Lawrence Lessig and the Future of the Internet
When George Orwell’s famous protagonist from 1984, Winston Smith, begins to read The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, supposedly penned by the revolutionary Emmanuel Goldstein, Orwell writes that the best books are the ones that tell you what you already know. Granted, Winston arrives at this revelation while hiding from the eyes [and telescreens] of the oppressive government of Oceania, but despite the obvious political differences between 1984 and life in our Information Age, Lawrence Lessig’s Code: Version 2.0 (also known as Codev2) often elicits the same sensation and serves, in no small part, to vocalize many of our nagging intuitions and fears about the internet.
When the World Wide Web first popped up in the late 1980s and 90s, there was a feeling that this was the new Wild West, that cyberspace would be unregulated and anonymous for the rest of its days. I was … Read more
