The lost decade
Where would we be with ten more years of Aaron Swartz?
Lamentations
Where would we be with ten more years of Aaron Swartz?
It is, on its face, a selfish question. Who am I, or anyone for that matter, to lay claim to the life, the work, the potential of another person? To express a sense of entitlement at their private tragedy, which played out in the public square? To suggest they persist in suffering for my own benefit?
But it’s also a version of the question that Aaron was, seemingly, always demanding of himself. How can I make the world a better place? What is the most effective way to make things better? How can I “get better at life”?
And, once you come to understand Aaron’s accomplishments, it’s also an altruistic question. The world is objectively a better place for his having existed, and would be a better place were he still in it.
He’d make sure of it.
Digital Afterlife
Aaron Swartz (1986-2013) was an open access and public information advocate, commentator and “applied sociologist,” political organizer and hacktivist, researcher and essayist, programmer and entrepreneur, son, brother, and friend.
At age 12, he developed The Info Network, a precursor to Wikipedia, for which he was an ArsDigita prize finalist. The award brought him to the attention of the burgeoning Web 2.0 community; as a teenager, he contributed to the development of the RSS 1.0 specification that enabled digital content syndication, and worked with Lawrence Lessig to code machine readable licenses for Creative Commons.
After dropping out of high school, Aaron attended a local college and ultimately enrolled in Stanford University. While at Stanford, he bulk downloaded the Westlaw legal database corpus, supporting a pioneering bibliometric and digital humanities analysis that resulted in a 2008 Stanford Law Review paper describing conflicts of interest between paid “for-litigation” legal research and appeals of punitive damages awards. He later resumed his exploration of political corruption as a research fellow at Harvard.
After dropping out of Stanford, Aaron developed Infogami, a web content authoring platform that became part of Reddit and was subsequently purchased by Condé Nast, and launched the Open Library project.
After being fired from Condé Nast (you’ve detected a pattern, no doubt), Aaron made a brief foray into tech entrepreneurship with Jottit before pivoting into political advocacy and hacktivism. He founded WatchDog.net, a government accountability initative; helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, credited with catalyzing Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)’s senate bid; and co-founded the Demand Progress political advocacy group, which successfully campaigned to thwart the SOPA/PIPA ‘anti-piracy’ bills that threatened to break the Internet. A later project, née DeadDrop but posthumously launched as Strongbox, provided encrypted inboxes for media outlets to receive anonymous tips.
He also co-authored the fateful Guerilla Open Access Manifesto decrying the “private theft of public culture,” which the US government would use to establish motive in the federal case that precipitated his suicide.
“The revolution will be A/B tested”
The first time Aaron was investigated by the FBI, it was for downloading public records.
With public information access activist Carl Malamud, Aaron refined a technique for bulk downloading federal court documents from the PACER system in 2008. Malamud’s goal was to liberate the documents from behind the paywall and make them publicly available for free. In the process, they discovered that many of the court documents contained privacy violations due to failures to omit or redact information prior to filing. Aaron was surveilled and investigated, but the feds never brought any charges.
As he increasingly traveled in activist circles, Aaron harbored a santimonious impatience with the inefficiencies of many nonprofits that championed the causes he cared about:
He couldn’t stand that there were so many bad, inefficient nonprofits out there, eating up donor money…. He imagined himself travelling around the country as judge and executioner, closing down hundreds of ineffective N.G.O.s.
An epistemic Robin Hood, his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto implored those with the privilege of access — including librarians — to steal from the information-rich and give to the information-poor.
Is that what he planned to do with the JSTOR documents that he bulk downloaded using MIT’s network?
No one knows for sure — but that’s the case that federal prosecutors made.
Extraordinary Machine
Aaron was facing thirteen felony counts — eleven of which were under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — in a superseding indictment on which prosecutors hoped to build a ‘case of deterrance’ and which many characterized as prosecutorial abuse. The charges carried a possible sentence of 35 years in prison, along with a million-dollar fine and other penalties. But worst for Aaron, according to former girlfriend and journalist Quinn Norton, was the idea of being branded a felon and the impact that status would have on his political aspirations.
We were walking by the White House and he said to me — “They don’t let felons work there.”
It would be easy to look at Aaron’s track record of achievements and see someone superhuman, but the reality is, it seems, quite the opposite. Aaron was extraordinarily human. He lived a nearly ascetic life and had a pathological fear of dependency, of imposing on others, of being a burden. Reflecting on Aaron’s decision to take his own life rather than take a plea deal or take his chances at trial, Lawrence Lessig speaks to this dimension of Aaron’s character: “I think it was just recognizing he was going to need other people, and that was too hard for him to accept. He couldn’t become dependent. To end it was the only way.”
In The Internet’s Own Boy, Quinn Norton divulges that Aaron once confided to her that he had a personal theme song: Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine.” The lilting melody belies lyrical themes of suffering, sacrifice, betrayal, estrangement, and self-deprecation:
I seem to you to seek a new disaster every day
You deem me due to clean my view and be at peace and lay
I mean to prove, I mean to move in my own way
And say I've been getting along for long before you came into the play…If there was a better way to go, then it would find me
I can't help it, the road just rolls out behind me
Be kind to me, or treat me mean
I'll make the most of it, I'm an extraordinary machine
Cod[e]a
Weeks after Aaron’s suicide — the federal charges against him dropped — the Office of Science and Technology Policy released guidance to federal agencies to prepare for a transition to open access of federally-funded research. Biden was then vice president; later as president, he expanded the 2013 directive by removing the embargo to provide immediate access to federally-funded research upon publication.
Sometimes one’s only crime is to be ahead of one’s time.
Learn more about Aaron
Read Aaron’s blog, Raw Thoughts.
Read The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz.
Read Justin Peters’s The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet. Simon & Schuster, 2016. Available in preview mode from Google Books. (I was thrilled to find this in Google Books, only to expend my entire preview reading privileges on the introduction. Google Books outsmarted all my efforts at circumventing the paywall. The irony is not lost on me; I imagine Aaron getting a laugh out of it.)
Read rememberences from Strongbox collaborator Kevin Poulsen, roommate and fellow tech activist Peter Eckersley, and journalist David Amsden.
Watch The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz.
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Great piece. I'm currently reading Whitney Webb's book, which includes lots of examples of suicides/ "suicided." I have to wonder now every time there is a "suicide." https://nypost.com/2018/01/27/these-hackers-suicides-are-eerily-similar/
When I first learned about Aaron Swartz a few years ago he was a motivating reason for me to go back to school to become a librarian 🥲