THE DAILY TRAVESTY | Cyberspace's Architectural Constitution

I am right now being flooded with, blessed be, new subscribers and lots of good contributions! Thanks to everyone who has sent these things my way. Keep paying attention.

You will find there is a lot in store for this ezine, at least if I ever get through the hassle of moving to college and rearranging my entire life and morphing into a superhuman demi-god.

Those of you with webpages -- I know there are many; I have heard from three. So what are the rest of you up too?? C'mon, finals are over. Let me know if it's cool to link.

This brilliant lecture exemplifies many of the points we should keep in mind these days as this rapidly unfolding technology changes our lives forever. This is a VERY important speech. I suggest you take the time.

We are in the middle of the most extraordinary explosion of innovation and creativity that we have known in two centuries. It has taken off, in the United States, and around the world. It has fueled at least half the growth that the US economy has seen in the last five years. It has made possible an explosion of commerce that was never foreseen.

Never foreseen. Never expected. Unpredicted. Surprising. Something worked; we didn't know it was going to work; and now that it has, we don't know why.

I am a law professor. I hold a chair at one of the most prestigious universities in America. I teach hundreds of students each year; they all have been told they are the best in the nation. My colleagues have been told they are the best in the world. We all have been told there is none better. That there are none who know more. None with a clearer insight.

I spend too much time, though it's not much time at all, talking to policy makers in Washington. They race about their capital wildly excited about the revolution they enjoy. The nation is churning with energy and with growth; tax coffers are overfilled. And like a child riding a bicycle for the very first time, they are panicked to simply do whatever it is they have been doing so far that has been so right -- to keep the revolution rolling.

And I'm about to move to the west coast in America. To Silicon Valley, to teach at Stanford Law School, a law school in the heart of the valley. A valley that is filled with talent and passion and energy to build the next great thing; the next killer application; the next revolution.

In my country, we always know why. We are always quick to offer a reason, and the reasons are usually quite simple. I come from a world where two very simple ideas in particular rule:

Second: That property equals progress. That strong property rights equal stronger progress. That the ideal world would be the world where property was perfectly protected.

We know these two things, we Americans, because, well, because we're Americans. We won the cold war; we won that war because the east didn't get it; the east thought government was great and property was bad; but in the west -- the far west, further west than here -- we know what worked. We know why the wall fell. And so we know why cyberspace will flourish, as it has flourished for the past eight years.

At an eCommerce conference on the west coast last year, a senior lawyer for a major Internet technology firm delivered a lunch time talk. He had two points -- one prescriptive, one descriptive. The first was a chant: The most important thing, he said, was that "we keep government out of the Internet. Regulation," he said, "will kill the Internet."

The second point was some corporate bragging: he described, with great pride, how his company had developed online tools to file for patents; they were filing and receiving patents now at a record rate.

I was astonished by this talk. I remember thinking it something of a joke. That perhaps here, in the lunch time eCommerce speaker was someone very deep; someone extremely perceptive about an extraordinary blindness that rages in my country. But as I waited for the punchline, and none came, I looked about the room to see whether others were as confused as I, and saw no one. No one but I was confused by this. No one thought there was anything askew. Everyone sat with their box lunches open, shaking their heads, jim-jones like, almost chanting: yes, keep government out; keep patents flowing.

And I wanted to jump up and down and scream at the top of my lungs -- but I didn't because I'm a coward and could never scream at the top of my lungs -- but I wanted to, I wanted to ask, What could you possibly mean by that? How could you possibly say in one breath that we should keep government out, and yet keep patents flowing?

An overworked, underpaid, yet pressured to issue patent official reviews an often incomplete yet smartly incomplete patent application, and decides (on I am told less than 8 hours consideration) whether to issue a government backed monopoly that will extend for practically one score years. A right to have the government stop another from using an idea; a power to force others to get permission before they use an idea; an architecture -- this time a legal architecture -- for centralizing the creative process. For locating it in the hands of a few; for requiring others, Oliver Twist style, to get permission before these "inventions" can be used. To move from a world where technologists innovate to a world where innovation is licensed.

And this would be just the beginning, just the beginning of the screaming I wanted to do -- if I weren't such a coward that is, milquetoast, good boy, quiet, really, quite harmless -- if I weren't that, this pathetic comfortable professor -- if I were free of these silly personal constraints -- if I could just say what I wanted to have others hear. I would say this and lots more.

That in more ways than we know, we don't understand why we're here. And that when we don't understand what's going on, the first thing we should do is look. Look around. See what's happening. Listen. Watch how things are working. Watch what is making things tick.

But that instead -- rather than looking around, and trying to understand; rather than watching; we turn to slogans in French ("laissez faire") and prejudices from our bank accounts (patents: good) and we use these slogans to explain everything around us.

And that this has got to change. For unless we begin to understand this revolution; unless we begin to really understand what makes this revolution tick; unless we watch and learn from its reality, we will kill it. It will pass. Its ecology will die.