Harvard professor Larry Lessig’s business pitch seems backwards, at first. It goes something like this: Invest in his super PAC, and get money out of politics. Donate enough money to render all the other money in politics meaningless.

So what’s the return on an investment, that, by definition, wants to ruin big, private financial investments in politics? “A return to something like a representative democracy,” is how Lessig puts it.

Larry Lessig via Wikipedia

That business pitch is now a $1 million idea. After launching a formal super PAC on May 1, thousands of small dollar donations flooded MayDay PAC’s servers, crashing them temporarily. It didn’t matter. Lessig and the MayDay PAC raised $1 million in less than two weeks, well ahead of their June 1 crowdfunding deadline, and the first in a series of fundraising goals to spur a mass movement towards campaign finance reform in the 2014 midterm elections. Marshaling 20,000 donations between $5 and $5,000 (the average was less than $100), Lessig now has his sights set on the end of the next month for another goal: $5 million, plus another $5 million in donor money to match if the crowdfunding campaign’s successful.

Armed with those dollars, Lessig’s MayDay PAC will try to influence five midterm races, and, in doing so, try and test a last-ditch, clinical intervention for democracy. If MayDay PAC sways enough legislators into making campaign finance reform a priority in 2014, then in 2016, its funders hope to make the issue unavoidable.

A week after the $1 million mark, I asked Lessig how he felt. “Elated,” he said. “Elated and under a lot of pressure, because the next step is getting the match and lining that up. The fact that we’ve succeeded means we have to take the next leap.”

If all goes according to plan, those leaps will culminate in a “super PAC to end all super PACs.” But Lessig, who admitted to being a little freaked out by MayDay’s initial success, is still securing donors. He’s also looking for a CEO.

It’s no small ambition. But what does an intervention for democracy even look like? According to Lessig, it requires using the very tool that many blame for concentrating political influence in the hands of the few in the first place. By creating a super PAC that tries to undo its own genetic code, Lessig hopes to show politicians that enough people are fed up with billionaires shaping American politics. “I think this is the first super PAC that’s received contributions from people who are complaining about the fact that they’re out of work,” he says.