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Snip:<br>
<br>
He once wrote me:
<blockquote>
<p>My core argument is that the problem with our government is not
specific misdeeds but systemic corruption. Thus pointing out
problems with specific Congresspeople—whether through wiki
pages, pop-up windows, or campaign finance data—is going to be
ineffective, perhaps even counterproductive, because every time
you whack at a corruption scandal over here, a dozen more will
pop up over there, and interested people will burn out from the
impossibility of the task.</p>
<p>The problem is not that Congressman X takes money from the
credit card companies and votes for the bankruptcy bill; the
problem is that he has to do that to get elected. Forcing him to
stop will just force him to be more subtle about it, just as
each new campaign finance reform bill sprouts more loopholes.
Structural fixes are needed to solve the system problem; fixes
like Clean Elections, more independent media, and a more
democratic citizenry.</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
<span class=""
id="parent-fieldname-title-74e9d0f3676e4b01b90e3aaca05c366a"></span>
<h1 class="documentFirstHeading"><span class=""
id="parent-fieldname-title-74e9d0f3676e4b01b90e3aaca05c366a">
Remembering Aaron Swartz, “Alpha Geek” and Defender of Online
Freedom </span> </h1>
<div class="articleSubheadline"> <span class=""
id="parent-fieldname-subheadline-74e9d0f3676e4b01b90e3aaca05c366a">
Aaron Swartz took his own life at the age of 26, after years of
legal trouble over academic articles he downloaded and intended
to share. He leaves behind a legacy of thinking about the power
of the internet to shape our political lives. </span> </div>
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<div class="articleByline"> by <a class="articleAuthor"
href="http://www.yesmagazine.org/@@also-by?author=Micah+L.+Sifry">Micah
L. Sifry</a> </div>
<div class="articleDate">posted Jan 17, 2013</div>
<p><span class="discreet">This article was originally published at <a
class="external-link"
href="http://techpresident.com/news/23363/democratic-promise-aaron-swartz-1986-2013">TechPresident.com</a>.</span></p>
<dl class="image-inline captioned">
<i>
<dt><img src="cid:part3.06040105.01080709@gmail.com" alt="Aaron
Swartz" title="Aaron Swartz" height="350" width="555"></dt>
<dd class="image-caption" style="width:555px">
<div>
<p>Photo by <a class="external-link"
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jewschool/6722393349/in/photostream/"
id="yui_3_7_3_3_1358384488175_1521">Daniel J. Sieradski</a>.</p>
</div>
</dd>
</i>
</dl>
<i>
</i>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; "><i><i>Aaron is dead.</i></i></p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; ">Wanderers in this crazy world, <br>
we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; ">Hackers for right, we are one down,
<br>
we have lost one of our own.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; ">Nurtures, careers, listeners,
feeders, <br>
parents all, <br>
we have lost a child.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; ">Let us all weep.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px; ">—Sir Tim Berners Lee, January 11,
2013</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote">Aaron worked closely on the early
architecting of Creative Commons, an immense gift to all kinds of
sharing of culture.</blockquote>
<p>Aaron Swartz, a leading activist for open information, internet
freedom, and democracy, died at his own hand Friday January 11. He
was 26 years old.</p>
<p>There is no single comprehensive list of his good works, but here
are some of them: At the age of 14 he co-authored the RSS 1.0
spec—taking brilliant advantage of the fact that internet working
groups didn't care if someone was 14, they only cared if their
code worked.</p>
<p>Then he met Larry Lessig and <a
href="http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/36298">worked
closely with him</a> on the early architecting of Creative
Commons, an immense gift to all kinds of sharing of culture. He
also was the architect and first coder of the Internet Archive's
OpenLibrary.org, which now has made more than one million books
freely available to anyone with an internet connection. "We
couldn't have come this far without his crucial expertise," Open
Library says on its <a href="http://openlibrary.org/about/people">about
page</a>.</p>
<p>He also co-founded Reddit.com, the social news site, and Demand
Progress, an online progressive action group that played a vital
role in the anti-SOPA/PIPA fight. He also contributed occasionally
to Personal Democracy Forum, writing this article on <a
href="http://personaldemocracy.com/content/eight-reasons-some-wikis-work">why
wikis work</a> and <a
href="http://rebooting.personaldemocracy.com/node/5490">this
essay on "parpolity</a>" or the idea that nested councils of
elected representatives could be used to represent a whole
country, for our 2008 book, Rebooting America. He was a fellow
traveler.</p>
<p>Aaron also made <a
href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/172187/aaron-swartz">gifts
of websites</a> the way others might make a friend a plate of
brownies. One of his lesser-known legacies, in fact, is a
do-it-yourself web platform called Jottit.com, which he built to
make it as a simple as possible for anyone to create and publish
their own site—or, as he put it, "as easy as filling in a
textbox." On it, you can read <a
href="https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget">his explanation on
how to become someone like him</a>, a self-made, self-taught
disturber of the peace.</p>
<p>We first met in the fall of 2004, when he was 18. I was in San
Francisco for a conference and went downtown one evening with my
smarter little brother David, who was hosting a Technorati
developers hackathon. The idea was to get people working with
Technorati's API. At the beginning of the meeting, I spoke up and
said that I was looking for someone who could hack together a
directory showing which members of Congress were currently most
being mentioned or linked to on blogs. I offered $100 cash to
anyone who felt like taking on the challenge. Moments later, there
was Aaron, with an impish grin on his face: "I think I can do
that."</p>
<p>Two hours later, he was done. He was a wizard.</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote">Aaron several times wrote blog posts
arguing that open data and government transparency weren't enoumgh
to make things change for the better.</blockquote>
<p>Two years later, we crossed paths in Boston. The Sunlight
Foundation, which we had just helped get started earlier that
year, was hosting a party for the Wikimania conference, and
several of us went out for Indian food together. If memory serves,
Aaron was on some crazy diet, limiting his calorie intake to
somehow increase his life expectancy. It doesn't matter now.</p>
<p>What I do remember more clearly is that it was the start of an
attempt at a formal working relationship between Sunlight and
Aaron, since his interest in open information as a force for good
seemed in close alignment with Sunlight's vision. That
relationship led to a six-month grant for him to develop
Watchdog.net, a noble but incomplete effort at merging campaign
finance data with lobbyist information to find the intersections
where a lobbyist's intervention appeared to match with an earmark
or other special congressional favor.</p>
<p>We never quite saw eye-to-eye about how best to reform or
transform politics, and Aaron several times wrote <a
href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/transparencybunk">critical
blog posts</a> arguing that open data and government
transparency weren't enough to make things change for the better.
