Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Larry Lessig Declares Email Bankruptcy

Larry Lessig declares email bankruptcy:

Wired News: Call It the Dead E-Mail Office: If you've been waiting for internet legal visionary Lawrence Lessig to reply to your e-mail, forget about it. In a script-driven note sent out last week, Lessig wrote: "Dear person who sent me a yet-unanswered e-mail, I apologize, but I am declaring e-mail bankruptcy." He went on to note that he had spent 80 hours the prior week sorting through unanswered e-mail built up since January 2002, and had determined that "without extraordinary effort" he would simply never be able to respond to these messages. Many of them were from admirers. He apologized five times in five paragraphs, acknowledging that by not responding, he had failed in the most basic form of "cyber decency." He told recipients, now effectively his e-mail creditors, that if they replied, his e-mail program would mark their missives for special attention.

He was clear, though, that he still may not make good on his "debt." "That's not a promise of a quick response," he wrote. "But it is a promise that I will try."

Lessig has been a crusader against the ills of spam, but told Wired News that his bankruptcy resulted from the overwhelming amount of personal e-mail he receives. (Ironically, Lessig had to respond to questions via e-mail, as he was in Brazil. He said he gets an average of 200 non-spam e-mails a day, at an undisclosed number of different e-mail accounts.) He said his unanswered mail involved a variety of things, including his work on Eldred v. Ashcroft, his request for support on the related Public Domain Enhancement Act, his columns for Wired magazine and his newly published book, Free Culture. It all generated "a torrent of e-mail," he said.

While Lessig has adopted techniques like using "disposable" e-mail addresses for people to respond to his blog posts, he told Wired News he has not formulated a specific plan for emerging from his bankruptcy. While many people might wish they could do the same -- e-mail overload is something most of us recognize -- some viewed Lessig's declaration as something of a stunt. "It's theatrical," said Eric K. Clemons, professor of operations and information management at the Wharton School. Clemons said Lessig is a public figure and should have long ago stopped thinking he should respond to every e-mail he gets. "You have to begin to think of e-mail from strangers as what it really is: telemarketing at 7:15 when you're sitting down with your teenage daughter for the first time in three days," Clemons said. "It's either somebody you have a reason to respond to, or it's the equivalent of telemarketing." Clemons reads e-mail from strangers, but only responds to well-thought-out requests, for instance for copies of hard-to-find papers he's written.

Others said Lessig's e-mail bankruptcy was more likely his effort to behave honorably while acknowledging that his life has changed. "This is Larry coming to grips with becoming a public figure, and recognizing he can't relate to e-mail in the way he did when he was just a law professor," said Michael Carroll, assistant professor of law at Villanova University and a founding board member of Creative Commons, a flexible-copyright group chaired by Lessig. "He was used to using e-mail for one-to-one communications, and he's now engaged in one-to-many communications."

Carroll notes that Lessig could have gone further. U.S. senators and congressional representatives for instance have a variety of filters in place so they only see e-mail sent by constituents. Both Carroll and Clemons agree that e-mail addresses are easier to get than phone numbers, and that most people don't regard e-mail messages as an imposition in the same way they do phone calls. One e-mail analyst thinks what Lessig is doing is part of a broader cultural adjustment to e-mail. "Public figures and senior managers are going to get a lot of e-mail, and the traditional solution for them is you have secretaries," said David Ferris, principal at Ferris Research, an e-mail research firm in San Francisco. Ferris says Lessig's problem does not reflect a flaw in e-mail technology, but rather the cultural fact that many people who would've employed secretaries 30 years ago no longer do.

For his part, Lessig still seems to intend to respond to all future e-mails. At the same time, he's obviously relieved that his note has been received with "kind understanding." "A few have simply resent their e-mail," he said. "But the vast majority were kind enough to simply remain silent."

I'm still above water, but only because I have tuned up my spam filters--and I know that I am missing some (hopefully only a few) messages that I want to receive.

However, in Lessig's case the problem was not spam--it was non-spam: people wanting a one-to-one relationship. And the stakes are pretty high: Successfully providing that one-to-one relationship can be a very important thing for those of us in the intellectual influence game to do.

Or should I say: "Successfully providing the seamless appearance of that one-to-one relationship can be a very important thing for those of us in the intellectual influence game to do"?