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You are lucky to have met this selfless being. I simply cannot
imagine what it must be like for his parents, particularly his mom.
This is such a tragedy - this guy ran both radical and reform and
seems to have been clear on so many issues - managing the
contradictions... <br>
<br>
Funny (not from you) but personally I was expecting list members to
climb in and tear him apart like they did with Julian Assange who
exposed war crimes etc. <br>
<br>
I guess the best we can do is keep his spirit alive by pushing the
public rather than the rentier interest... <br>
<br>
Riaz<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 2013/01/16 09:01 AM, Anriette
Esterhuysen wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:50F65035.1010600@apc.org" type="cite"><font
size="+1">I have been thinking <font size="+1">and reading a
lot about Aaron in the last few days.</font></font> I met
Aaron in 2008 when we were both part of a small group</blockquote>
<br>
<p style="margin:1em 0 3px 0;">
<a name="2" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica,
sans-serif;font-size:18px;"
href="http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/NakedCapitalism/%7E3/UzK74Wi5ubU/aaron-swartz-and-his-risk-factors.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email">Aaron
Swartz at Risk</a>
</p>
<p style="font-size:13px;color:#555;margin:9px 0 3px
0;font-family:Georgia,Helvetica,Arial,Sans-Serif;line-height:140%;font-size:13px;"><span>Posted:</span>
15 Jan 2013 03:15 AM PST</p>
<p><em>These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.<br>
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see<br>
that he is living somewhere in the middle<br>
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.</em> –Edwin Brock</p>
<p>Twenty-<i>first</i> century. As Matt Stoller shows, <a
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartzs-politics.html">Aaron
Swartz was killed by corruption</a>. His destroyers were <a
href="http://boston.com/community/blogs/on_liberty/2013/01/aaron_swartz_death_highlights.html">placeholders</a>
in a weak, vicious, and corrupt rentier state.</p>
<p class="p3">Immanuel Wallerstein describes such a state in <i>World-Systems
Analysis</i>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[W]hat does it mean to be a strong state internally? Strength
certainly is not indicated by the degree of arbitrariness or
ruthlessness of the central authority. … Dictatorial behavior by
state authorities is more often a sign of weakness than of
strength. … The weaker the state, the less wealth can be
accumulated through economically productive activities. This
consequently makes the state machinery itself a prime locus,
perhaps the prime locus, of wealth accumulation—through larceny
and bribery, at high and low levels. It is not that this does
not occur in strong states—it does—but that in weak [<a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/12/secession-petition_n_2463385.html">e.g.</a>]
states it becomes the preferred means of capital accumulation [<a
href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aKGZkktzkAlA">"savvy
businessmen"</a>], which in turn weakens the ability of the
state to perform its other tasks. … In states that have raw
materials which are very lucrative on the world market (such as
oil [or some forms of intellectual property]), the income
available to the state is essentially rent, and here too the
actual control of the machinery guarantees that much of the rent
can be siphoned off into private hands.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sound familiar?<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>For
our rentier state then, siphoning rents on intellectual property
into private hands is central to mission. <a
href="http://mashable.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-sopa/">Swartz
stopped SOPA</a> because his mission (or vision) was <a
href="http://pastebin.com/cefxMVAy">radically different</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come
into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil
disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of
public culture.</p>
<p>We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our
copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff
that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to
buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to
download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing
networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Which is what Swartz did, and <a
href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/aaron-swartz-fix-draconian-computer-crime-law">for
which he was punished</a>. (empty wheel points to <a
href="http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/01/14/doj-invoked-aaron-swartz-manifesto-to-justify-investigative-methods/">the
procedural sloppiness of the charges</a>, but that’s hardly the
point when a rentier’s rice bowl is broken, and weak states are
lousy at law anyhow.)<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
<p>This isn’t a post about intellectual property rights, so I’ll
merely present an example of the good that Swartz’s vision can do.