We'd go back and forth by email after each of these posts. He once
wrote me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My core argument is that the problem with our government is not
specific misdeeds but systemic corruption. Thus pointing out
problems with specific Congresspeople—whether through wiki
pages, pop-up windows, or campaign finance data—is going to be
ineffective, perhaps even counterproductive, because every time
you whack at a corruption scandal over here, a dozen more will
pop up over there, and interested people will burn out from the
impossibility of the task.</p>
<p>The problem is not that Congressman X takes money from the
credit card companies and votes for the bankruptcy bill; the
problem is that he has to do that to get elected. Forcing him to
stop will just force him to be more subtle about it, just as
each new campaign finance reform bill sprouts more loopholes.
Structural fixes are needed to solve the system problem; fixes
like Clean Elections, more independent media, and a more
democratic citizenry.</p>
<p>This doesn't mean that forcing him to stop is a bad thing—if
you have to spend resources on individualized projects like
this, it's better than not spending them at all. But why
constrain yourself in this way? Why not harness the power of the
Internet to work on the larger-scale problems?</p>
<p>Think bigger, <br>
- Aaron</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This isn't the place to go back over those arguments; they're
moot. The point is that that was Aaron—pushing everyone he knew to
do more with what they had. I don't know where he got the bug, but
I understood it. If you have "change the world" disease, there is
only one cure. And he tried mightily to change the world using
every tool at his disposal, as <a
href="http://techpresident.com/news/23363/boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html">Cory
Doctorow eloquently wrote on BoingBoing</a>, even if it meant
being an outspoken critic of allies and mentors. And that was
fine.</p>
<p>An icon smasher, he twice took on the content cartel; first in
2009 by releasing a trove of legal documents from the PACER
database of U.S. federal court documents, for which all charges
were dropped; and a second time in 2011, when he set up a server
in an MIT closet and downloaded about 4 million academic documents
from the J-STOR library, for which he was charged with wire fraud
and computer fraud and faced a potential sentence of up to 30
years. He was arrested on January 6, 2011, just over two years
before he took his life.</p>
<p>Lessig, one of his closest friends and mentors, writes <a
href="http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully">on
his blog</a> that Aaron was fighting to get the government to
drop the felony charges—no doubt because he didn't believe he had
caused anyone any harm; besides J-STOR itself had declined to
press charges. Lessig:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not
willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a
million dollar trial in April—his wealth bled dry, yet unable to
appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his
defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court
judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is,
I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make
sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If coders are the unacknowledged legislators of our new digital
age, then Aaron was our Thomas Paine—an alpha geek who didn't use
his skills just to get more people to click on ads, but tried to
figure out how to change the system at the deepest levels
available to him. He accomplished much in his 26 years, but he had
so much more promise.</p>
<p>Aaron's parents Robert and Susan Swartz, and partner Taren
Stinebrickner-Kauffman, have set up this <a
href="http://rememberaaronsw.tumblr.com/">memorial website</a>
for him.</p>
<hr width="50%">
<p>Micah L. Sifry is a co-founder executive editor of the <a
class="external-link" href="http://www.personaldemocracy.com">Personal
Democracy Forum</a>, which covers the ways technology is
changing politics. Sifry was also a writer and former editor for
The Nation magazine for thirteen years. He is the author or editor
of four books, the most recent being <a class="external-link"
href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/047167995x?&PID=23116">Is
That a Politician in Your Pocket?</a>, written with Nancy
Watzman. His personal blog is at micah.sifry.com.</p>
<p>This article was originally published at <a
class="external-link"
href="http://techpresident.com/news/23363/democratic-promise-aaron-swartz-1986-2013">TechPresident.com</a>
where Sifry is a frequent blogger.</p>
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