Is Lessig the next Reverend Wright (and a communist, and an orwellian, and…)
Will Lawrence Lessig and the Free Culture movement become a political liability?
Ever since Lawrence Lessig emerged into the public sphere, there have been whispers among fringe critics that his ideology is just info-communism, but it looks like the innovators over at Red State have managed to create a new charge against Lessig: anti-christian.
It all started with a Keynote. As part of Lawrence Lessig’s iconic Free Culture talks, there’s a montage of clips showing off some of the funniest moments of remix culture, including video from the left, the right, and the absurd. Several months ago, as he wound down his focus on Free Culture, and prepared to shift his focus to the corruption of political culture, he began to add several more videos to this series, including a short film by “guerilla filmmaker” Javier Brato featuring Jesus in a diaper lipsyncing Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive, and well…
This video has been in many of his most recent talks, including his talk in the Authors @ Google series, the footage of which (of course) was put up on YouTube.
Enter Barack Obama. Obama used to teach Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School along with Lawrence Lessig, who began teaching at UChicago after clerking for the legendary jurist (and fellow Chicago faculty member) Richard Posner. In addition to advocating for Free Culture, network neutrality, and a host of other tech-centric policies, Lessig has recently become one of the most vocal supporters of Barack Obama, releasing a series of videos on his support of Barack Obama (which lay out some of the most interesting intellectual arguments in support of any candidate I’ve ever seen).
Lessig has become a pretty high profile public intellectual, particularly in the technology, and his support of Obama only has elevated Lessig further.
On April 21st, RedState, a conservative blog network, made a high profile post about Lessig, his support for Google and Obama, and his “anti-christian stance”, which also immediately urged readers to call the Senate Commerce Committee and ask them to stop Lessig from testifying on network neutrality the next day (this tactic, which I frankly consider to be brilliant, deserves a post in its own right).
Could this be the start of a new trend – quite possibly. The following week, the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a right-leaning technology policy think tank released a report entitled Tragedy and Farce: An Analysis of the Book Free Culture (and a fantastically titled accompanying press release: “Free Culture” Akin to “Quasi-Socialist Utopianism”), charging that Lessig advocates that the United States should move to a Soviet Union style system for information policy, and promising that this is merely the opening salvo in their criticism of Lessig’s works.
Could this be the intellectual run-up to halt Lessig’s Change Congress project? Perhaps, though it’s more likely that it’s a growing movement designed to curb Lessig’s influence on shaping tech industry policy as a whole, not to tie him to the Obama campaign and try to use him to sink the ship.
Additional coverage:
Ars Technica - Lessig, Google, Obama, and Jesus: a net neutrality mash-up
Ars Technica – Is Lessig’s Free Culture Just a Modern Das Kopyright?
[...] mudwhistle wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptEnter Barack Obama. Obama used to teach Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School along with Lawrence Lessig, who began teaching at UChicago after clerking for the legendary jurist (and fellow Chicago faculty member) … [...]