Believing we know what makes prosperity work, ignoring the nature of the actual prosperity all around, we change the rules within which the Internet revolution lives. These changes will end the revolution.
Interpretation
The quote warns against altering the foundational rules of the Internet, as it could lead to the downfall of the digital revolution.
Lawrence Lessig's quote highlights the danger of assuming we fully understand the dynamics that drive prosperity in the digital age, particularly within the context of the Internet. When we attempt to change the established rules without appreciating the existing prosperity and innovation that the Internet has fostered, we risk undermining the very revolution that has transformed society. This cautionary statement serves as a reminder that the complexities of the Internet and its impact require respect and careful consideration rather than reckless modification.
In practice
In a tech conference discussing the future of online commerce, this quote could be used to emphasize the importance of maintaining a stable regulatory environment.
And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B.
In these times, the hardest task for social or political activists is to find a way to get people to wonder again about what we all believe is true. The challenge is to sow doubt.
Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.
So uncritically do we accept the idea of property in culture that we don't even question when the control of that property removes our ability, as a people, to develop our culture democratically.
The war against illegal file-sharing is like the church's age-old war against masturbation. It's a war you just can't win.
Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.
The telephone will be used to inform people that a telegram has been sent.
Technology and the Internet are not just changing politics here in the U.S. It's also happening abroad. In the Philippines, where I grew up, grassroots organizers used text messaging to help overthrow a president.
What I do instead is I will cheerfully spend literally hours on identifier names: variable names, method names, and so forth, to make my code readable. If you read some expression using these identifiers and it reads like an English sentence, your program is much more likely to be correct, and much easier to maintain.
We need to be vigilant about how we design and train these machine-learning systems, or we will see ingrained forms of bias built into the artificial intelligence of the future.
People don't want lots and lots of single purpose devices. They do not want to have to learn how to set up something for photos, another thing for music, another thing for video.
If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship.
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