Stanford Law Professor and founder of the Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig, is starting a new movement aimed at reducing corruption in politics. Lessig's contention is that the fundamental obstacle preventing political change is not a misunderstanding or disagreement over policy, but instead a lack of transparency and, therefore, accountability. Because campaigns are privately financed, our candidates are able to take money from lobbyists and political action committees and often do out of lust for power. The obvious problem here is that these candidates are no longer solely accountable to the American people that elect them but are forced to compromise their supposed duty to their constituents by returning favors to those special interests that helped elect them. The ultimate result of this is a lack of trust in government, manifested by consistently low congressional approval ratings that today stand at 23%. Lack of trust, of course, leads to two even more profoundly detrimental trends: apathy and disengagement.

Lessig's project, Change Congress, will aim to establish a wiki-style watchdog movement that will seek pledges from elected and running officials in terms of campaign finance, with the goal of reducing the influence of lobbyists, PACs and earmarks. Ordinary citizens will be called upon to hold their representatives accountable and to upload their own political pledges for reform, so that like-minded candidates can link up with like-minded citizens. It will be interesting to see whether or not Lessig can galvanize a community around building an application which has as its sole function a kind of use-value and utility that members of the web 2.0 community are unfamiliar with. Social media applications have rarely been centered around the idea of political utility, but instead are more often centered around more hedonistic or voyeuristic value propositions. So, yes, you can build a site that enables people to upload home movies or pictures, or allows peers to keep up with their ever growing network, and these applications have tremendous value in terms of creative collaboration and social utility. Lessig is asking whether that social energy can now be leveraged into political activism.

Tags: Lawrence Lessig, Congress, Corruption, Transparency, Lobbyists, PACs