On the heels of Larry Lessig’s historic announcement of his Referendum Candidacy came another newsworthy item: Jimmy Wales announced that he is chairing LECEC, the Lessig Equal Citizens Exploratory Committee, which consists of me and scores of other volunteers and staffers working at a breakneck pace to make Lessig’s nascent campaign a reality.
At first blush, the Wales announcement might seem like a footnote on an afterthought, but I read something very different into it. Something that reminds me of Paul Revere. But no British are coming this time. Instead, Wales penned these nine simple words and so began the largest, most peaceful, and most desperately-needed democratic revolution in human history:
When you light up the Internet, anything is possible.
–Jimmy Wales, Chairman emeritus, Wikimedia Foundation
That’s right, Internet: He may have understated it a bit, but Jimmy Wales just asked us to mobilize and elect Lessig in 2016.
Let’s face it: No one has been kinder to the Internet than Larry Lessig. In the twenty-plus years I’ve followed his work, he’s rallied against outrageous software patents, fought copyright takedowns, drafted the contracts that legally protect and enable “open source” software (which powers most of the Internet), started the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford, fended off aggressive corporate and government entities in his quest for net neutrality and, naturally, he’s spoken at TED. Four times.
Larry is and has been the Internet’s dedicated steward for the better part of his career. His body of work enabled the Internet to become what it is today: a loosely-coupled network wherein heterogeneous data, applications, and systems play in an ecosystem with minimalist governance atop a tiny handful of protocols and specifications.
No one's been a bigger advocate for the open internet than Larry Lessig.
–Cenk Uygur, The Young Turks
If Vint Cerf, Donald Davies and Bob Kahn are the “fathers of the internet” and if Aaron Swartz was “the internet’s own boy,” then Lessig is the Internet’s uncle.
What better way for the Internet to say thanks to Uncle Larry than to use its enormous catalytic power to hack him into the White House?
And who better to do the hacking than the hackers of our own generation? We were born into a world with basically no connectivity to information, services or people. Today, we have access to pretty much every other connected person and all of the world’s public digital information (so long as we can keep our phone batteries alive).
As software developers in the mid-90s, we didn’t just witness the explosive, hockey-stick growth of the commercial internet; we actually built huge swaths of that reality ourselves. My peers and their peers built out the data centers and server racks, the gateways and firewalls, the routers and switches, the firmware and software platforms, the web servers and middleware, the web services and mobile applications — that drew billions of people into a web of inter-connectivity, knit together so tightly that a single thread can be spun half way around the world and back again in just seconds.
As my peers and I built PayPal and Yahoo! and Oracle and Amazon and Google — and the millions of companies that weren’t as fortunate — we didn’t realize this tremendous side benefit:
We created the most powerful agent of social change in the history of humankind.
In 2012, when Lessig and Swartz “lit up” the internet to defeat the SOPA and PIPA bills, scores of sites — including Wales’ Wikipedia — “went dark” in protest of these hair-brained bits of legislation.
That was the battle. This is the war.
Today we are at war with a much darker evil, far more insidious than the foiled attempts to reign in and regulate the internet. Our government has become the handmaiden of the "funders" -- billionaires, PACs, multinational corporations, labor unions and other special interests -- and we are fighting to restore a representative democracy back to the citizens to whom it was promised.
We are fighting “the root of all evil,” the darkest evil with the deepest pockets. And we’re already in way over our heads.
But now, Jimmy, we’re gonna light up the Internet.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
–Martin Luther King, Jr.
If there exists one light great enough to drive the corrupting influence of money out of DC, it’s not burning torches and gleaming pitchforks. Rather, it’s the glow of a hundred million mobile phones, tablets and laptops, mobilized under a single, peaceful mandate. With every Facebook like, every share, every re-tweet, every blog post, every comment, every volunteer effort and every donation, the light spreads and burns ever more strongly, driving out the darkness.
Wales said:
When you light up the Internet, anything is possible.
I say:
Lessig for President in 2016.
Wales said anything. And it’s our job — as denizens of the Internet — not to prove him wrong.