Book Review: Republic Lost

I had Lawrence Lessig's recent book, Republic, Lost on my to-read list for some time. However, after hearing that he narrated the audio version, I snapped it up in prep for a recent road trip. Lessig is a fantastic speaker and in general I believe that audio books narrated by their authors are better than those narrated by others.

Best known in the tech community for his work on copyright & Creative Commons, Lessig turned his attention a few years ago to corruption in government. Republic Lost is his first full-length book on that subject.

It is an important book that I highly recommend reading, though I can't promise you'll find it uplifting. It's downright depressing in parts. Solutions are offered but the author is the first to admit that they have very slim chance of working and that without them things will only get worse.

The main point of the book is that government (and he focuses on Congress in particular) is corrupt, and that this corruption is not so much the corruption of individuals but rather a systemic corruption that makes it impossible even for honest politicians to succumb to it.

What makes it a unique work is that Lessig, in his usual style, provides what to me anyway seems like a near-bullet-proof breakdown of his argument. I fail to see how someone, in the face of all he argues, could deny the systemic corruption exists or hast the effect it does.

Lessig provides a number of options on how it could be addressed, ranging from the likely-possible-but-minimal-impact (e.g. everyone should post/tweet every example of such corruption they see) to the high-impact-but-near-impossible (hold a constitutional convention for campaign finance reform). He himself acknowledges that most of his solutions have a very slim chance of working, but as he also puts it, what choice do we have but to fight?

Personally, I'm going to do three things: First, I'm going to read more on the subject and post when I see good examples, per Lessig's recommendation above. Secondly, I'm going to give some money to his organization, RootStrikers. Finally, I'm going to recommend this book to others, which is what I'm doing here. Go read it. It's important.

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It

SOPA Rhetoric

It's been interesting to watch the activism around the Stop Online Piracy Act, the entertainment industry lobby's latest ill-conceived attempt at legislating against the inevitable. As many have pointed out, SOPA and it's cousin PIPA threaten the open internet and won't do much to curb piracy anyhow. You should let your gov't representatives know how you feel about it, and also give to the EFF or other organizations doing something about it. You can do both here.


One thing I find interesting is the rhetoric that the entertainment lobby is using is pretty effectively (with ignorant folk like those in government anyway) to turn this into an "America vs THEM" story. The four words being used repeatedly are "foreign criminals" and "american jobs" - namely that the former are stealing the latter.

Now, to be fair, part of what these proposed actions do IS aimed at giving the industry some tools to combat piracy from foreign sites, but they can also be used against Americans. On the other side, the victims they aim to protect aren't all American. They are artists that may be from other countries, and the content owner companies who are multi-national anyway.

Anyhow, it's just remarkable how on-message they are with those four words, and that our government reps haven't seen right through the rhetoric.

Heavy Rain (of Incentives)

dIn an interview up on GamesIndustry.biz, Heavy Rain developer Quantic Dream's CEO Guillaume De Fondaumiere makes some comments on the effects that Quebec's game development incentives had on the French games industry:

[referring to the French games industry downturn from 2000 through 2005]

"...we've been hit by the distortion of competition - primarily from Canada, from Montreal, which as you know is a French-speaking province. The fact that they created a tax credit worth almost 50 per cent, this has had a big impact in France, and a lot of our creators, developers and programmers went to Canada, so I think we lost more than half of the community to Montreal in those days."

He later goes on to say that France's institution of a similar - but smaller - system helped stem the bleeding.

Bartle's Indie MMO Conference Keynote

Here's an Indie MMO conference going on in Minnesota (?) and it looks like Richard Bartle's keynote was really good.

Gamasutra has a good synopsis, and Bartle has posted slides.

His keynote looks back 20 years, from the year 2028, and paints three alternate portraits of the future: One in which game designers and other creatives thrive (the good), one in which lawyers and accountants stifle development (the bad), and one in which business and academia drive VW's to practical usage - and thus make them mundane in the process (the ugly).

On the front of the second of those possible futures, Congress recently held hearings on Virtual Worlds.

They don't call it 'priming the pump' for nothin'

There's been a lot of linking to Silicon Knights' Denis Dyack's comments (and subsequent clarification) about the Quebec government's subsidies of game development companies. The clarification was that by labelling them 'insane', he meant 'better than good'.

He still maintains, though, that the subsidies are not maintainable in the long term.

I think he's missing the point. The point was to prime the pump and jump start an industry hot-bed. They've absolutely done so. Now that they have, if the subsidies were to go away, it's not like Ubi and the others would just pack up and leave, would they? There's a local dev community, an infrastructure of schools producing new talent, etc.

I don't think they were ever meant to be sustainable.

There's an argument that they are sustainable (if the delta in growth, new jobs, the taxes those people pay, etc, are enough to fund the subsidies), but that's beside the point.