"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"
About this Quote
Lessig’s warning lands like a controlled burn: the Internet didn’t “win” because officials designed the perfect prosperity machine; it won because its architecture accidentally made certain kinds of prosperity easy. The quote targets a familiar policy reflex - the urge to treat growth as a formula and the network as a quarry. “Believing we know” is the dagger. It’s not just ignorance; it’s managerial overconfidence masquerading as expertise.
The subtext is about mismatch. “Actual prosperity all around” gestures to value created outside old categories: peer production, permissionless innovation, cultural spillover, weird new markets that don’t look like legacy industries. Lessig implies that lawmakers and incumbents see the wealth but misread its source, then try to “optimize” it with rules built for scarcity-era media and industrial gatekeeping. The Internet revolution “lives” within rules - not only statutes, but defaults baked into code: end-to-end design, open standards, low barriers to entry. Change those, and you change what kinds of businesses, speech, and experimentation can survive.
Context matters: Lessig has spent decades arguing that “code is law,” that regulation doesn’t just happen in Congress; it happens in protocols, platforms, and intellectual property regimes. Read in the shadow of the DMCA, telecom consolidation, and the steady creep of surveillance and liability, “end the revolution” is less apocalypse than slow suffocation. Not a single dramatic ban, but a thousand friction points: permission requirements, pay-to-play lanes, aggressive copyright enforcement, platform incentives that favor control over openness. Lessig isn’t romanticizing chaos; he’s insisting that the Internet’s prosperity is an ecosystem, and ecosystems collapse when you start rewriting the physics to suit the landlords.
The subtext is about mismatch. “Actual prosperity all around” gestures to value created outside old categories: peer production, permissionless innovation, cultural spillover, weird new markets that don’t look like legacy industries. Lessig implies that lawmakers and incumbents see the wealth but misread its source, then try to “optimize” it with rules built for scarcity-era media and industrial gatekeeping. The Internet revolution “lives” within rules - not only statutes, but defaults baked into code: end-to-end design, open standards, low barriers to entry. Change those, and you change what kinds of businesses, speech, and experimentation can survive.
Context matters: Lessig has spent decades arguing that “code is law,” that regulation doesn’t just happen in Congress; it happens in protocols, platforms, and intellectual property regimes. Read in the shadow of the DMCA, telecom consolidation, and the steady creep of surveillance and liability, “end the revolution” is less apocalypse than slow suffocation. Not a single dramatic ban, but a thousand friction points: permission requirements, pay-to-play lanes, aggressive copyright enforcement, platform incentives that favor control over openness. Lessig isn’t romanticizing chaos; he’s insisting that the Internet’s prosperity is an ecosystem, and ecosystems collapse when you start rewriting the physics to suit the landlords.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
|---|
More Quotes by Lawrence
Add to List
