Monday, February 02, 2009
Scott McCloud at TED
Scott McCloud, who understands comics better than anyone, gave a recent TED talk in which he explained comics while demonstrating how they work. It's a lot of fun.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Cory Doctorow: Little Brother
's Little Brother is a fun, modern, flashy, but stark warning in the vein of Lewis' classic It Can't Happen Here. Like 's The Execution Channel from last year, it takes place in the current anti-terror climate, but focuses more on the consequences and costs of the resulting repression and shows how we (or at least those with a connection to technology and time on their hands, meaning smart high school kids) might fight back.
even has an afterword from Bruce Schneier and a bibliography to underline the fact that technologies for privacy are available and urging people to do more to prepare for the resistance now. Since I can attest that all the technology in the book is either available or easily developed, the book has to be placed in the future history category to qualify as science fiction. It has been nominated for this year's Prometheus and I'd have to say it's the best candidate I've read so far.
The story is told from the point of view of a small group of teenagers in San Francisco who are imprisoned by DHS in a general sweep after a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge and BART tunnel. Once they are released, they (principally Marcus Yallow, a hacker and LARP player) work to undermine the terrorist state and build tools that their friends can use to communicate privately and organize out of the government's sight. There are enough details about what tools they build and what systems they compromise to serve as an outline for budding hackers who aren't sure how to fight back. These details occasionally intrude into the story in the form of Marcus explaining things to his audience, but I think readers for whom they aren't obvious will take it as necessary background.
The story also shows clearly how torture can come about, and without taking their viewpoint makes the actions and motivations of the guards and torturers believable. Marcus and his friends react to their harsh imprisonment in a variety of ways, just as the people on the outside react to the increasing repression differently. It's not surprising that kids in school (who are used to hiding some of their activities from their parents and teachers) adapt readily to using surreptitious means to hide from DHS as well.
The story doesn't have a young-adult feel; even though the protagonists are mainly teenagers, the story is told with an adult sensibility. Being youngsters, has plenty of opportunity to show them growing intellectually and emotionally. The characters are well filled out, and have appropriate conflicts that drive the story. The story is exciting and well motivated. Marcus starts working with a journalist early enough in the story that her role in the denouement isn't a surprise. And compared to the Queen's similar role in 's Half a Crown, it seems completely plausible.
I really enjoyed this book. It had some of the flavor of 's Fast Times at Fairmont High, without being as far ahead of the curve, and gave an exciting depiction of the fight against an enveloping tyranny (harking back to The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) along with a concrete vision of how and why we'd fight back set in an all-too-plausible near future.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Jo Walton: Half a Crown
's Half a Crown completes her "Small Change" series with a distinctly different ending. The second novel in the trilogy, Ha'Penny, was a co-winner of last year's Prometheus Award.
Small Change is an alternate history in which Britain made peace with Hitler and itself moved toward fascism. The story follows Peter Carmichael, a police inspector in the first novel, now head of Britain's Secret Police, The Watch. Carmichael is gay, and this fact is being used by his superiors to keep him in line. But they don't seem to know that Carmichael has been secretly operating an underground railroad from inside The Watch. In Half a Crown, Carmichael additionally struggles to deal with the troubles of his protege Elvira Royston, a debutante planning for her presentation to the Queen. Elvira accompanies a friend to a political rally to watch the parades, and is rounded up along with the provocateurs after a riot erupts. The government decides to make an example of the provocateurs and Carmichael has to scramble to extract Elvira from the mess at great cost to himself and his friends.
The books provide a clear depiction of innocent well-meaning people getting caught up in a totalitarian struggle, and having to choose which of the things they value they will work to preserve and at what cost to their other values and to the rest of society. The first two books had downbeat endings, as Carmichael and others gave in on major issues that allowed the totalitarian government to take power in order to preserve a small amount of personal autonomy. This third book has the same feeling most of the way, but in the end Elvira finds a way to turn the tables and expose the machinations that led to the government takeover. I don't know if Britain's government really would work the way portrays it, but as an American, it felt like deus ex machina.
