[governance] Aaron Swartz's Politics

[Riaz K Tayob]

    Aaron Swartz's Politics

Tuesday, 15 January 2013 14:22 By Matt Stoller 
<http://truth-out.org/author/itemlist/user/46195>, Naked Capitalism 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartzs-politics.html> | 
Op-Ed

  *
    3 <http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13940-aaron-swartzs-politics#>

Aaron Swartz was my friend, and I will always miss him. I think it's 
important that, as we remember him, we remember that Aaron had a much 
broader agenda than the information freedom fights for which he had 
become known. Most people have focused on Aaron's work as an advocate 
for more open information systems, because that's what the Feds went 
after him for, and because he's well-understood as a technologist who 
founded Reddit and invented RSS. But I knew a different side of him. I 
knew Aaron as a political activist interested in health care, financial 
corruption, and the drug war (we were working on a project on that just 
before he died). He was a great technologist, for sure, but when we were 
working together that was not all I saw.

In 2009, I was working in Rep. Alan Grayson's office as a policy 
advisor. We were engaged in fights around the health care bill that 
eventually became Obamacare, as well as a much narrower but significant 
fight on auditing the Federal Reserve 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/matt-stoller-how-the-federal-reserve-fights.html> that 
eventually became a provision in Dodd-Frank. Aaron came into our office 
to intern for a few weeks to learn about Congress and how bills were put 
together. He worked with me on organizing the campaign 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/matt-stoller-how-the-federal-reserve-fights.html> within 
the Financial Services Committee to pass the amendment sponsored by Ron 
Paul and Alan Grayson on transparency at the Fed. He helped with the 
website NamesOfTheDead.com, a site dedicated to publicizing the 44,000 
Americans that die every year because they don't have health insurance. 
Aaron learned about Congress by just spending time there, which seems 
like an obvious thing to do. Many activists prefer to keep their 
distance from policymakers, because they are afraid of the complexity of 
the system and believe that it is inherently corrupting. Aaron, as with 
much of his endeavors, simply let his curiosity 
<https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget>, which he saw as synonymous with 
brilliance, drive him.

Aaron also spent a lot of time learning how advocacy and electoral 
politics works from outside of Congress. He helped found the Progressive 
Change Campaign Committee, a group that sought to replace existing 
political consulting machinery in the Democratic Party. At the PCCC, he 
worked on stopping Ben Bernanke's reconfirmation (the email Aaron wrote 
called him "Bailout Ben"), auditing the Fed and passing health care 
reform. I remember he sent me this video 
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuF6bWGadRc> of Financial Services 
Committee Chairman Barney Frank, on Reddit, offering his support to 
Grayson's provision. A very small piece of the victory on Fed openness 
belongs to Aaron.

By the time I met and became friends with Aaron, he had already helped 
create RSS and co-founded and sold Reddit. He didn't have to act with 
intellectual humility when confronting the political system, but he did. 
Rather than approach politics as so many successful entrepreneurs do, 
which is to say, try to meet top politicians and befriend them, Aaron 
sought to understand the system itself. He read political blogs, what I 
can only presume are gobs of history books (like Tom Ferguson's Golden 
Rule, one of the most important books on politics that almost no one 
under 40 has read), and began talking to organizers and political 
advocates. He wanted, first and foremost, to know. He learned about 
elections, political advertising, the data behind voting, and grassroots 
organizing. He began understanding policy, by learning about 
Congressional process, its intersection with politics, and how staff and 
influence networks work on the Hill and through agencies. He analyzed 
money. He analyzed corruption.

And he understood how it worked. In November of 2008, Aaron emailed me 
  the following: "apologies if you've already seen it, but check out 
this mash note to Rubin from Lay. ahh, politics." This was attached to 
the message.

<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/?attachment_id=37297>

This note, from Enron CEO Ken Lay to Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, 
perfectly encapsulates the closed and corroded nature of our political 
system -- two corporate good ole boys, one running Treasury and one 
running Enron, passing mash notes. This was everything Aaron hated, and 
fought against. What I respected about Aaron is that he burned with a 
desire for justice, but also felt a profound desire to understand the 
system he was attempting to reorganize. He didn't throw up his hands 
lazily and curse at corruption, he spent enormous amounts of time and 
energy learning about and working the political system. From founding 
Reddit, to fighting the Fed. That was Aaron.

