Lawrence Lessig: One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic (2012)

“Something is clearly rotten in our Republic. Americans are disillusioned with the political system and angry as hell. They feel like outsiders in their own nation, powerless over their own lives, blocked from having a real voice in how they are governed. But all of this can change. Lawrence Lessig, the renowned Harvard Law School professor and political activist presents a user-friendly, bipartisan manifesto for revolution just when we need it the most. His audaciously simple solution? Kill political corruption at its root: money.”

Publisher Byliner Inc., San Francisco, February 2012
ISBN 1614520232, 9781614520238

Commentary: Cory Doctorow (BoingBoing, 2012).

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Berin Szoka, Adam Marcus (eds.): The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet (2010)

This unique book brings together 26 thought leaders on Internet law, philosophy, policy and economics to consider, from a wide variety of perspectives, what the next digital decade might bring for the Internet. This book is essential reading for anyone gazing toward the digital future.

The book’s 31 essays address questions such as: Has the Internet been good for our culture? Is the Internet at risk from the drive to build more secure, but less “open” systems and devices? Is the Internet really so “exceptional?” Has it fundamentally changed economics? Who—and what ideas—will govern the Net in 2020? Should online intermediaries like access providers, hosting providers, search engines and social networks do more to “police” their networks, increase transparency, or operate “neutrally?” What future is there for privacy online? Can online free speech be regulated? Can it really unseat tyrants?

With contributions by Robert D. Atkinson, Stewart Baker, Ann Bartow, Yochai Benkler, Larry Downes, Josh Goldfoot, Eric Goldman, James Grimmelmann, H. Brian Holland, David R. Johnson, Andrew Keen, Hon. Alex Kozinski, Mark MacCarthy, Geoffrey Manne, Evgeny Morozov, Milton Mueller, John Palfrey, Frank Pasquale, Berin Szoka, Paul Szynol, Adam Thierer, Hal Varian, Christopher Wolf, Tim Wu, Michael Zimmer, Jonathan Zittrain, Ethan Zuckerman.

Publisher TechFreedom, Washington DC, 2010
ISBN 1435767861, 9781435767867
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License
575 pages

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Lee Siegel: Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (2008)

From the author hailed by the New York Times Book Review for his “drive-by brilliance” and dubbed by the New York Times Magazine as “one of the country’s most eloquent and acid-tongued critics” comes a ruthless challenge to the conventional wisdom about the most consequential cultural development of our time: the Internet.

Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It’s become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products—such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the “bourgeois bohemian”—have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused “self-expression” with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine—that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity.

Siegel’s argument isn’t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but rather a bracing appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Dazzlingly erudite, full of startlingly original insights, and buoyed by sharp wit, Against the Machine will force you to see our culture—for better and worse—in an entirely new way.

Publisher Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, New York, 2008
ISBN 0385522657, 9780385522656
182 pages

review (Adam Thierer, Technology Liberation Front)
review (Louis Bayard, Salon)
review (John Lanchester, The New York Times)
review (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)

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