The characterization is interesting. We've come to know Carmichael from the previous books, and his motivations (protecting both his lover Jack and Elvira, furthering the secret projects that allow some people to escape) are clear and well established. Elvira is a newcomer to the story, and demonstrates her thinking and motivations clearly in alternating chapters that Elvira tells in the first person. The others, which mostly follow Carmichael, are given in third person, which allows to follow other characters when necessary.
Half a Crown has been nominated for this year's Prometheus, and it's a strong candidate. The application to libertarianism is clear, but I think there are other books which will do better. Little Brother seems a more powerful cautionary tale along the lines of It Can't Happen Here, though I'm not quite finished with it yet. The book is well written, and my only complaint is that the happy ending seemed forced. I don't think dystopias have to end in a downbeat to be effective, but the total collapse of Britain's fascist government seemed to run against a lot of previous description showing how that the government had co-opted most of the country's leaders and that the institutionalized prejudices were in harmony with those of the populace who were learning to get along with the other consequences of institutionalized repression. The quick turnaround in response to a single speech was a surprise. This is, after all, still an alternate history in which the Germans and the Japanese have taken over two thirds of the globe. Britain will have to figure out how to co-exist with an external world dominated by fascism.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Diane Coyle, The Soulful Science
's goal in writing The Soulful Science was to explain why economics is relevant and to convince readers that the bad rap that economics seems to carry is undeserved. She argues that modern economics studies important topics like the causes of growth and of happiness, and thereby provides important clues as to how we can relieve poverty and increase personal well-being. I think the book is a good introduction to the economic way of thinking that might draw a more humanistic audience into the field.
's approach is non-technical and engaging. The book has only a few graphs and charts, and I don't remember seeing any equations. tells the story of the people who made the advances that interest her and what their results imply about how we should organize society, what society can and cannot accomplish, and how these advances in knowledge affect our lives.
The first two-thirds of the book contains most of the meat. Part one talks about what economists have learned over the last several decades about what makes economies grow, and by implication, what we can do to reduce poverty where growth is still sparse. She starts out this section with a chapter extolling the virtues of the economic historians who have dug into obscure archives and surprising sources to collect detailed data about how people lived before record keeping was as persistent and consistent as it has become. This work required a fair bit of inference and a lot of perseverance, but in the end, we have a good view of how well people got on in different times and places. This data can tell us a lot about how quickly growth occurred in different circumstances. From this we can deduce a fair bit about when and where progress flowered, which shows some facts that seem to nearly always be true beforehand. (Protection of property rights, respect for education) But the inconsistencies; other societies that seem to have all the prerequisites, but don't enjoy the growth that occurred elsewhere show that it's an incomplete model.
In her chapter on alleviating poverty, admits that we don't have a formula that works reliably, but argues that we have identified some policies that are worth encouraging and we have learned about some approaches that don't work. If developmental economists and leaders of underdeveloped countries pay attention to these lessons they'll be able to lay some groundwork that will put them in a better position to take action as we continue to learn more. It'll also stop people from hoping for quick results from ideas that we now know don't work (natural resource discovery and exploitation seldom leads to improved living conditions for the populace.)
The second part of the book focuses on people, usually the province of microeconomics. But focuses instead on recent advance in personal happiness and work on rationality and biases. She does a thorough job of presenting an overview of the implications of recent research for how to live your life, and on what interventions actually make people happier. She also talks about how people behave in markets, and what the economists have figured out about our behavior based on theory and experiment. Theory has filled in the consequences of asymmetrical information: how it affects negotiations and outcomes, and how people gain an advantage in business or politics by controlling access to information. Experimental economics has taught us a lot both about how people actually act in market environments as well as what kinds of institutions and frameworks make markets more effective at allocating goods and how to reduce undesired outcomes like pollution.
The final section addresses larger topics that have been attracting economists' attention recently: how evolutionary and chaos theory can be used to enhance classical economics' approach to the emergence of behavior from collections of interacting agents, and public choice theory's observations about how incentives on bureaucrats as individuals reduce the effectiveness of government as a tool for effecting change. This section is interesting, but doesn't get into a lot of detail.
