One of the strands of thought coming from Copenhagen lays the blame of a lack of fair and binding deal at the feet of the internal US political system, namely the US Senate.

This has brought keepfakingit right back to March and a speech we saw one of our academic heroes, Larry Lessig, deliver to the SXSW interactive festival in Austin, Texas. Lessig, who has worked for a decade on copyright law in the US, speaks of classic tobacco science as it now applies to climate change and in particular the health industries in the US. His thesis is that money poisons trust. But that the cesspool of corruption is not the same as it ever was. The dynamics of money and access have changed dramatically in the past 15 years.

He believes legislators’ integrity is actually higher today than any time in the Senate’s history. The corruption he speaks of is a ‘good souls’ corruption that has come from systemic faults . Senators are spending 30-70% of their time on raising money for their own, or their party’s re-election. And this opens up the cracks for the lobby industry.

Some stats. Since Bill Clinton left office the number of lobbyists has doubled and their daily rate has doubled. Using the laws of simple economics, Lessig notes that if the number and value of lobbyists is rising, they must be becoming more effective. He also notes how nobody, on the right or the left, has any interest in changing this system.

Whether you want to blame the EU, China, Obama or indeed the Senate on the failure of Copenhagen, Lessig’s points here are eminently valid. To keepfakingit’s mind this is the biggest, most important political issue in the US today. Lessig does a simple cost benefit analysis on the lobbying industry and the cost here is trust. Ultimately Lessig calls for a ‘Declaration for Independence’. How? Through citizens funding.

Pascal’s Wager is ofter referred to by climate change activists; if we’re right we save the planet, if we’re wrong, we change society for the good anyway, win-win. The situation is exactly the same in the US Senate. To take on big coal, big oil and all the other big lobby groups funding tobacco science we need institutional change. And if we get it there are a lot more benefits, for both the right and left of the political spectrum, than simply a chance to ‘meaningfully’ tackle climate change.

I can’t find a video but here’s some audio that turned up on mediatedhumanities.org.

If you have 45 minutes at all this Christmas, listen to this.

Here’s the audio of the Q&A:

There’s more info on Lessig’s campaign at http://change-congress.org.

We find patterns where we look for them in life. Right now I’m thinking an awful lot about trust, and how we emulate real world trust relationships online. So it’s not altogether surprising that trust emerged for me as the biggest theme on Saturday at SXSW.

Nobody nailed this better than Laurence Lessig in his talk entitled Change V2. Lessig claims he’s giving up the copyright war he’s been waging these past ten years in favour of a a bigger fight. Political campaign finance reform. Without the total overhaul of how politicians are funding their campaigns he claims. The thesis is pretty simple:

Dependencies weaken trust

Money /= False

BUT

Money breeds contempt

How does this apply to government? Lobbyists pay politicians, ostensibly for access rather than favours. The electorate knows this and assumes the worst. So the US is now in a situation where less than 20% of the population thinks that congress is doing a good job.

Lessig gave examples from the past 200 years of the Republic and stated his view that we are living in a less corrupt democracy than at any time in history. So this is Good Souls corruption in Lessig’s view. But perceived conflicts of interest are providing the contests that create doubt and these doubts breed the deadly meme.

The same situation exists within the world of medicine. Think MMR inoculations. GPs are perceived by their patients to be on the end of a  payola stick by big medicine. So no record number of parents  are forgoing jabs for their kids.

So with all that in mind Lessig says we need to removed the dependencies of K street and issue a Declaration FOR Independence. How: Citizens funding only of political campaigns.

In Google we trust

Charlene Li came back to the issue of trust in her talk on the Future of Social Networks. The first half of the talk I wondered why I’d made the mistake of sitting in. Inane observations that anybody in the audience could have made isn’t the reason I’m here. But Li did bust out a couple of nuggets near the end.

She argued that we’re on the brink of really stepping up our use of implicit social data to fill in gaps of closeness. Essentially one social network talking and communicating to others in order to know who are friends are and importantly, in what context they’re our friend.This makes sense. But here’s the rub. To do this Li claims we need a central trust fund. And who’s this going to be. Google.

I’m not so sure about this. Why will we suddenly start trusting Google, will it be implicit trust, or explicit. In other words will we trust them by default because they simply host more of our digital life than anyone else, or will we grab on to them as an OpenID supplier( or whatever trust ecosystem eventually emerges, I’m not so sure OpenID will be the one). Follow the money said our host and she gave the example of our banks, our government services, our stores are all starting to move onto the social web.

But let’s go back to Lessig. Money is not equal to false, but money breeds contempt. Will the migration of financial transactions and dependancies onto the social web breed the same DIStrust that exists in real life? Big question.

A follow up thought of my own from this goes something along these lines:

Online philanthropy is a booming business right now. From events like Twestival to startups like DonorsChoose and Kiva, there’s never been a better time to give, and to give online. But are there real dangers here that we miss the trust hooks when we’re setting up these new paradigms.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos (was it me or was this talk a geek infomercial) talked (super nervously) about happiness. Ho hum. But one interesting point on trust didn’t pass me my. Zappos are all about company culture and happiness in the workplace. In order to achieve this they place a super amount of trust in their entire workforce from warehouse floor to callcenter to finance department. And if you were to believe Hsieh it works.

Finally, the OpenSocial Stack, which I saw at both geek (code) and non-geek (IRL ideas) talks. Four of the five levels on the stack here have implications for trust. Think about it. Google already are.

Opensocial Stack