But mostly this is a basic point about political economy. The tech sector—particularly the consumer-facing portion that Google and Facebook now epitomize, but which includes hundreds of wealthy companies—has become incredibly rich and powerful without developing much of a relationship with Washington. To this day, with only a few prominent exceptions, it isn’t super adept at wrangling concessions and defusing threats from government. As a result, has a lot more to lose from Washington than to gain.

By contrast, the tech industry’s competitors have highly effective, industry-wide armies of special pleaders (think of Hollywood and the music industry during the online-piracy fight, or the telecom and cable companies during the net neutrality fight), which ensures they have much more to gain from Washington than to lose. In the eyes of many tech executives, then, government is a preposterously powerful weapon that can be wielded against them by hostile forces, with no corresponding opportunity for them to do the same. They can immediately appreciate the logic of blowing the system up.

The genius of Lessig’s Mayday approach is that it’s perfectly calibrated to capitalize on this mindset. Beyond the appeal of what I’ve just described, it’s precisely the kind of pitch tech-world financiers are comfortable embracing. “The mentality of Silicon Valley when it comes to making investments is that it’s a low probability it’s going to pan out. But if it pans out, it changes the world,” Lessig told me. “You just have to have a way to make it plausible for them.” Even the mechanics of Lessig’s fundraising process mimic the way a start-up attracts financial backers: First build your website and collect a bazillion eyeballs (Lessig rounded up over 11,000 small donors in 12 days in May), at which point the moneymen consider your idea validated and open their wallets.

And so it’s no surprise that the seven fantastically rich people who matched Lessig’s first $1 million were all tech moguls: Peter Thiel (of PayPal and Facebook fame), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), the venture capitalists Brad Burnham and Fred Wilson, Joanne Wilson (Women Entrepreneurs Festival), Chris Anderson (TED), and Vin Ryan (Iron Mountain). (David Milner, of the private equity firm NuGen Capital Management, matched the nearly $200,000 that came in above the $1 million threshold in May.) If Mayday raises its next $5 million this month, it will almost certainly be a consortium of tech moguls that cobbles together the next big match.

The big caveat in all this is that the window is rapidly closing. The richer and more powerful Google and Facebook and their ilk become, the more they will invest in gaming the current system, and the less enthusiasm they will have for defunding it. Already, the leading moguls in Silicon Valley have joined forces to launch an industry-wide political-advocacy group. Though the initial cause is immigration reform, more causes and groups are surely imminent, many of them substantially less noble. Google, for its part, has made its peace with the Washington model of influence-peddling. And while many other companies, like Airbnb and Uber, rail against the regulators and pols they see as tools of established industries, at some point soon they too will learn how to coopt government rather than fight it, and the game will be over.

In fact, we may not even have till then. Today, there are dozens of billionaires walking around Silicon Valley thanks to their stakes in companies with insanely high valuations. When the tech bubble bursts, as it inevitably must, there’s going to be a lot less money sloshing around for extracurricular adventures like a campaign-finance super PAC.

All of which is to say, we don’t have a second to waste here. Campaign finance reform is theoretically the key to anything else you’d want government to do (or not do, as the case may be). As Lessig puts it, it is the reform without which no other fundamental reform is really possible, since without it you’re stuck in the world buying off powerful, self-interested actors to get anything done, which inevitably mucks things up. So we’re staring at the most important cause in politics, and an enormously powerful potential ally. It would be a crime to let the moment go to waste.