Overall, The Soulful Science is a well-written non-technical introduction to the most interesting fields in modern economics. is an insider and quite familiar with the personalities in the field and she presents recent findings well while giving a sense of how economists work together to develop and explore these ideas.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Charles Murray: Human Accomplishment
Human Accomplishment is 's attempt to catalog and explain the highest achievements in the arts and sciences that people have produced. He says his yardstick is the things that humanity would be able to brag about if we were putting together a resume, but he includes scientific discoveries which any advanced species would have made along with the heights of poetry, composition, and painting.
The book quantifies and compares the contributions of individuals, fields of endeavor, countries, and regions, and points out some consistent features of the data like the prominence of men and the paucity of identifiable contributions from Asia. At the end of the book he makes some generalizations about what kinds of environments led to increases and decreases in the amount of great work that was done.
While the book is nearly 700 pages, more than 200 pages of it is contributed by the appendices, notes, index, and front-matter. At least another 75 pages are made up by tables and itemized listings of major contributions by field. In addition, the prose is scattered with frequent tables, graphs and asides (in white text on dark blue so you can't miss the fact that you are welcome to skip them.) So it's not as long a read as it appears, but it's still substantial.
's methodology in identifying the accomplishments that stand out was to survey many encyclopedic works. For the most part, he found in nearly all fields which were covered by a substantial number of such books that there was a lot of overlap and consistency among them. This allowed him to declare that he would only include in his survey achievements that were recognized widely, that he would exclude compendiums that didn't overlap substantially with other works purporting to be in the same field, and that fields that weren't covered by at least a handful of broad overlapping surveys would be omitted from the results.
He ends up with substantial reviews of 8 fields in science and technology; separate inventories for philosophy from China, India, and the West; for the visual arts from China, Japan, and the West, and for Literature from the Arab world in addition to the four regions mentioned previously. The arts are divided regionally because otherwise the contributions from the Arabs or the East would be swamped by those of the West. In each of the regional breakdowns, the West contributed substantially more (4x-10x) than any other region. Murray spends some time showing that this probably isn't due to his lack of familiarity with these regions or the languages in which the histories are written. (Part of the justification is that the disparity holds similarly in the scientific inventory for which there are firmer criteria for inclusion and a general agreement about which accomplishments count, even among those who want to claim minorities are under-represented in the listings.) also spends some time speculating about why there's such a disparity in contributions.
There were few surprises for me in the actual lists. There were only a couple of cases where I didn't recognize one of the top few contributors in a scientific field, even though there were many cases where I wouldn't have been able to name their contribution. There have been a couple of occasions to cross-reference names I've come across in recent reading. For instance, Lope de Vega was a prominent character in Harry Turtledove's Rule Brittania, which I reviewed recently. I didn't realize until I was reading Murray's 1-page summary of the heights of Western literature that de Vega was based on a real author from that period (though not quite significant enough to make the list of Significant Figures in Western literature in Appendix 5.) I also referred to the lists of Chinese notables while reading The Early Chinese Empires.
The most important conclusion to draw from the book is that accomplishment is unevenly spread. Most people who have given even cursory thought to the subject have noticed that there's an exponential distribution of achievements across fields and across time. Practically no matter what criteria you come up with to measure achievement, you'll find there's a high peak and a consistent, rapid drop-off in people's abilities. The best athletes are as much above their competitors as the best scientists and the best writers.
's book gives us the opportunity to savor the best and the brightest.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Allen Steele: Coyote
's Coyote was nominated for the Prometheus award when it appeared in 2002, but somehow I missed reading it at the time. This year, it was nominated for the Hall of Fame award, which gave me a second chance to read it. Since I had read the follow-up novel Coyote Rising when it came out in 2004, I already knew something about how things turn out, but Coyote Rising takes place long enough afterward that only a couple of characters carry over, and they have a lifetime of hardship between their two appearances. The story appeared as a series of short stories before publication as a novel, but for the most part this isn't very noticeable since the story proceeds reasonably through quite different venues, and the character continuity is unbroken.
