This is a video by a law scholar from Standford, Lawrence Lessig. He is pretty famous in law and communications for his work on copyright and culture in the changing technology environment. But after his last book he decided to change his research focus to figuring out where our *system* of government fails. What he comes up with is the corruption of basically good people via an inherently flawed system of corporate interference in campaign and policy-making processes. Now he is considering actually running for a congressional seat in California, but my point here is that he addresses so clearly our problems of governance at the structural level. And this is exactly what I see in Obama that I see in no other candidate: the glimmer, even if at the rhetorical level, of recognition that the wheels fell off a long time ago and the system itself needs an overhaul. What I like about this video is the Lessig spells out how he thinks it might be done. Maybe he’s right, maybe not, but calling it out feels like a big step to me.
I got fired up tonight for some reason.
