SAN DIEGO – Stanford law professor and internet icon Larry Lessig called on geeks Wednesday night to be "heroes" who can help Americans believe in their government again, by creating tools to help drive the influence of money out of politics.

"We have had different times in this country requiring different heroes," Lessig said in a keynote speech at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference here.

"During World War II, we required soldiers as heroes," Lessig said. "We may be at a time when we need geeks as heroes."

Lessig says he needs help from coders, because problems like global warming can't be solved until elected officials are freed from the corrupting effect of campaign contributions.

Lessig recently flirted with the idea of running for Congress, but instead is launching a new campaign called Change Congress.

The new project is modeled on the Creative Commons project he started to help change how copyright works, which allows people to tag their writings and photography with alternative copyright badges.

The project, to be officially announced in two weeks, will give candidates for political office three choices they can support in order to get badges for their campaign website.

Candidates who pledge not to take money from lobbyists or political action committees can claim one badge, get another for pledging to ban "earmarks" in Congress and take a third for supporting public campaign financing.

From there, Lessig wants to find ways to get individuals to funnel early money to candidates who pledge to support one or more of the principles.

That's the carrot.

The stick approach includes possibly recruiting respected "citizen candidates" to run against politicians who don't support the statements – a way, Lessig said, to make it cheaper for a candidate to support the principles than to ignore them.

Lessig's new project comes after 10 years of working on what he calls the "Free Culture" project that focused on copyright reform to encourage an explosion of creative remixing of our cultural history.

Lessig says the only way for Congress to change is to have outsiders change the system, since right now the whole system is rigged.

"Congress is an incumbency machine," Lessig said.

But he doesn't think legislators are by and large crooks who are taking bribes in exchange for votes. In fact, he says we may have the least bribery in our nation's history.

But the money still corrupts in a number of ways. For instance, legislators, like scientists funded by drug companies, internalize their supporters' interests.

"Money corrupts the process of reasoning," Lessig said. "They get a sixth sense of how what they do might affect how they raise money."

Lawmakers need to be free from a system that requires them to constantly raise money in order to free them to simply think about how to craft good public policy.

Lessig spared no rhetoric in making his case against the corrupting influence of campaign contributions – comparing the urgency of the financing problem to that of an alcoholic about to lose his family and job, but who has to "realize the first problem that must be solved is the alcoholism."

Health care reform, global warming and immigration?

"There is no way to think about solving these problems until we solve the money problem," Lessig said.

Lessig also pointed to the Sunlight Foundation and MAPLight.org as examples of burgeoning uses for technology to show – and thus hopefully diminish – the influence of money on politicians.

The geeks in San Diego embraced Lessig's call to keyboards, giving him a standing ovation, but wanted to know what they could do right now.

Lessig tamped down their excitement a bit, saying the project could take three or four election cycles to truly create this year's political buzzword, "change."

The outro music to Lessig's speech was the Rolling Stone's "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

Photo: Quinn Norton/Wired.com

See Also: