[governance] Aaron Swartz's Politics

[Riaz K Tayob]

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...

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.

I guess the best we can do is keep his spirit alive by pushing the 
public rather than the rentier interest...

Riaz



On 2013/01/16 09:01 AM, Anriette Esterhuysen wrote:
> I have been thinking and reading a lot about Aaron in the last few 
> days. I met Aaron in 2008 when we were both part of a small group

Aaron Swartz at Risk 
<http://feedproxy.google.com/%7Er/NakedCapitalism/%7E3/UzK74Wi5ubU/aaron-swartz-and-his-risk-factors.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email> 


Posted: 15 Jan 2013 03:15 AM PST

/These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see
that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there./ –Edwin Brock

Twenty-/first/ century. As Matt Stoller shows, Aaron Swartz was killed 
by corruption 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartzs-politics.html>. 
His destroyers were placeholders 
<http://boston.com/community/blogs/on_liberty/2013/01/aaron_swartz_death_highlights.html> 
in a weak, vicious, and corrupt rentier state.

Immanuel Wallerstein describes such a state in /World-Systems Analysis/:

    [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 [e.g.
    <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/12/secession-petition_n_2463385.html>]
    states it becomes the preferred means of capital accumulation
    ["savvy businessmen"
    <http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aKGZkktzkAlA>],
    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.

Sound familiar?For our rentier state then, siphoning rents on 
intellectual property into private hands is central to mission. Swartz 
stopped SOPA <http://mashable.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-sopa/> because 
his mission (or vision) was radically different 
<http://pastebin.com/cefxMVAy>:

    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.

    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.

Which is what Swartz did, and for which he was punished 
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/aaron-swartz-fix-draconian-computer-crime-law>. 
(empty wheel points to the procedural sloppiness of the charges 
<http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/01/14/doj-invoked-aaron-swartz-manifesto-to-justify-investigative-methods/>, 
but that’s hardly the point when a rentier’s rice bowl is broken, and 
weak states are lousy at law anyhow.)

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. And so 
<http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/memories/rss-changed-our-lives.html>:

    *RSS changed our lives*

    I need to let the people who knew and loved Aaron know that his work
    changed my son’s life for the better, forever.

    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…
    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. 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].

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.(See also on PACER 
<http://laboratorium.net/archive/2013/01/12/aaron_swartz_was_26>, where 
Swartz provided open access to the law.)

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.

*Risk Factors from the Health Care System*

As Swartz wrote in “How to Get a Job Like Mine” 
<http://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget>:

    Undoubtedly, the first step is to choose the right genes: I was born
    white, male, American.

Unfortunately for Swartz, he should also have chosen to be born in a 
different generation: My own, for example. Check out this chart from the 
New York Times 
<http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/10/health/differences-in-life-expectancy.html>:

<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartz-and-his-risk-factors.html/health>

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 depression 
<http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/verysick>, 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, our system of 
health-care-for profit 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/business/health-care-and-pursuit-of-profit-make-a-poor-mix.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0> 
is both uniquely profitable and uniquely bad at delivering health 
<http://baselinescenario.com/2010/01/13/united-states-health-care-spending/>, 
dominated as it is by health insurance companies 
<http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-resources> — rentiers — who 
contribute no value to any of the transactions in which they participate 
<http://rutherfordl.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/my-new-hero-house-representative-anthony-weiner/>, 
and who have corruptly used the power of the state to entrench 
themselves 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/ny-times-reporter-confirm_b_500999.html> 
(shocker, I know). I’d also note that suicide 
<http://www.suicide.org/college-student-suicide.html>* is a problem our 
health care system seems unable to address 
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2011/11/14/what-we-dont-know-about-suicide/>.

*Risk Factors in the Tech Community*

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.

First, Ilya Zhitomirskiy (22) 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/technology/ilya-zhitomirskiy-co-founder-of-social-network-dies-at-22.html?_r=0>. 
His project was Diaspora 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/technology/ilya-zhitomirskiy-co-founder-of-social-network-dies-at-22.html>:

    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.

Second, Len Sassaman (36) 
<http://www.cso.com.au/article/392338/young_cryptographer_ends_own_life/>. 
His project was Mixmaster:

    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.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.

Before you ask, Sassaman, like Swartz, suffered from depression 
<http://boingboing.net/2011/07/04/rip-len-sassaman-cyp.html>, and 
Zhitomirskiy was bipolar 
<http://www.modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/dark-side-of-the-boom>. 
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.

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 commenter debasishbera in a long 
thread at YCombinator <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3235583>, the 
entrepreneurial incubator:

    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.

    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).

    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”

And a final risk factor Swartz shared 
<http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartzs-crime/> 
with other tech entrepreneurs is being on the wrong side of the law 
(however righteously). From a long thread on Reddit 
<http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/16i790/aaron_swartzs_suicide_may_make_the_openaccess/>:

    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.

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 Steve Jobs is a better example 
<http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/the_spectator/2011/10/steve_jobs_and_the_little_blue_box_how_ron_rosenbaum_s_1971_arti.html>. 
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:

    [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.)

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).

*Risk Factors in the Activist Community*

Zooming in to Swartz’s associates, friends, and family, we find 
additional risk factors when the power of the state 
<http://www.mainjustice.com/2013/01/07/mass-u-s-attorney-carmen-ortiz-says-no-to-run-for-higher-office/>*** 
was brought to bear on him. Stoller explains 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartzs-politics.html>:

    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.

<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/aaron-swartz-and-his-risk-factors.html/aaron-ada> 


And such an additional stressor — and I’m sure there were many others 
besides this one — put Swartz at risk. Quinn Norton’s howl of pain 
<http://www.quinnnorton.com/said/?p=644>:

    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.

*Conclusion*

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:

Depression.

Oppression.

Repression.

Simple, direct, neat.

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.

NOTE *,** If you or anyone you know is considering suicide, do, 
/please/, seek help (for example 
<http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/>). Multiple asterisks for 
emphasis!

NOTE *** Ortiz was a leader in collecting fines for lawbreaking 
<http://www.mainjustice.com/2013/01/07/mass-u-s-attorney-carmen-ortiz-says-no-to-run-for-higher-office/>:

    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 recoveredin 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.

These cost-of-doing-business fines are corrupt, as Yves points out 
<http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/01/yes-virginia-the-department-of-justice-really-believes-it-has-been-tough-on-corporate-fraud.html>. 
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.

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!



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