Aaron approached politics like he approached technology 
<https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget>. His method was as follows - (1) 
Learn (2) Try (3) Gab (4) Build <https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget>. 
He was methodical about his work, and his approach to life - this essay 
on procrastination <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dalio> will give you a 
good window into his mind. Aaron liked to "lean in" to difficult 
problems, work at them until he could break them down and solve them. He 
had no illusions about politics, which is why he eventually became so 
good at it. He didn't disdain the political process the way so many 
choose to, but he also didn't engage in flowery lazy thoughts about the 
glory of checks and balances. He broke politics down and systematically 
attempted to understand the system. Aaron learned, tried, gabbed, and 
then built.

This is a note I got from him years ago, when we were trying to put 
together flow charts of corporate PAC money and where it went.

    "Been playing around with the numbers tonight. Turns out corporate
    PAC money explains 45% of the variance in ProgressivePunch scores
    among Dems. Scatterplot attached. Right is progressive, down is no
    corporate PAC money. So you can see how all the people with less
    than 80% progressive punch scores get more than 20% of their money
    from PACs."

    <http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/?attachment_id=37298>

This is a chart of power, one of many Aaron put together to educate 
himself (and in this case, me). Most geeks hate the political system, 
and are at the same time awed by it. They don't actually approach it 
with any respect for the underlying architecture of power, but at the 
same time, they are impressed by political figures with titles. Aaron 
recognized that politics is a corrupt money driven system, but also that 
it could be cracked if you spent the time to understand the moving 
parts. He figured out that business alliances, grassroots organizing, 
and direct lobbying to build coalitions was powerful, whereas access 
alone was a mirage. He worked very hard to understand how policy changes 
work, which ultimately culminated in his successful campaign to stop 
SOPA in 2011. This took many years of work and a remarkable amount of 
humility on his part.

But he was driven by a desire for justice, and not just for open 
information. He wanted an end to the drug war, he wanted a financial 
system not dominated by Bob Rubin, and he wanted monetary policy run to 
help ordinary people. Some of his last tweets 
<https://twitter.com/aaronsw> are on monetary policy, and the platinum 
coin option for raising the debt ceiling (which is a round-about way of 
preventing cuts to social welfare programs for the elderly). Aaron was a 
liberal who saw class and race as core driving forces 
<https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget> in American politics. In a lovely 
essay on how he organized his career, he made this clear in a very 
charming but pointed way.

    So how did I get a job like mine? Undoubtedly, the first step is to
    choose the right genes: I was born white, male, American. My family
    was fairly well-off and my father worked in the computer industry.
    Unfortunately, I don't know of any way of choosing these things, so
    that probably isn't much help to you.

    But, on the other hand, when I started I was a very young kid stuck
    in a small town in the middle of the country. So I did have to
    figure out some tricks for getting out of that. In the hopes of
    making life a little less unfair, I thought I'd share them with you.

Making "life a little less unfair." Those aren't the words of a 
techno-utopianist, those are the words of a liberal political organizer. 
They remind me of how Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has 
described her own work. Aaron knew life would always be unfair, but that 
was no reason not to try to make society better. He had no illusions 
about power but maintained hope for our society if, I suppose, not 
always for himself. This is a very difficult way to approach the world, 
but it's why he was so heroic in how he acted. I want people to 
understand that Aaron sought not open information systems, but 
justice. Aaron believed passionately in the scientific method as a guide 
for organizing our society, and in that open-minded but powerful 
critique, he was a technocratic liberal. His leanings sometimes moved 
him towards more radical postures because he recognized that our 
governing institutions had become malevolent, but he was not an anarchist.

I am very angry Aaron is dead. I've been crying off and on for a few 
days, as it hits me that he's gone forever. Aaron accomplished more in 
13 than nearly everyone I know will get done in their entire lives, and 
his breadth of knowledge and creativity in politics were stunning, all 
the more so since he was equally well-versed in many other fields. But 
what I respected was his curiosity and open-mindedness. He truly loved 
knowledge, and loved people who would share it. We used to argue about 
politics, him a hopeful and intellectually honest technocratic liberal 
and me as someone who had lost faith in our social institutions. We made 
each other really angry sometimes, because I thought he was too 
sympathetic to establishment norms, and he thought I couldn't 
emotionally acknowledge when technocrats had useful things to say. But I 
respected him, and he frequently changed my mind.  I saw that what 
looked like stubbornness was just intellectual honesty and a deep thirst 
for evidence. He wanted to understand politics, because he thought that 
understanding, and then action, was the key to justice.

As I said, I am very angry that he is dead. I don't want to get into the 
specifics of his case, because others have discussed it and the 
political elements of it more eloquently than I ever could. His family 
and partner have put out a powerful statement 
<http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/> placing blame appropriately.

