Politics & Power Quote by Lawrence Lessig

Lessig is poking at a modern reflex: we treat culture like real estate, then act surprised when the locks change. The line’s sting comes from how casually it indicts “we” for consenting to a worldview in which songs, images, and stories are primarily assets to be owned, fenced off, licensed, and policed. He’s not arguing that creators shouldn’t be paid; he’s arguing that the property frame has become so totalizing we forget it’s a choice, not a law of nature.

The subtext is democratic, even populist: culture isn’t just something we consume, it’s something we do. “Develop our culture democratically” smuggles in a claim about participation. When ownership and control consolidate - in copyright regimes, platform terms of service, automated takedowns - the public’s role shrinks from co-author to customer. The uncritical part matters. Lessig is less angry at “piracy” than at the idea that remix, quotation, parody, and informal circulation are presumptively suspicious rather than constitutive of cultural life.

Contextually, this sits squarely in Lessig’s early-2000s critique of expanded copyright terms and digital enforcement, the same era that birthed Creative Commons and the “free culture” movement. The internet promised a renaissance of amateur creativity; the backlash was a legal and technical architecture designed to reassert scarcity. His sentence works because it flips the moral script: the real theft isn’t copying, it’s the quiet removal of collective agency, justified in the name of protecting what we’ve decided culture “should” be - property first, public commons second.