Lawrence Lessig –founder of the Creative Commons, board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all around kickass dude, and one of my heroes–has just climbed like fifteen hundred notches on my scale of awesome by turning his attentions from fighting for copyright reform, to fighting for government reform. From Wired.com:
“The problem we face is … the problem of crony capitalism using money to capture government,” he said on Monday during the launch of his project in Washington, DC. “The challenge is whether in fact we can change this. The political experts tell you that it can’t be done, that process always win over substance.”
As such, he and Joe Trippi have founded The Change Congress Project, which aims to bring an unprecedented degree of transparency to politics. A short piece by Lessig himself, outlining his intentions with this project, can be found here. This is a perfect example of how technology, properly wielded in the hands of many, can and will bring transparency and accountability to the opaque back-room-deal-type of politics that we’re unfortunately used to, and which so many of us abhor. I think one of the biggest trends of the coming decade or so is going to be the disruptive effect of technology and communications on politics in the US and worldwide, an analogous situation to how technology has disrupted the entertainment industry over the past ten years or so. We’re going to start seeing a lot more politicians being on the up-and-up, because they won’t have a choice, they will be under too much scrutiny.