Utne Reader Visionaries Special Project: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig

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Do you think there’s a hunger for reform in the air right now?

Yeah, and unfortunately I don’t think either party is satisfying it. One of most important dynamics of the hunger is that there’s a revulsion for the way ordinary politics function.

And part of the Change Congress movement ultimately is to consciously identify ourselves as a citizen movement—meaning people who explicitly say they don’t want to be a politician, they’re not in it to become a congressperson or a senator or the president of the United States—in fact, they commit to this is not the future they want.

Instead, what they’re trying to do is ask average citizens, from the outside, to effect change in the way the government works. I think tying into a credible position about having no self-interest is going to be an essential part of getting over the cynicism that defines people’s relationship with politics right now.

Should you accomplish what you want to with Change Congress, would you consider returning to some of these copyright issues you’ve previously worked on?

I probably would return in the sense of coming back to celebrate our success, because I think if we fix the Congress problem, then a lot of these issues that I was working on aren’t really hard public policy questions, but if you could just get a Congress that could think about things freely or independently, I think they’d get the right answer.

So it’s a pretty hopeful picture to imagine fixing the Congress problem, but if we create a movement to fix that, then I think we should move on to something like cancer or something really impossibly difficult.

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