shouting loudly

Taming Tigers: Will Lessig Be Eaten?

Lawrence Lessig’s switch from copyfighting to fighting political corruption has made huge waves among copyright activists, many of whom were first driven to action by Lessig’s writings. I instantly agreed with his premises and thus supported his switch (ditto Ed Baker’s quieter, impending switch from focusing on media policy to building theories of equality), but ironically, I had not yet thought about what it would mean to him personally.

That changed just now.

In his laudatory discussion of Robert Reich’s book, Supercapitalism, Lessig compares corporations to tigers. We may love and respect the species, but we have to recognize its nature–for instance, not putting one’s child in a tiger’s cage and blaming the animal for not behaving responsibly around children.

Likewise, corporations are profit-maximizing machines. We must act accordingly, deploying policies that limit their ability to make profits at the expense of broader social welfare. This seems obvious, but the rhetoric of corporate responsibility–in lieu of meaninful regulation–has actually served an important role in justifying an ever-smaller role for government.

Starting with the tiger metaphor, commenter HH asks what this shift to fighting corruption will mean for Lessig the person:

Professor Lessig has begun a journey from which he cannot honorably retreat, and this will lead to one or more moments of personal crisis. At some level, he must recognize that the corporations will strike back at him once it becomes clear that he intends to restrict their freedom of action. These are very smart tigers, and some of them have developed a taste for eating children. …

When the corporations come after Larry Lessig, they will do it with a vengance. They may get him thrown out of Stanford, which, like most universities, is ultimately run by cowardly fund raisers. They will attack him personally through proxies, and they will attempt to demonize him politically as a kind of Emmanuel Goldstein of the Academic Left. …

Lessig’s willingness to enter this lion’s den is what will attract people to him. He is splendidly equipped as an intellectual, an advocate, and a scholar to be the tip of the spear that slays the plutocratic dragons fouling world society. Many are willing to lift this spear.

Lessig has already been savagely attacked in proportion to his visibility. In particular, the right has dusted off a plethora of anti-communist slurs, feeding off his advocacy for the dot.commons. If he makes particularly controversial claims, he may become the subject of massive personal attacks, some hysterical, others coldly systematic.