Lessig

Lessig has written a book called the Future of Ideas, there is a Japanese introduction for their version, here is an excerpt of the full introduction [pdf]. It’s depressing. The entire intro is a good read though, I hope technology allows freedom to win.

At the same time, this book was shocking because it uses concepts such as freedom and equality and democracy at the very center of its argument. Do not read any irony in the last sentence. I don’t know about other countries, but here in Japan these days, it’s kind of embarrassing to talk about these values with a straight face. Freedom? Democracy? Yer, right. And tomorrow we sing with the flower children. They seem too vague and idealistic. We feel that the only people who are insensitive enough to rely on such ideas are either stupid die-hard left-winger leftovers that cater for kids, or unsophisticated feel-good ear-pleasing-but-meaningless conservative TV propaganda that caters for retired old guys. We feel that any argument that does not rely on economic efficiency or some strategic analysis based on game theory can’t possibly have any rigor to stand the test of real life. We should re-establish the democratic tradition? Yeah yeah, tell the people to vote or something, right? You should live so long. Code, however, completely ignored that sort of smart-ass-ism. It simply went on to establish a convincing argument based on democratic value, and the argument was both sophisticated and powerful. In a sense, it was a book that smashed the nihilism that many of us Japanese unknowingly held.