[governance] Remembering Aaron Swartz, “Alpha Geek” and Defender of Online Freedom - US systemically corrupt...
Riaz K Tayob
riaz.tayob at gmail.com
Sat Jan 19 14:49:07 EST 2013
Snip:
He once wrote me:
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.
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.
Remembering Aaron Swartz, “Alpha Geek” and Defender of Online Freedom
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.
by Micah L. Sifry
<http://www.yesmagazine.org/@@also-by?author=Micah+L.+Sifry>
posted Jan 17, 2013
This article was originally published at TechPresident.com
<http://techpresident.com/news/23363/democratic-promise-aaron-swartz-1986-2013>.
/
Aaron Swartz
Photo by Daniel J. Sieradski
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/jewschool/6722393349/in/photostream/>.
/
//
//Aaron is dead.//
Wanderers in this crazy world,
we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.
Hackers for right, we are one down,
we have lost one of our own.
Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders,
parents all,
we have lost a child.
Let us all weep.
—Sir Tim Berners Lee, January 11, 2013
Aaron worked closely on the early architecting of Creative Commons,
an immense gift to all kinds of sharing of culture.
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.
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.
Then he met Larry Lessig and worked closely with him
<http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/36298> 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 about page <http://openlibrary.org/about/people>.
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 why wikis work
<http://personaldemocracy.com/content/eight-reasons-some-wikis-work> and
this essay on "parpolity
<http://rebooting.personaldemocracy.com/node/5490>" 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.
Aaron also made gifts of websites
<http://www.thenation.com/blog/172187/aaron-swartz> 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 his explanation on how to become someone like him
<https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget>, a self-made, self-taught
disturber of the peace.
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."
Two hours later, he was done. He was a wizard.
Aaron several times wrote blog posts arguing that open data and
government transparency weren't enoumgh to make things change for
the better.
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.
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.
We never quite saw eye-to-eye about how best to reform or transform
politics, and Aaron several times wrote critical blog posts
<http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/transparencybunk> 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:
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.
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.
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?
Think bigger,
- Aaron
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
Cory Doctorow eloquently wrote on BoingBoing
<http://techpresident.com/news/23363/boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html>,
even if it meant being an outspoken critic of allies and mentors. And
that was fine.
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.
Lessig, one of his closest friends and mentors, writes on his blog
<http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully> 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:
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.
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.
Aaron's parents Robert and Susan Swartz, and partner Taren
Stinebrickner-Kauffman, have set up this memorial website
<http://rememberaaronsw.tumblr.com/> for him.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Micah L. Sifry is a co-founder executive editor of the Personal
Democracy Forum <http://www.personaldemocracy.com>, 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 Is That a Politician in Your
Pocket? <http://www.powells.com/biblio/047167995x?&PID=23116>, written
with Nancy Watzman. His personal blog is at micah.sifry.com.
This article was originally published at TechPresident.com
<http://techpresident.com/news/23363/democratic-promise-aaron-swartz-1986-2013>
where Sifry is a frequent blogger.
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