- From: Joseph M. Reagle Jr. <reagle@MIT.EDU>
- Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 21:30:10 -0400
- To: Larry Lessig <lessig@POBOX.COM>
- Cc: www-archive@w3.org, swick@w3.org
Hi Larry, I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to speak with you at the LCS talk. Interestingly, when I was in Asia at the beginning of the month, I thought I heard you'd be in the area, and when I was in Berlin last week, I heard the same, so perhaps were following the same paths but out of synch. I've been meaning to comment on the substance of your presentation but I've prolonged it sufficiently that I've probably lost the thread. In fact, a colleague noted it sounded like the same talk you gave at WWW9, so it's really been a year some ideas have been bouncing around. So I'll give it a quickie attempt. One of the things I've been meaning to write is why I'm not doing much policy anymore -- "comparative media analysis" is the new frontier! <smile/> Like any geek, I most enjoy analysis and learning, and policy/law was novel and rich with good interdisciplinary nutrients. However, there's a number of characteristics related to policy that are particularly frustrating: Each of these are a qualifier of an issue/argument: o Rat holes: not likely to resolve so that one feels a sense of reward or closure. o Religious: where discourse fails to acknowledge the differing first principles/assumptions upon which the argument forever dances. o Political: stated intentions of an argument are not true. These can characterize discussion in the technical domain as well. In fact, I only realized I wanted to define these things after bandying these terms around in that domain for so long that one day I asked myself, "what exactly do we mean?" However, they are endemic to the policy/legal domain. Those in "DC" are motivated by power and money: clearly political. Additionally, positions differ because of differing assumptions regardless of all the verbiage. And no matter how successful you are in a court decision or law, it can always be reversed: you have to be ever vigilant and become corrupt or bitter in the process. Compare this to the technical domain where if you write a spec or implement it, it's done and always will be done. Other things can come, but they don't really negate what you've done. The formal/explicit methods of technologists alleviate problems arising from obfuscated assumptions and intent. In your talk you ask technologists to be more active in the policy domain. And I can understand why many choose not. They can choose a domain of deceit and incompletion or live in a world with a sense of community, integrity, and satisfaction. You also mention that early architecture promoted freedom, but I sometimes wonder to what degree this was a fortuitous accident: grey beards might take too much credit. Freedom easily derived from end-to-end, decentralized, and simple architectures, but had freedom required *hard* work to happen, then we wouldn't have had it. In fact, when we look at the possibility of widely deployed crypto (complex), the point is proven. Principles of simple design and freedom conveniently occupied the same space. But the world is what we make it and monied interests are making much of the on-line world now and be it simple or complex, they fashion it to suit their own interests, and as I state in my anarchist paper, pithy maxims can not stand in the face of architecture and rule. I think we agree on this. But whether technologists should be repeating those maxims (and I actually think we have) to the policy makers, it's somewhat moot. I don't mean to say culture is unimportant, it's critical, but legal culture trumps in the legal domain -- and while I hope we preserve geek/freedom culture in the techie domain, I doubt it's efficacy elsewhere. They were novel when the Net was new, but now they can be brushed aside. Think of these maxims as memes and consider that power and money can coerce the memes of "thou shall not kill" into "kill them all, and let God sort them out" or "freedom and justice for all" into Kissinger's "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." On-line, Rotenberg et al were right to point out privacy is only a "preference" but IPR is a "right." DCMA focused on prohibiting technology that might be used to copy, but consider the alternative of prohibiting technology that might prevent fair-use! So, I'm still informally active in politics/policy because I still enjoy the visceral pleasure of interdisciplinarism, and I enjoy flipping the system the bird. And I'm pessimistic like you, most of my early 90 cypher punk expectations never panned out and open source and free software is one of the few good things to happen. However, I do question the efficacy of advocating technologists spending their time quoting pithy maxims against monied interests when the could be writing code -- because their corporate colleagues (or with their own jobbing hat on) are now out-coding them in their own domain. In the great tradition of civil disobedience we should each simply ignore, break, and flow around what those in DC do, and build what makes us happy. We should keep our culture strong, and code like the wind. And a few with strong stomachs and great patience might engage the lawyers, and they're invaluable and brave souls for it, but I don't see that as the solution. -- Regards, http://www.mit.edu/~reagle/ Joseph Reagle E0 D5 B2 05 B6 12 DA 65 BE 4D E3 C1 6A 66 25 4E MIT LCS Research Engineer at the World Wide Web Consortium. * This email is from an independent academic account and is not necessarily representative of my affiliations.
Received on Thursday, 31 May 2001 21:30:17 UTC