In Coyote, the US has become the totalitarian United Republic of America, and a race is on to colonize the planets circling a nearby star. When the URS Alabama is ready for launch, the captain and most of the crew conspire to hijack the ship. They don't change the destination, so the hijacking consists of replacing loyal intended crew-members with families and other folks that the URS regime had considered to be subversives.
The first story covers the theft of the Alabama, and most of the political content appears here in the presentation of the regime's repressive tactics. Most of what we see directly concerns people whose friends or acquaintances have been taken off to the camps, and gives the impression, without saying anything very explicit that minor transgressions against local authority explain most of the incidents rather than anything that would look like true rebellion or protest. The only other time politics comes up is when the crew of the Plymouth (Alabama was renamed upon landing) decides how to arrange their colony. The results are quite pedestrian, and we see the process through the official records of the colony's Secretary. The Ship's captain is elected chair of the Town Council, with a little dissent by people who were hoping for a continuation of military formality.
The rest of the story is pretty standard colonizing-a-new-planet material. The characterization, conflicts, and scenery is reasonably interesting and well-written, but there's nothing of deeper significance to recommend it. The coming of age sub-plots are well-developed, and the conflicts are real; colonists die when they're careless while exploring the new environment. The native flora and fauna have plenty of surprises in store. As I recall, some of them continued to be crucial plot elements in Coyote Rising.
Overall, I'd summarize it as a decent read, but I don't disagree with the decision to not give an award when it first appeared. I can think of several perennial nominees for the Hall of Fame that are more deserving, as well as a few that have recently been nominated for the first time.
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
Harry Turtledove: Noninterference
's Noninterference explores the consequences of violating the noninterference principal when exploring a world that hasn't achieved contact with other societies. takes the best possible example of a minor intervention that goes awry with beneficial consequences that persist through the ages on a developing planet and extrapolates the possibilities. As articulated in Star Trek's Prime Directive, there is something sacrosanct about allowing each civilization to find its own way. In this case, the actual effects on the subject planet appear benign, though extensive. But benevolent consequences are no defense against violations of the Prime Directive. In any case, Turtledove focuses on the effects in the exploring (and interfering) civilization.
The Federacy's Survey Service is responsible for exploring newly discovered planets and making occasional visits to developing worlds. They're in a constant battle with the private Noninterference Foundation, whose Purists argue that it should be disbanded and no contact should be allowed with pre-technological civilizations. In this environment, when news comes back of the effects of the prior interference, the head of the service tries to cover up all the evidence, even stooping to violence when necessary. She convinces herself that it's for the protection of the important work the Survey Service, and therefore justified.
Given all this context, we get to see chase scenes, violence, narrow escapes, bureaucratic bungling, the power of the press, and the importance of independent parties monitoring everything the government does. (co-)won the Prometheus award this year for The Gladiator, and his libertarian tendencies show clearly here. He isn't actually very concerned about the Prime Directive—If he were, he could have easily manufactured a simple intervention with disastrous consequences, rather than one with pervasive, long-term, apparently favorable effects. His focus is really on exposing the incentives of bureaucrats to cover up their mistakes, and the unlimited power they draw on because they have access to the public purse.
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Cory Doctorow: Eastern Standard Tribe
's Eastern Standard Tribe takes place in a high-speed near future of advanced technology. It jumps around in time, with flashes back and forward getting about equal time.
Art Berry is a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, a granfaloon of people synchronized to Eastern Standard Time, regardless of where they live. Art has been serving EST as a double agent working for the Greenwich 0 Tribe in London, but his erstwhile partner and his paramour have conspired to get him committed to an asylum so they can exploit his latest invention unhindered.
Art feels very similar to ' Manfred Macx from Accelerando: a high tech entrepreneur living a life two sigmas faster than those around him, inventing constantly, and caught up in other people's conspiracies. Art is a human factors designer who has a good feel for the zeitgeist, and enough reputation that he has no trouble getting backing to implement outlandish ideas and see whether they'll catch on quickly.
