

As I write this post and read the book, I grasp and lose this new relation I could have with myself and others. Glimpses into letting go of a deceivingly stable "I" and embracing a flowing, moving "We."

Code 2.0 and The Constraints on Liberty

I finally read all of Lawrence Lessig's Code 2.0. It was a brilliant book. Lessig shows how the Internet is moving from a "space beyond regulation" to the most regulable space we have every had. He also shows how the new technology is producing "latent ambiguities" or questions of value that our Constitution never addressed due to the technological space of the day. (I will have another post about this soon.) And he ends with why we are stuck as a society to make choices about what values we will carry into the future, and what can be done about it.

Below, and in future posts, I'm going to write on a few things that struck me from the book. I'm sure there are many experts that have given more insightful reviews of the book than I will do here, but I don't pretend to be a lawyer, a hacker, or an expert in this domain. I plan to just show who I am and how this book has shaped and changed my world.

First, I suggest reading Chapter 7 (beginning on page 120) of the book, if you don't read anything else. A CC-licensed downloadable pdf version is here. This chapter is about liberty and what things constrain our liberty.

Lessig brings forth four modes of regulation on our liberties:

• The Law


• The Market


• Norms


• and Architecture.

The same constraint can be obtained through any of the four modalities or a combination of them. An example Lessig gives is smoking. The law can make it illegal to buy cigarettes under the age of 18; norms can regulate smoking by making it rude to light up a cigarette in the car without asking permission first; the market regulates through price and quality; and the architecture of cigarettes, such as nicotine-treated versus smokeless ones, offer different levels of constraint. If a modality decreases our choice in this example, it constrains us more. And we work through these modalities. If we want people to smoke less, we can pass a law that places a higher tax on cigarettes, increasing market price.

These four modalities shape the constraints and freedoms in cyberspace. A major difference to physical space is that the architecture of the Internet, the code, is a much more powerful regulator of liberty than real space architecture. Architecture is a constraint that is in place before we arrive at a site. If AOL has complaints from its online community about foul language in forums, the programmers can easily write some code to begin tracking the conversations in its forums. If China wants to prevent certain images or sites from appearing on Google, a few programmers can write some code. Every space on the Internet regulates through code and it is happening quite often in an intransparent way. Governments and companies can indirectly regulate us through code, indirect regulation being that we won't know "who" is regualting is. Also, if the code is closed source, we (or at least the small part of the national community that understands and builds code) will not be able to see how this code regulates.

I want to end by saying that I have found Lessig's distinctions useful not just with the Internet but in my political conversations with others. First, while libertarians and some conservatives are concerned with government as "the threat to liberty," liberals are concerned with the market. But by remaining stuck in vilifying one entity as the transcendental threat -- the "evil corporation" or the "big bureacracy" -- we miss the whole. And finally, transparency is the key. As Lessig said, "If transparency is a value in constitutional government, indirection is its enemy. It confuses responsibility and hence confuses politics."

Obama Requests Democratic Debates Go CC

I found this article on digg about Obama requesting for the recent debates to be licensed under a Creative Commons License. Super cool.

The "past exonerative"

A short article from Wednesday's New York Times about a style which takes responsibility out of the game.

Labels: politics

Approach to Blogging

Here is an interview with Fernando Flores about his approach to blogging. He has a different approach to blogging than I have seen. What possibilities does this style bring? Is it powerful? useful? (And what do I mean by those distinctions?)