Consuming these two was a cognitive speedball. =)
First came Larry Lessig’s downer book on the systemic corruption of Congress by the campaign contributions of companies and special interest groups, which corrodes our democracy and is at the root of our broken political system. For me, a newbie to all things political, the bizarre patterns of behavior in D.C. finally made sense.
You can read the opening chapter of Republic Lost over at Rolling Stone:
“Government is an embarrassment. It has lost the capacity to make the most essential decisions.”
“Everything our government touches— from health care to Social Security to the monopoly rights we call patents and copyright— it poisons. Yet our leaders seem oblivious to the thought that there’s anything that needs fixing. They preen about, ignoring the elephant in the room. They act as if Ben Franklin would be proud.”
“We must remember that harm sometimes comes from timid, even pathetic souls. That the enemy doesn’t always march. Sometimes it simply shuffles.”
“The great evil that we as Americans face is the banal evil of second-rate minds who can’t make it in the private sector and who therefore turn to the massive wealth directed by our government as the means to securing wealth for themselves.”
“This corruption has two elements, each of which feeds the other. The first element is bad governance, which means simply that our government doesn’t track the expressed will of the people, whether on the Left or on the Right. Instead, the government tracks a different interest, one not directly affected by votes or voters. Democracy, on this account, seems a show or a ruse; power rests elsewhere.
The second element is lost trust: when democracy seems a charade, we lose faith in its process. That doesn’t matter to some of us— we will vote and participate regardless. But to more rational souls, the charade is a signal: spend your time elsewhere, because this game is not for real. Participation thus declines, especially among the sensible middle. Policy gets driven by the extremists at both ends.”
“In a poll commissioned for this book, 75% of Americans believe ‘campaign contributions buy results in Congress.’” (p.88)
“in the most critical cases, the vast majority of contributions to a congressional campaign are not even from the voters in that district. 79% of contributions to California state legislators came from out-of-district contributors. It is clear ‘the funders’ are not ‘the People.’” (p.233)
Larry just spoke in San Francisco to the Long Now Foundation, available here
Chapter One opens with “In the summer of 1991, I spent a month alone on a beach in Costa Rica, reading novels.” And there I was in Costa Rica reading Lessig’s book, just like last time with Stewart Brand’s book!
Then came the upper, a pre-print of Diamandis & Kotler’s Abundance due to come out Feb 2012. This book is a compendium of many great books and speakers on the topic of techno-futurism.
I love his description of Craig Venter: “he has the appearance of a modern-day wizard — like Gandalf with a solid stock portfolio and a pair of flip-flops” (p.59)
They posit that we are entering an era of abundance driven by “the coming of age of the DIY innovator, a new breed of technophilanthropist, and the expanding creative/market power of the rising billion [from the base of the pyramid] —augmented by exponential technology. In fact, exponential technology could be viewed as their growth medium, a substrate both anchoring and nurturing the emergence of these forces.” (p.77)
“More than a trillion genetically engineered meals have been served and not a single case of GE-induced illness has turned up.” (p.103)
But overall, I would recommend Abundance if you want a synthesis by summary quotes of many great books on the subject by: Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, Matt Ridley (and more), Steven Johnson (and more), Stewart Brand, Stewart Kauffman, Geoffrey West, Neal Stephenson as well as great speakers and innovators: Nicholas Negroponte, Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates, Sal Khan, Richard Branson and Craig Venter.
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