The plot-line associated with the asylum has the paranoid feeling of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest". On one hand, Art's friends really were out to get him, but on the other hand, once you're sent to an asylum, there's no way to convince the doctors that you're sane, especially if you try to ask them how to prove you're not crazy. Art's inventiveness serves him in good stead here, as he manages to find a way to cause a ruckus that allows him to contact a sympathetic and influential psychiatrist who believes his story.
The story is well-told, but without depth or broad implications. The most interesting aspects are the world building and Art's struggle to get out of the asylum. The former is well-played; it's a believable fast-paced world with a constant introduction of new toys and tools, but most of the population is unaware of the constant struggle to invent and deliver the things they use. I enjoyed the story, but it's not more than an entertaining diversion.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Nick Humphrey: Seeing Red
's Seeing Red is another attempt to explain consciousness, but from a slightly different angle. clearly understands what it would mean to produce an explanation, and makes some progress on the task. starts not with what it means to think about something or to be aware of something, but with the more fundamental fact of perception of something outside of ourselves. The focal perception is of a red sensation. There's something in your environment that produces the perception of redness. What just happened to you? What does it mean that it makes you sense the presence of red? Why can you share this experience with others who also perceive the redness or with people who aren't present but still understand what you mean?
first concentrates his attention on the internal details: first you perceive, then you become aware that you are perceiving. You may put words to the sensation or you might not, but takes pains to point out that the perceiving and awareness are two separate facts. If you then talk to someone else about the perception (which you can do because you're aware of it), then of necessity each of you has some kind of "theory of mind"; a mental model that represents the fact that whatever it means to perceive, you are something that can do it, and other people are capable of the same thing.
Having set these aspects of reality out, goes to some trouble to demonstrate that they are separate facets of reality, and all need to be present in an actual explanation. He talks about things like 'blindsight' and optical illusions in order to convince people who aren't keeping up that all these things are distinct facets of reality and need to be distinct in any explanation.
In the second half of this small book, explains that consciousness arises out of the neurons in the brain, and that their role is to reflect and represent what's really going on in the world. He wants to present an evolutionary explanation of why they arose, but he only really justifies the fact that they are useful. The mechanism and history that allowed a feedback process between sensing and acting to arise and be passed down as a competitive advantage eludes him. And he doesn't have much to say about how the neural substrate might represent facts about reality in such a way that it could actually be useful to an aware, active agent interacting with the world.
My bottom line is that this book lays out the issues fairly clearly in a way that ought to be interesting and convincing to someone who is just starting to think about how consciousness might work, but the explanations fall short of answering the deeper questions. On the other hand, 's stated goal in the book is to show that consciousness matters and that it can be productive to think carefully about it. That much he succeeded at.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Kim Stanley Robinson: A Short, Sharp Shock
's A Short, Sharp Shock is a vague, meandering fantasy in which nothing interesting or consequential happens. Someone washes up on a shore and can't remember who he is or where he came from. A woman is also there in the surf, and when they are separated, he spends the rest of the book looking for her and then traveling with or passing time with her. The local terrain is an unending peninsula that apparently circles the world, providing an obvious opportunity for a trek. Thel (the name finally bestowed on the non-hero in the fourth chapter) wanders on his one-dimensional quest, encountering various bizarre groups with indecipherable goals and practices. Some of them chase him, some of them welcome him, some of them let him live peacefully with them. Thel doesn't spend any time trying to figure out who he was, or how he got here, or what his current situation means. Sometimes he's driven by events or pursuers on long sub-quests to find his companion again (who remains unnamed, and is merely "the swimmer" throughout the book). Other times, he spends long interludes in indolence or indulgence either with his swimmer or with someone else.
I've read other books in which nothing happens, but in the good ones someone learns or grows or at least strives. Sometimes the viewpoint character does none of these, but the reader is at least entertained because interesting things happen nearby, and the way these events affect or don't affect the protagonist is compelling. There was none of that in this book. Thel journeys, waits, searches, suffers, encounters, and debauches; all without learning, growing, or caring for anything beyond self-preservation and a drive to be with the person he first noticed next to him. This passage, near the end of the book seemed particularly apt. Thel has found a coin in the surf bearing a profile like the swimmer's.
