Lawrence Lessig wants to reduce the power of money in politics. And to do that, he says, he's going to need a "god awful amount of money."

The irony is not lost on Lessig, a Harvard Law School professor and political activist. But he believes that the only way to defeat Big Money is with Big Money, and so, on stage at WIRED's BizCon conference in New York City on Tuesday, he urged the crowd of business leaders in front of him to "embrace the irony."

Lessig is the founder of the May One PAC, which he refers to as "the Super PAC to end all Super PACs." Launched on May Day – a clever nod to the state of emergency Lessig says our government is in – May One's goal is to raise enough money to win several key Congressional races in 2014 and parlay those victories into a bigger fight to win a majority in Congress by 2016. That, Lessig says, would allow the government to "pass fundamental reforms, the first step to reducing the influence of money in politics."

The Root of All Evil

The way Lessig sees it, money in politics is the root of all evil. He says that too often, the American public is led to believe that it's the big corporations, in their constant quest for profits, that are truly to blame for our societal woes. And yet, Lessig explains, that's the intended nature of corporations. "We made them to make money," he said on stage. "That's a fantastic thing for the economy. But left free they want to make money however they can."

Corporations should not be blamed, Lessig argues, for behaving the way they were engineered to behave. Instead of blaming the corporations for doing what they do best–making money–Lessig says the government needs to "recognize what they can't do well and regulate."

Core to Lessig's argument is the recent debate over network neutrality, the idea that internet service providers shouldn't be allowed to play favorites with the applications run over their networks. But lately, that guarantee has been in jeopardy, after the Federal Communications Commission proposed new rules that would allow content providers to buy their way to faster delivery speeds, a move that would benefit larger companies with the ability to pay.

The Fear of Big Business

The uproar from the tech community has been mighty, and the FCC is now revisiting that proposal. But for Lessig, the fact that it was proposed at all proves that the government is scared to regulate big business for fear of jeopardizing the vote. After all, Lessig demonstrated with video clips, President Obama was a full-throated supporter of net neutrality throughout his presidential campaign.

"Does anyone really believe the Obama administration wants to alienate the telecom sector going into the 2014 elections when millions of dollars can be spent to displace the Democratic party, and therefore achieve the majority the Democrats fear?" Lessig asked.

And yet, Lessig believes, unraveling net neutrality would give these telecom providers a gross amount of power to pick and choose how content flows over the internet. That means, he says, that these companies could decide which political ads we see and don't see, only exacerbating the problem of money ruling politics. Allowing net neutrality to come undone, he says, "would produce a power which has literally never been seen in America to date, a power to control access to our culture and politics, unchecked and incapable of being checked by the government and a disaster for the diversity the Internet said it would give us."

Mayday, Mayday

Which is why he's launched May One. As of Tuesday, the PAC had already surpassed its funding goal, crowdsourcing more than $1 million in just 13 days. Now, Lessig will find backers to match that amount, and once he does, the PAC will put out a call for another $5 million round of crowdfunding and try to match that, too. May One will use that funding to back several Congressional races in 2014. The goal, Lessig says, is to learn from those campaigns and use what they've learned to raise even more money to win a House majority in 2016.

Of course, it will take more than money to achieve the future Lessig envisions. What this plan seems to overlook is the fact that politics are not just crippled by money, but by gerrymandering between districts and states. In most parts of this country, political lines have been drawn in indelible ink. Rewriting those lines will likely require a lot more than money – even a god awful amount of it.