As is well known, Swartz wrote the spec for RSS (Really Simple
Syndication). At age 14. <a
href="http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/memories/rss-changed-our-lives.html">And
so</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><b>RSS changed our lives</b></p>
<p>I need to let the people who knew and loved Aaron know that his
work changed my son’s life for the better, forever.</p>
<p>Diagnosed with autism at age 2, My son’s best help came from
the RSS feeds and papers that I could get access to that offered
the truth and science about autism. Every morning I read the RSS
feeds from academic journals world wide to find out more about
my son’s regressive autism, fragile X premutation (which is only
known in scientific academic circles) the MTHFR gene and new and
critical treatments. Because of his work I was able to find out
about UC Davis, about current scientific treatment, and research
studies to get us this treatment. My son is now four and his is
doing great… <span class="s1">BECAUSE of the scientific
information I had access to. I have an MLIS. I interned at
Elsevier. I have seen all sides of the academic pay wall and I
have felt my ignorance around my neck like a boulder, at great
cost to my son’s health. But Aaron, you helped us</span>.
Thank you. Until we see that the populace will never be
scientifically aware UNLESS we have access to the information we
will not be able to go from a people of belief to a people of
ideas [not a bug].</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, Swartz helped this woman and her son by removing
information from the grasp of rentiers. That’s what “open access”
means, operationally.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>(See
also on <a
href="http://laboratorium.net/archive/2013/01/12/aaron_swartz_was_26">PACER</a>,
where Swartz provided open access to the law.)</p>
<p>I would now like to dolly back from Swartz’s views on open
access, and show how three overlapping lethal systems, each one
structured for its own corrupt purposes by our rentier state,
narrowed his life chances by piling on risk factors, and set him
up for an untimely death. First, I’ll look at the health care
system, then at health in the tech community, and finally at
health in the technical activist community. In each system, Aaron
Swartz was at risk — or the nature of our current arrangements in
political economy put him at risk.</p>
<p><b>Risk Factors from the Health Care System</b></p>
<p>As Swartz wrote in <a href="http://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget">“How
to Get a Job Like Mine”</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Undoubtedly, the first step is to choose the right genes: I was
born white, male, American.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unfortunately for Swartz, he should also have chosen to be born
in a different generation: My own, for example. Check out <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/10/health/differences-in-life-expectancy.html">this
chart from the New York Times</a>:</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartz-and-his-risk-factors.html/health"
rel="attachment wp-att-37451"><img
src="cid:part14.07020507.01090406@gmail.com" alt=""
title="health" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-37451"
height="455" width="540"></a></p>
<p>Clearly, we are failing millions of our young people — of whom
Swartz, 26, was one — in the most basic way imaginable, by
shortening their lives! Of course, I don’t claim that there was a
linear relation between Swartz’s death and health care he would
have gotten under a humane system, had he needed it (although <a
href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick">depression</a>,
though often treatable, is hard to treat). What I do claim, and
what the chart shows, is that Swartz, because of his age, was at
risk of dying younger than I will (drawing me into collusion as a
rentier, come to think of it; I didn’t do anything to this life
chance). And of course, <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/business/health-care-and-pursuit-of-profit-make-a-poor-mix.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0">our
system of health-care-for profit</a> is both <a
href="http://baselinescenario.com/2010/01/13/united-states-health-care-spending/">uniquely
profitable and uniquely bad at delivering health</a>, dominated
as it is by <a
href="http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-resources">health
insurance companies</a> — rentiers — who <a
href="http://rutherfordl.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/my-new-hero-house-representative-anthony-weiner/">contribute
no value to any of the transactions in which they participate</a>,
and <a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/ny-times-reporter-confirm_b_500999.html">who
have corruptly used the power of the state to entrench
themselves</a> (shocker, I know). I’d also note that <a
href="http://www.suicide.org/college-student-suicide.html">suicide</a>*
is <a
href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/14/what-we-dont-know-about-suicide/">a
problem our health care system seems unable to address</a>.</p>
<p><b>Risk Factors in the Tech Community</b></p>
<p>Zooming in to civil society, Swartz was not the only tech genius
to commit suicide**. Two examples; see if you can find a common
factor with Swartz.</p>
