Yesterday I attended Lawrence Lessig’s last lecture in Palo Alto. On the one hand I was sad to see him move from public domain and copyright to the easier and more obvious issue of political corruption. On the other hand I was just happy to be there to witness his last “pie in the sky” speech and drink in the optimism.
A GREAT SPEAKER
Long ago, in my life as a political speech writer I dreamt of producing the speech that rallied the movement. Twice I delivered speeches while chained to welfare offices, but for the most part I wrote handshake speeches for centres of excellence. It was depressing.
When you’ve obsessed on the cadence of the Beats, and studied Jesse Jackson’s sermons, and memorized “I Have a Dream”, you don’t want to be peppering your speeches with Dale Carnegie quotes and Whitney Houston sound bites. Maybe the children are our future, but if we keep filling their heads with bullshit clichés, the future is going to be pretty bleak.
Lessig is in so many ways, the “I Have a Dream”-er of the free culture movement. Listening to him, in a room full of cyberpunks, film makers, writers, business men and civil rights lawyers, I can’t help feeling like I am a part of something great - something democratic.
Lessig rallies a movement in words that are accessible, honest and tangible. He’s protecting your right to create and distribute without being bullied by monopolies. Moreover, he’s ensuring that works of genius add to the public body of knowledge. He’s ensuring that the public and the public’s kids don’t turn into a bunch of dancing meat puppets.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE
The proprietary-model corporations are paying attention to Lessig and free culture. Think about it. The Linux and Mozilla Project camps have always asserted that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” and it’s true. When you move this volunteer contributory model over to the user-generated likes of Wikipedia you can see how a noble vision can become a noble reality.
So the proprietary camps steal messaging from the free culture side and try to harness the power of the crowds. Corporate PR often feeds journalists confusing info and I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve seen open API mistakenly interchanged for open source. I don’t blame them. I’ve seen open source coders belittle questions and evangelists deliver convoluted Buddhist sutras rather than answers. It’s frustrating. There are hundreds of free speech activists left over from the sixties retired and reminiscing over cappuccinos because they just can’t see the link between free culture online and free culture offline. Why are we all such a bunch of atomized self-serving buttheads?
THE RALLY
If we’re going to keep a noble vision alive - one where indie art, DIY life and free speech reigns supreme, then we’re going to need each other. Movements don’t happen amongst homogenous groups. The civil rights movement didn’t happen because a bunch of kids grew out their hair and sang kumbaya. Half of the movement was there for the drugs and I suspect half of the free culture movement are here for the free downloads. It’s always been simpler for the other side to come up with a clear message. They have money. Voice and power require money; therefore, they deserve all the voice and power.
We don’t have money. And dare I say it, most of us aren’t in it for the money. Free culture is the same movement as the civil rights movement of the sixties. We need to kumbaya alongside collage artists, deejays, indie pornographers, Christian bloggers, war footage podcasters, feminist photographers and volunteer coders even if we think they totally suck. We are protecting our right to suck, our right to distribute each other’s suck and our right to be credited for the suck.
