Science & Tech Quote by Lawrence Lessig

Lessig’s line is a Trojan horse: it strolls in as a bland observation about the Internet’s success, then quietly smuggles in a full political program. The key move is the phrase “teaches us anything,” which frames the open web not as ideology but as evidence. You’re not being asked to admire sharing; you’re being asked to accept it as a hard-won lesson from the most consequential infrastructure of the past 30 years.

“Great value” is doing double duty. It sounds like the language of markets and venture capital, but Lessig is redirecting it toward the unglamorous plumbing that markets typically under-reward: protocols, standards, basic research, public-domain knowledge. “Core resources” keeps the claim strategically narrow. He isn’t arguing that everything should be free; he’s arguing that certain foundational layers must be non-excludable if you want innovation to compound. That’s the Internet’s origin story: TCP/IP, HTML, and open standards created a platform where permission wasn’t the price of entry.

The subtext is a rebuke to enclosure. In Lessig’s world, the villain is the slow privatization of the commons through intellectual property maximalism, platform gatekeeping, and “walled gardens” that turn users into tenants. “Free for people to build upon” evokes a maker culture, but it’s also a warning: when the commons shrinks, creativity becomes a licensing negotiation, and the next generation of breakthroughs gets trapped behind tollbooths.

Context matters: Lessig emerged as a leading critic of how law can hard-code power online (from copyright expansion to regulatory capture). This quote is less about nostalgia for early web idealism than about keeping the generative layer open so the future can remain iterable, not rented.