"Were you ever the queen of an ancient kingdom?"
"Yes," she muttered sleepily. "And I still am."
But this, he supposed, was another of their misunderstandings. Thel had first noticed this phenomenon when he had seen a windhover, hunting over the meadows inland. "Look," he had said, "a kestrel." But the swimmer had thought him crazy for pointing into the sky, for that to her was the name of a kind of fish. And later he found that when he said loyalty she understood it to mean stubbornness, and when she said arbitrary she meant beautiful, and that when she said melancholy she did not mean that sadness we enjoy feeling, but rather mendacity; and when she said actually she meant currently; and when he said "I love you," she thought he was saying "I will leave you." They had slowly worked up quite a list of these false cognates, Thel could recite scores and scores of them, and he had come to understand that they did not share a language so much as the illusion of a language; they spoke strong idiolects, and lived in worlds of meaning distinct and isolated from the other. So that she no doubt understood queen of an ancient kingdom to mean something like a swimmer in the deep sea; and the mystery of the ancient alloy coin was never explained, and, he realized, never would be. It gave him a shiver of fear, thinking about it—it seemed to him that nothing would ever be explained , and that all of a sudden each day was slipping away, that time was flying by and they were getting old and nothing would ever come clear. He sat on the beach watching the clouds tumble overhead and letting handfuls of sand run through his fingers, the little clear grains of quartz flecks of black mica, pieces of coral, shell fragments like small bits of hard ceramic, and he saw that a substantial portion of the sand was made of shells, that living things had labored all their lives to create ceramic shelters, homes, the most permanent parts of themselves; which had then been pummeled into shards just big enough to see, millions upon millions of lives ground up and strewn under him, the beach made out of the wreckage of generations. And before long he and the swimmer too would become no more than sand on a beach; and they would never really have understood anything.
The idiosyncrasy of language between them hadn't been prominent to this point, and isn't raised again. If this is intended as the message of the book, it's a good thing spelled it out, because Thel and the swimmer don't spend their time searching for meaning or trying to build anything permanent; they don't even focus on enjoying their time together. They do appear isolated from one another when they're together, but not because they can't communicate so much as because they don't try. The passage seems a symptom of the lack of direction of the entire book.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Michael Resnick, New Dreams for Old
's New Dreams for Old contains several very good stories. If you haven't been reading (or listening to) recent nominees for the Hugo awards, it's worth picking up. Out of 20 stories, half were nominated for or won a Hugo.
I'm a fan of Resnick, though I can't claim to be a completist. I have his name on my list of authors, so when I'm in a bookstore with time or money to spend, I make sure to look through his books and often find something interesting to read. I think he writes good adventure SF, but this collection also contains some interesting fantasy.
With short stories, the element of surprise seems more important than with longer works, so I'm hesitant to say much about these stories. There are a couple ("Robots Don't Cry", "Travels with My Cats") in which Resnick shows an ability to quickly make us care deeply about a character whether or not they're human. "The Chinese Sandman" is a wonderful evocation of the fairy tale genre, with an oriental flavor.
Some are serious investigations of serious issues; "Hothouse Flowers" and "Down Memory Lane" talk about how important quality of life is to those in their declining years. I think they make important points, even though I expect the state of medicine to improve sufficiently in the next couple of decades to make the issue obsolete.
Obligatory disclaimer: this book was provided to Prometheus, the LFS Newsletter, as a review copy. Since I'm a fan of Resnick, I jumped at the chance to read it. I'm glad I did, even though I was already familiar with the best stories in the collection.
