This probably explains why Einstein worked in a patent office for some years. It was a wonderful place to keep up with tech. Fewer patents get introduced each year. I’ve wondered if the tech is just that much more complex, or if it really is a result of our system? Same goes with copyright.

It’s the great legal balancing act–purpose as opposed to method. When you forget the purpose, it’s really easy to get lost creating convoluted methods–rabbit holes that lead nowhere, or at least that lead to a place determined by someone like the lawyers for big patent mills. You let the Congress publish laws that do not represent the intents given in the Constitution, and people who are meant to be sure law is consistent (law A is in keeping with internal consistency of purpose) i.e judges, and you wind up with laws and enforcement built to support large isolated companies who don’t care about inovation, but sustained profits. They don’t have to produce anything for them, and since our society is so entrenched in this money game as Hedges and Lessig write about, we end up just letting it happen.

Meh… the real problem is people are taught to believe law is some esoteric subject they cannot understand. 200-years ago, people read up on this stuff all the time. -shakez head-

Post-Intellectual society, welcome.

A friend of mine and professor of physics (he’s and elderly Englishman who came to the US in the early 1960’s) gave me an interesting notion that the great philosophers in America were laywers (like my 7th great grandfather James Wilson). They were often country laywers like Lincoln. Educated on their own or through small farming schools or land grant universities. Students’ education was not free, but subsidizrd by the community.

Professors made substantially less, but they were professors as a civic duty. Much like teachers. It was also a stable job. A guarenteed job in many ways.

We also would talk about an American professor on media ecology named Neil Postman. Founder of the NYU school of media ecology. Postman took off where Korzybski, McLuhan, and many others took off, in education, technology (of which he was a skeptic to some extent, but for good reason), and a variety of other subjects.

Postman’s arguably greatest achievement was analyzing the American social narrative and producing tools to said us as a society described our social narratives and determine what problems exist in our society, and how best to deal withthem. Narratives are building blocks which explain to us our purpose and outlook on the world.

I’ve been slowly laying out a paper on the topic. It would probably be of great value to the legal world (Postman’s theories–not necessarily anything I create), by allowing us to better understand that within any institution there exists narrative–stories–gods to which we serve, and when those meaning making devices break down or are no longer fuctioning satisfactorily, the institution breaks down. People claw onto whatever they can find, or find solace in total disillusionment.

Postman writes about looking to the 18th and early 19th century to find components and narrative elements to which we can fasten ourselves to, and thereby use to propel ourselves into the 21st century.

The bridge we are constructing–what are we to take with us?

What we have brought with us obviously does not serve us.

We need to look back at what has come before and find new narratives from which to serve, and to serve us. Presently, we have very few if any gods to serve–narratives. Often people get stuck in dogmatism and fundamentalism, because they have no competing narratives to serve.

In the legal profession, this seemily great tidal wave of formalism may be a direct response to our loss of narrative that was solidified in the 1950’s and 1960’s with the racial equality movements and the anti-war protest movements where people learned to distrust their society and government. We have to so great an extent given up on living as a society where as a community we can intellegently solve any problem that comes before us, instead replacing this society of idealist lawyers, farmers, and dreamers who took the impossible and made it real (the American dream) with a culture of clans and culture wars–group tribal mentality. We have in so many ways regressed as a society in this pos-intellectual age. People can no longer put their faith and trust in social narratives and institutions which they had at one time confidently confided their fears, hopes and dreams. The social order fell apart. I don’t think it was broken for a bad reason, but the after effects have been catastrophic, as no one has come in to set things right–no narratives exist–outside, perhaps, a few good movies or those developed through social movements like Occupy or other left-libertarian movements–that can fill the gaps left by the great American social purge.

Overall, no meaningful narratives present themselves outside of the occasional film, book, or television show that tell us about ourselves and what our world should look like, or what it does look like, but these stories are like the nightly news–they do not represent themselves inside meaningful order or context. They are merely entertainment as opposed to something the the Greek epics in Ancient Greece, which existed as a platform for human experience and expression. Young Greecians would run about reciting Homer. The society used these stories for many years to fill in the context of life until Olato changed that, replacing it with his Academy, which served for nearly a thousand years as the center for meaningful human endevors. Today, our stories, which could provide us some valuable context for our world are tossed about ineptly in our society. Monty Python has phrase well suited to the world in which we live, “And now for something completely different.”

We live in a time where meaningful context is a near impossibility.

To endeavor to improve our world, improve our laws, improve our system of government, we need first a meaningful context and social narrative in which to serve, and which may in turn serve us. One that will guide us forward, providing some meaningful order to the world in which we find ourselves. Once these are in place, as it has in past times, society will fall into step behind our new narratives–provided the narratives are functional and mean ngful for the times–but far too often we allow our narratives to stagnate and die, or do not even know they exist. It has come time in our development that we become cognizant of our narratives and seek to improve them or replace them when times and change necessitates it–we must not lose track of who we are or where we have come, lest we will become lost–as we now find ourselves

We fight, live and die for our narratives, without even knowing they exist.

The Constitution is no different. We have quite clear purposes and narratives listed in the documents, but our people (judges, lawyers, political leaders) serving other gods–the gods of fundamentalism, social opportunism, and formalism (toname but a few) are conspiring to overwhelm us, because they provide to these men and women the meaningful context for their age. They have no other eak out a life for themselves or hope to move effortlessly through the vast and complex multitudes of change that occur in our world everyday, and they see latching onto these narratives (plugging themselves into the Borg Hive Mind as it were) as a meanigful solution to their woes.

We who think differently, obviously have fashioned our own narratives of sorts–obviously built out of the culture of the geek-centric world. I don’t know what that constitutes, but it’s some sort of ready-made patchwork of ideas and past narratives that allows us to survive and provide meaning for our world.

For the rest of humanity–or at least American humanity (whether life without meaning is even life at all, I cannot say)–no such escape is near. They latch onto whatever they can in the hopes of survival.

I suspect our problems in patent law are just one superficial example of this fundamental problem with our world.