About Bottom-up

I’m Timothy B. Lee, and this is my blog. Note that I’m not related to Timothy Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Nor am I related to Timothy H. Lee of the Center for Individual Freedom. My Princeton home page has more information about me. I can be found on Twitter here. You can email me at leex1008 (a) umn.edu.

My professional life has been driven by twin passions: technology and public policy. My undergraduate studies were in computer science, and my first post-college job was as a computer programmer. But I soon got an unexpected opportunity to work as a writer at the Cato Institute, a DC think tank. I spent four years in the think tank world, before quitting to be a full-time freelance writer. Then, in 2008 I decided to go back to graduate school; I’m now pursuing a PhD in computer science at Princeton University.

Most of my writing to date has focused on technology policy. I’ve written about copyright and patent law, privacy and electronic surveillance, network neutrality, and government transparency. At Princeton, I’ve been actively involved with the Center for Information Technology Policy, which does cutting-edge research on such topics as government transparency, electronic voting, and web security.

In recent years, Silicon Valley has become a symbol for the best aspects of the American economy: fiercely competitive, breathtakingly innovative, and open to anyone with the talent and the work ethic to make something people want. It has become a cliche to note that the country (and the world) would be a better place if it were more like Silicon Valley. But few of the people who make this observation have any deep insights about why Silicon Valley works so well. They speak in platitudes about the importance of innovation without having much to say about where innovation comes from or why it happens.

I’m convinced that Silicon Valley’s fundamental strength is the fact that it embodies what I’ll call a bottom-up perspective on the world. The last couple of decades have brought us the dominance of the open Internet, the increasing success of free software, and the emergence of the free culture movement as an important social and political force. More generally, Silicon Valley is a place with extremely low barriers to entry, a culture of liberal information sharing, and a respect for the power of individual entrepreneurs.

Conversely, I think many of the world’s problems can be traced to the actions of institutions that are too large, too powerful, and too out of touch with the people over whom they exercise authority. I’m an unapologetic advocate for a bottom-up agenda that seeks to make these entrenched incumbents more accountable, more subject to competition, and ultimately less powerful. This blog will explore how this might be done, and why it ought to be.

Bottom-Up aims to be a little bit different than most blogs. The typical blog is tightly coupled to the news cycle. That makes for a lively read, but it tends to produce a kind of scatter-shot effect, with little connection between one post and the next. I’m going to try to achieve a bit more continuity and coherence with posts at Bottom-Up. Posts may run long, and if a topic strikes my fancy I may do several posts in a row about it. I’m not going to try to hit every story that shows up on Techmeme; if you’re looking for comprehensive coverage of tech policy (or anything else) I suggest you look elsewhere. But I hope those who take the time to read my longer-than-average posts will find them interesting and perhaps even compelling.