Resnick's stories should resonate well with libertarians, even though there's nothing overtly political in them. "Guardian Angel" and "Keepsakes" take different views of dealing with criminals. In one case, the police aren't called in because the principals include ganglords, in the other, the police have to step gingerly because the "criminals" involved don't seem to have broken any laws. In both cases justice is served, though in one case justice isn't very satisfying. Resnick also has a healthy respect for self-sufficiency, and many of his characters could have come from the pages of a Heinlein story.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Lessig's Change Congress proposal
Larry Lessig has an article in Metro, a Silicon Valley entertainment weekly. In it Lessig talks about his new campaign to reform national politics. Lessig does a good job of laying out and describing a problem that is worth solving. He ends by providing a vague idea of what he intends to do about it, but doesn't seem to notice that the solution only addresses the surface characteristics of the problem, and won't change the underlying incentives that make the problem so pernicious. His solution might make the problem more visible, but unless they provoke a separate, more fundamental change, it will leave politics as the same mess it currently is.
The problem that has attracted Lessig's attention is the pernicious affect of money on politicians. He has laid out the problem in illuminating detail. The problem isn't just explicit graft and corruption; the unrelenting need to raise money affects even those who manage to keep their values unaffected by the source of the funds that get them elected. Those who provide the money set the terms of the debate and determine which questions will be addressed. Even ideal politicians (if any exist) who retain their values and vote their conscience have to choose among policy prescriptions provided according to the current focus of attention.
As the theory of regulatory capture shows, the decision to regulate an industry is valuable to the companies currently in that industry, regardless of what form the regulation takes initially. Eventually, the industry will leverage its greater interest in the outcomes and its monopoly on experts in the field to ensure that the effective regulations change to its advantage. Once the question of regulation is in the air, people with an interest will weigh in in various ways, including campaign contributions, and eventually there will be a plausible case that congress should discuss what regulations are best. At that point the deck is stacked.
Lessig even provides an example showing that congressfolk completely understand the implications of this. When Al Gore was working on the National Information Infrastructure, one of his proposals was to deregulate the nascent Internet. When Gore's team presented the idea to people in Congress,
the reception was not favorable. "'Hell no,' we were told." The concern? Translated: "How are we going to raise money from those guys if we deregulate them?"
This is, roughly speaking, extortion. And if so, then the Communications Act is a kind of extortion-enabling regulation: regulation whose reach was explained, in part at least, by the opportunity such regulation would give regulators to raise money.
And if so, then how much other regulation is extortion-enabling in just this sense? How many other examples are there of government reaching beyond what it needs to regulate effectively, merely to assure (sic) that members can raise campaign funds more effectively?
So to combat this problem, what does Lessig propose? He's going to use Web 2.0-style media and networking tools to shine a light on congress. They'll connect votes to contributions and show the public what is going on. But given the discussion that has gone before, the only affect of this will be to drive out any explicit graft, and encourage the legislators to take fewer positions that seem affected by donations.
But that won't solve the problem. The problem is that congress can regulate, and does so when constituents demand it. The form of the regulation and its affects on society are extremely hard to see ahead of time, but we can predict that most of the time, the industry will be more in control afterward. And we can be sure that Congress will extract a rent during and after the process, and that the regulation will be structured so that Congress at least has the ability to intervene so there's a reason for affected businesses to keep paying them contributing. Even if we can see the connections between the contributions and the resulting legislation, the contributors will still be able to defend giving money to influential legislators, and legislators will be able to say the effects are all open and visible. There doesn't have to be quid pro quo in order for the influence to be beneficial to both sides.
Giving voters access to better statistics about the situation will make it clearer that interested parties contribute to powerful legislators, but there are legal and respectable ways to do this, and there always will be.
Am I missing something? Does Lessig hope to create an outcry that will change the fundamental incentives? Is there something other than pious hope behind the drive to remove money from politics?
I think the fundamental problem is that congress is allowed and expected to legislate on all subjects. We want citizens (who are also owners of businesses and members of public-interest groups) to be able to speak about their goals and priorities. Being able to spend money expressing support for policies and politicians is an essential way of participating in the debate. Since the laws that come out of congress affect people's goals, people who favor and oppose various outcomes will attempt to influence the decisions that are made.
Money isn't the problem, it's merely one of the more apparent forms of evidence about where influence is flowing. Money and influence aren't going to stop flowing. Maybe Lessig's affect here will just be in making the flow of influence more apparent. I certainly can't foresee any way that he can stop them from flowing.
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