Larry Lessig gave an amazing presentation on David Post’s Jefferson’s Moose (2009) at the Heinrich-Böll Foundation in Berlin last week. Watch it! What do you think about the RW/RO argument? The Remix argument? Is change as radical as Lessig argues? What is your favorite moose? Other mooses you can think of?
What
If you are looking for a semana santa (easter week) reading, I urge you to order David Post‘s, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (Oxford University Press 2009). It is an amazingly beautiful written reflection on the the emerging/emergent new world of Cyberspace.
The book, which I’ve been laboring over for a good 12 years or so, has a (deceptively?) simple premise: to recreate Jefferson’s analysis of the New World, for cyberspace. It sounds pretty outlandish, and I guess it is — but I think it actually works pretty well (though I leave that to you to decide that for yourself). Along the way, we discover some pretty interesting things about the Internet, and about Jefferson — about network design, and Jefferson’s plan for governing the Western Territory, about the protocol stack and the canals of France, about distributed routing, end-to-end design, and the Louisiana Purchase. And about why Jefferson had a moose shipped to him in Paris while he was serving as US minister to France, and why we should care about that.
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