<p>First, <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/technology/ilya-zhitomirskiy-co-founder-of-social-network-dies-at-22.html?_r=0">Ilya
Zhitomirskiy (22)</a>. His project was <a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/technology/ilya-zhitomirskiy-co-founder-of-social-network-dies-at-22.html">Diaspora</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Instead of creating a central database like Facebook’s, where
information about hundreds of millions of members is stored and
mined for advertising and marketing purposes, their idea was to
develop freely shared software that would allow every member of
the network to ‘own’ his or her personal information.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Second, <a
href="http://www.cso.com.au/article/392338/young_cryptographer_ends_own_life/">Len
Sassaman (36)</a>. His project was Mixmaster:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Len Sassaman, [was] a highly-regarded 31 year-old cryptographer
who helped create secure communication systems. … The former
engineer for Anonymizer, which obscures a user’s IP address, was
a well-known “cypherpunk” who maintained the open source
Mixmaster remailer software. The Mixmaster protocol was designed
to protect against traffic analysis and offer users a way to
send email anonymously.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>Sassaman’s
work focussed on ‘attacking and defending anonymous
communication systems, exploring the applicability of
information-theoretic secure systems for privacy solutions, and
designing protocols which satisfy the specific needs of the use
case for which they are applied’, according to his profile at
the computer security and industrial cryptography research
department of Belgium’s Leuven University.<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Before you ask, <a
href="http://boingboing.net/2011/07/04/rip-len-sassaman-cyp.html">Sassaman,
like Swartz, suffered from depression</a>, and <a
href="http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/dark-side-of-the-boom">Zhitomirskiy
was bipolar</a>. However, if you look again at their work, you
will also see that both men had an additional risk factor in
common with Swartz: They too were directly assaulting the
interests of rentiers with a vision of open access, Zhitomirskiy
with the radical notion that users should own their own data (the
nerve!), and Sassaman with the equally radical notion that people
should be able to communicate without having their own byte
streams monetized.</p>
<p>Adding to the risk factors for Swartz in the tech community,
entrepreneurs suffer massive stress — and Swartz, a co-founder of
Reddit, was an entrepreneur. From <a
href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3235583">commenter
debasishbera in a long thread at YCombinator</a>, the
entrepreneurial incubator:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As a startup owner I feel like I am a sinking man and each
floating wood chip around is a hope – Learning to float between
moving from one wood chip to other is the key to me.</p>
<p>I guess I will fail that day when I will conclude that I am too
tired of trying (not really, really tried — and still failed).</p>
<p>I don’t believe “The truth is … that it takes a special and
lucky person”. The truth is we need one or two hands on our
shoulder and someone to stand during the darkest hours and say
“darkest hours are always before the sun comes”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And a final risk factor <a
href="http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartzs-crime/">Swartz
shared</a> with other tech entrepreneurs is being on the wrong
side of the law (however righteously). <a
href="http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/16i790/aaron_swartzs_suicide_may_make_the_openaccess/">From
a long thread on Reddit</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Most people should check out just how most people in Tech start
out their careers. Every person I know that starts a successful
company, has to do illegal things at the start. Why? Because
being legitimate isn’t profitable for a small business in the
US… you cannot make it through the first year without skating
that line.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In other words, corruption is part of the bootstrapping process,
beyond the corruption imposed by rentiers. I could tell a story
about my entrepreneurial grandfather, but <a
href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_spectator/2011/10/steve_jobs_and_the_little_blue_box_how_ron_rosenbaum_s_1971_arti.html">Steve
Jobs is a better example</a>. The “blue box” is a device, back
in the analog days, that was widely used for making free—and
illegal—phone calls. “Open access” again:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[Jobs] told me about how the blue box article had inspired him
and Wozniak. How they’d taken down the cycles-per-second of the
tones AT&T used to translate phone numbers into audio
signals, some of which I’d disclosed in the article, and how
they’d found the others in some obscure technical journals and
had begun building their own blue boxes, hoping to sell them on
the underground market. (Gamblers and mobsters liked to use them
to keep their communications outside the system.)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mobsters? Well, alrighty. Today’s Steve Jobs would have been
thrown in jail and tortured by solitary confinement: No Apple!
