Quite a while ago I read an article written by Lawrence Lessig. Lessig's well-known in geek circles as a champion of the rights of consumers with regard to copyright protection. After reading this particular article, I sent an email to him disagreeing with some points he made. Amazingly enough, he wrote back and his response was very gracious. Ever since then I've been a fan of his.
Lessig leans left but, unlike many involved in political discussion these days, he's pretty rational. His blog is here.
I received an email from Lessig the other day that introduces a fascinating concept. It's called, P2P Politics. This is Lessig's description of it from his email:
So this is some political spam, which you've earned by either (1) being in my address book, or (2) having sent me a question, comment, or criticism in the past. Consider this small request the price of our contact.
A bunch of us have put together a p2p-politics.org site which I'd be grateful if you could look at, and more importantly, pester the campaigns about.
The idea of the site is to enable people to send clips -- both video and audio -- about the candidate they support to people they know, asking them to listen to or watch the ads sent before they vote. These ads can come from the campaigns, or from anyone who wants to make an ad for a campaign. And as this email does, the site permits people to ad text to the message.
We were very successful in collecting ads supporting Kerry. Moveon.org had a bunch licensed under a Creative Commons license we we could get automatically. And the Kerry campaign then gave us a few more to include.
But despite our repeated requests, through many channels, we've not yet been able to get a reply from the Bush campaign.
So here's the request. If you go to the site (linked below) and think it worthwhile, can you send a brief email to the Bush campaign (there's a link on the site) or the Nader campaign (if that's your persuasion)?
If that's too much, then enjoy (or be frustrated by) the ads I've selected here. They are all tied to a theme I've written about -- the effect of this election on the next generation -- inspired, no doubt, by my confronting my own next generation, now just 13 months old.
Again, I apologize for the intrusion, if this is what this is for you. But if there is ever a time peers need to speak to peers, an election like this is such a time.
I would encourage everyone to check it out. You may not agree with everything you see there, but no campaign should be afraid of political discourse. You might even want to use it to help promote the re-election of the best candidate for President of the US.