    Aaron's death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of
    a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial
    overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S.
    Attorney's office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US
    Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges,
    carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged
    crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to
    stand up for Aaron and its own community's most cherished principles.

I want to make a few points about why it's not just sad that he is gone, 
but a tragedy, a symbol for all of us, and a call to action.

Aaron suffered from depression, but that is not why he died. Aaron is 
dead because the institutions that govern our society have decided that 
it is more important to target geniuses like Aaron than nurture them, 
because the values he sought -- openness, justice, curiosity -- are 
values these institutions now oppose. In previous generations, people 
like Aaron would have been treasured and recognized as the remarkable 
gifts they are. We do not live in a world like that today. And Aaron 
would be the first to point out, if he could observe the discussion 
happening now, that the pressure he felt from the an oppressive 
government is felt by millions of people, every year. I'm glad his 
family have not let the justice system off the hook, and have not 
allowed this suicide to be medicalized, or the fault of one prosecutor. 
What happened to Aaron is not isolated to Aaron, but is the flip side of 
the corruption he hated.

As we think about what happened to Aaron, we need to recognize that it 
was not just prosecutorial overreach that killed him. That's too easy, 
because that implies it's one bad apple. We know that's not true. What 
killed him was corruption. 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 if you are truly dangerous and brilliantly 
subversive, as Aaron was, you are bankrupted and destroyed. There's a 
reason whistleblowers get fired. There's a reason Bradley Manning is in 
jail. There's a reason the only CIA official who has gone to jail for 
torture is the person -- John Kiriako - who told the world it was going 
on. There's a reason those who destroyed the financial system "dine at 
the White House", as Lawrence Lessig put it. There's a reason former 
Senator Russ Feingold is a college professor whereas former Senator 
Chris Dodd is now a multi-millionaire. There's a reason DOJ officials do 
not go after bankers who illegally foreclose, and then get jobs as 
partners in white collar criminal defense. There's a reason no one has 
been held accountable for decisions leading to the financial crisis, or 
the war in Iraq. This reason is the modern ethic in American society 
that defines success as climbing up the ladder, consequences be damned. 
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.

More prosaically, the 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. And now we've 
seen these same forces kill our friend.

It's important for us to recognize that Aaron is just an extreme example 
of a force that targets all of us. He eschewed the traditional paths to 
wealth and power, dropping out of college after a year because it wasn't 
intellectually stimulating. After co-founding and selling Reddit, and 
establishing his own financial security, he wandered and acted, calling 
himself an "applied sociologist."  He helped in small personal ways, 
offering encouragement to journalists like Mike Elk after Elk had broken 
a significant story and gotten pushback from colleagues. In my inbox, 
every birthday, I got a lovely note from Aaron offering me encouragement 
and telling me how much he admired my voice. He was a profoundly kind 
man, and I will now never be able to repay him for the love and kindness 
he showed me. There's no medal of honor for someone like this, no Oscar, 
no institutional way of saying "here's someone who did a lot of good for 
a lot of people." This is because our institutions are corrupt, and 
wanted to quelch the Aaron Swartz's of the world. Ultimately, they 
killed him. I hope that we remember Aaron in the way he should be 
remembered, as a hero and an inspiration.

In six days, on January 18th, it's the one year anniversary of the 
blackout of Wikipedia, and some have discussed celebrating it as 
Internet Freedom Day. Maybe we should call this Aaron Swartz Day, in 
honor of this heroic figure. While what happened that day was 
technically about the internet, it should be remembered, and Aaron 
should be remembered, in the context of social justice. That day was 
about a call for a different world, not just protecting our ability to 
access web sites. And we should remember these underlying values. It 
would help people understand that justice can be extremely costly, and 
that we risk much when we allow those who do the right thing to be 
punished. Somehow, we need to rebuild a culture that respects people 
like Aaron and turns away from the greed and rent-extraction that he 
hated. There's a cycle in American history, of religious "Great 
Awakenings", where new cultural systems emerge in the form of religion, 
often sweeping through communities of young people dissatisfied with the 
society they see around them. Perhaps that is what we see in the Slow 
Food movement, or gay rights movement, or the spread of walkable 
communities and decline of vehicle miles 
<http://www.businessinsider.com/vehicle-miles-driven-2012-12>, or maker 
movement, or the increasing acceptance of meditation and therapy, or any 
number of other cultural changes in our society. I don't know. I'm sure 
many of these can be subverted. What I do know is that if we are to 
honor Aaron's life, we will recognize him as a broad social justice 
activist who cared about transforming our society, and acted to do so. 
And we will take up his fight as our own.

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