(But as Wallerstein says, weak states aren’t really about
economically productive activities.) I’m not equating Swartz’s
community service-level offense with being mobbed up, but pointing
out that getting on the wrong side of the law is yet another tech
stressor, and hence a risk factor for anyone fragile (not the
first word that comes to mind when thinking of Steve Jobs).</p>
<p><b>Risk Factors in the Activist Community</b></p>
<p>Zooming in to Swartz’s associates, friends, and family, we find
additional risk factors when <a
href="http://www.mainjustice.com/2013/01/07/mass-u-s-attorney-carmen-ortiz-says-no-to-run-for-higher-office/">the
power of the state</a>*** was brought to bear on him. <a
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartzs-politics.html">Stoller
explains</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Corruption isn’t just people profiting from betraying the
public interest. It’s also people being punished for upholding
the public interest. In our institutions of power, when you do
the right thing and challenge abusive power, you end up
destroying a job prospect, an economic opportunity, a political
or social connection, or an opportunity for media. Or … you are
bankrupted and destroyed. … Corrupt self-interest, when it goes
systemwide, demands that it protect rentiers from people like
Aaron, that it intimidate, co-opt, humiliate, fire, destroy,
and/or bankrupt those who stand for justice. … [T]he person who
warned about the downside in a meeting gets cut out of the loop,
or the former politician who tries to reform an industry sector
finds his or her job opportunities sparse and unappealing next
to his soon to be millionaire go along get along colleagues.
I’ve seen this happen to high level former officials who have
done good, and among students who challenge power as their
colleagues go to become junior analysts on Wall Street.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartz-and-his-risk-factors.html/aaron-ada"
rel="attachment wp-att-37460"><img
src="cid:part35.02010607.04090002@gmail.com" alt=""
title="aaron-ada" class="alignright size-full wp-image-37460"
height="240" width="160"></a>
</p>
<p>And such an additional stressor — and I’m sure there were many
others besides this one — put Swartz at risk. <a
href="http://www.quinnnorton.com/said/?p=644">Quinn Norton’s
howl of pain</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We were destroyed by the investigation, and by enduring so much
together in the five years of the difficult love affair of
difficult people. In the end he told me he needed to get away
from me. I let him go, and waited for the day he’d come back. I
knew that one day we’d have a day to be together again, though
probably not as lovers. Together, as something that doesn’t have
a word. He went on to another relationship, and I know he
touched her like he did me, because that’s how he touched
people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><b>Conclusion</b></p>
<p>I don’t have the right word for the way that the rentier state
zeroed in on Swartz until he cracked: How it piled a
rentier-directed health care system on top of a rentier-optimized
technical ecology on top of a rentier-driven justice system. But
perhaps I have a metaphor: The Salem Witch trials, where those
convicted by the justice system of that time were “pressed” to
death with stone after stone after stone: </p>
<p>Depression. </p>
<p>Oppression. </p>
<p>Repression. </p>
<p>Simple, direct, neat.</p>
<p>However, I am hopeful because I believe that our state acts as it
does because it is weak, not strong. And I expect to have a way to
use the cold and burning anger I too feel in the service of
justice.</p>
<p>NOTE *,** If you or anyone you know is considering suicide, do, <i>please</i>,
seek help (<a href="http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/">for
example</a>). Multiple asterisks for emphasis!</p>
<p>NOTE *** <a
href="http://www.mainjustice.com/2013/01/07/mass-u-s-attorney-carmen-ortiz-says-no-to-run-for-higher-office/">Ortiz
was a leader in collecting fines for lawbreaking</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ortiz and her office have won attention for taking on a number
of high-profile cases, including the ongoing murder prosecution
of notorious mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger. Her office also
announced in December that it was the largest contributor to the
$13.1 billion in criminal and civil fines recovered<span
class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>in 2012 by the
nation’s 94 U.S. Attorney’s offices. Ortiz’s office collected
$8.8 billion during the fiscal year, accounting for almost 67
percent of the total collection.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These <a
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/yes-virginia-the-department-of-justice-really-believes-it-has-been-tough-on-corporate-fraud.html">cost-of-doing-business
fines are corrupt, as Yves points out</a>. They are the precise
equivalent of shell game operators passing the cop on the beat a
fiver while they continue to rope in the shills. Ortiz is, as one
would expect, a rising star in the Democratic party, and she’s not
spending more time with her family. Yet.</p>
<p>NOTE *** One very, very obvious thing the left should be seeking
to redress is the different life expectancies shown in Chart 1.
Single payer health care would be of great help to the Aaron
Swartz’s of this world who are still alive. And we shouldn’t be
fighting merely to “save” Social Security, but to make the
benefits age neutral. How the elites must laugh among themselves
for having inveigled us into selling out our own children!</p>
<br>
<br>
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