The above video is a short presentation from Larry Lessig on why he supports Barack Obama. Mr. Lessig is an extremely profound thinker and I am going to begin extrapolating some of the points he makes here to some positive changes I have begun to notice in our economy.
In the video, Larry makes 3 core points supporting Obama’s character and actions, but one of them really resonated with me. It concerns tactical choices made by the Clinton campaign in recent efforts to win votes. He terms the tactics “Rovean”, as in Karl Rove. Specifically, he refers to Clinton making intentionally misleading or false remarks in an attempt to “Swift boat” Obama’s character and record.
I’ll leave it up to those who can watch the video to see the examples. I believe strongly that this is exactly the kind of behavior that we can no longer afford to reward, regardless of ideology. Politics does not “have to be this way” and if there is a candidate strong enough to make the right choices I think it behooves us to support her or him.
Whether or not Barack Obama is the agent of change in the political domain is a little besides my current point…although I think he could be that person (and he has my support after considering Lessig’s arguments).
What I am drawing from Obama’s success is that it is another example of how strategies predicated on trust, sustainability, and Good (in a John Locke kind of way) can create enormous value without taking value from somewhere else.
(I admit that I’m wary of any quasi-utopianism here, especially after reflecting on some of my reactionary views on the American “Corpocracy” circa 2001, when I worked in investment management. But I do think that the new modalities of communication and coordination afforded by the Internet really are starting to affect our society pretty viscerally in a positive way.)
The “shell-game” of value creation that characterizes a lot of an industrial economy isn’t sustainable. As my favorite thinker Umair Haque has said:
…think about how food players have created an obesity epidemic. Or how pharma players have spent billions upon billions - to subvert and replace value creation in healthcare with push marketing. Or how Detroit continues to focus on coercing people, cities, states, and nations into consuming car afer car - instead of on durable, sustainable long-run productivity and efficiency gains.
The virus is rotting the system from inside. The hypercapitalist economy we’ve built isn’t about deep, sustainable value creation. It’s become about simply shifting value from one party to another.
There’s not much difference between the above examples, Clinton’s tactics, Wal-Mart’s exploitation of sweatshop labor, and Merrill Lynch ripping off small towns. It’s all bad and it’s continued acceptance will be inevitably ruinous.
In contrast, I look to examples like Obama, Google, craigslist, Wikipedia, and the entire open source software movement as concrete models for sustainable value creation.
I hope to write more about this meme as it develops. I’ll be trying to synthesize what I’m learning from Umair, The Wealth Of Networks, Bruce Sterling, and the Obama campaign and hopefully we’ll get somewhere.
