Batman movie poster for The Dark Night in New York City. (C) Photo by Catherine A. Fitzpatrick 2012.
Aaron Swartz, a celebrated "open Internet pioneer," has committed suicide in New York at the age of 26.
THE TECH REVOLUTION EATS ITS CHILDREN
Once, at a TechCrunch Disrupt conference, I confronted venture capitalist (venture communist?) Fred Wilson, and asked him why Silicon Valley was so destructive in the name of its cherished "disruption," why so many start-ups were burned through and passed around from VC to VC like baubles on expensive chains -- companies never seem to go public and reach the state of self-sufficiency (this was before the Groupon and Facebook IPOs, but look how they turned out...).
And Fred Wilson, who is a very thoughtful and philosophical man, conceded this problem. "The revolution eats his children," he said matter-of-factly. He meant in the larger sense, Web 2.0 and its discontents in general, but I've often taken it literally about the burn-out cult of open source software.
Because there's the obvious fact of the entire open-source cult and shill -- how idealistic and enthusiastic young men -- it's mainly young men -- are persuaded to burn themselves out like shooting stars trying to "create value." And how their efforts are sucked up for free by Big IT, which is able to incorporate their free labour and free products into larger consulting businesses or more complex proprietary IT systems from which they make billions. The start-ups generally create only free web sites or services or aps -- and everyone voraciously consumes them. The selfless hero-coders surviving on Red Bull and chips and living in crowded walk-up squats to fulfill their dream are somehow supported with life's needs -- friends, parents, university, maybe even the occasional big infusion from a VC, or a contest win. Yet the wreckage is big and the product is slim. Few start-ups succeed; even those that do are consumed and disappear into bigger companies (that revolution eating again) and then even those big companies falter (Zynga).
Few people will discuss the suicide of Ilya Zhitomirsky, one of the founders of Diaspora, which was to be the free and open-source alternative to Facebook, that hated "walled garden" based on proprietary code which still nevertheless enables "hooks" into its service for app engineers. There was just aA brief discussion on Y-combinator -- one of the VC companies that fuels the revolution that eats its children so heartily -- and then that founder, a Russian man, fell into obscurity with no questions asked about what happened, whether related to personal or public matters. Everybody who donated money or time to Diaspora -- and they were considerable -- lost, because Diaspora was "returned to the community" by which the cultists mean they stop working on a failed project and let it die unless somebody else feels like picking up its carcass.
WARNING: I'M NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT
Warning: I don't believe that you are required not to criticize the dead and that you must abide by some ancient mourning period of 7 days or 14 days or 30 days before you can speak critically of public figures. I also don't believe -- as with Benghazi -- that you are bound by some ancient notion of blasphemy, that you can't question the policies of the dead or their supporters. I don't believe that you somehow can't debate the ideas and life of a figure merely because he just died or that this is "politicizing" his death -- the insane hagiography and the exploitation of this young man to advance the big guys' technocommunist agenda is far more of a politicization. And yes, this means I will even argue with his mom, who obviously doted on him and supported his cause -- because he's a public figure and public policies are shaped by his life and death.
Aaron Swartz has committed suicide. Just as did Guy Debord, the French philosopher of the 1960s generation whose quote graces the top of this blog. Just as people in extreme ideologies tend to do -- which is why such ideologies based on destruction of the old and glorification of the unreal new aren't so recommended for the young by their wiser elders.
DIGITAL THEFT IS STILL STEALING; HACKING IS CRIME
I was a big critic of Aaron Swartz because I find hacking to be common vandalism, theft and -- when it's large-scale and driven by leftist political ambitions -- a form of terrorism.
Right now, with the geeks ruling the earth, and especially Twitter and the tech media and blogosphere, we're likely to see a huge outpouring of self-righteous and self-justifying bunkum around the death of this young man, and I think it's important to try to counter the lies.
What Aaron Swartz did *was* wrong and *was* theft -- breaking and entering into a university with false ID and using tools to pry open doors and stealing 4 million JSTOR articles -- therefore undermining the JSTOR business. (I don't listen to silly arguments about how stealing a copy of something where the original remains "isn't stealing" because of course it is -- it's about stealing the bundled, inherent commodification feature of content that is perfectly fine for digital content to have. Hacking is all about deliberately breaking and destroying that commercial inherency.)
I BLAME LESSIG, NOT THE DOJ FOR SWARTZ'S DEATH
Whenever someone commits suicide, they themselves are the first ones to blame. Sometimes suicide is murder -- it is anger and settling scores and trying to make survivors feel guilty; it's the ultimate temper tantrum to get your way, you know? Even so, people tend to feel sorry for suicides and find someone else in the larger picture to blame. In this case, the geeks making Aaron Swartz into an instant overnight saint because he offed himself consistent with his nihilist belief (like Debord) are blaming The Man or the Department of Justice for continuing to bring suit against him.
I blame not the Department of Justice for Aaron Swartz's death in that sense, but Lawrence Lessig. He's the one who, like Pan, lured this young men into his extremist and delusional cult of Creative Communism as I called it, with the shill that somehow human nature and the earth can be re-made merely by being digitalized and moved online.
It's can't be. Not only is human nature not reformable in the way these delusional ideologues imagine; human society with its institutions, values and the rule of law so arduously established do not need to be remade in order to have progress, freedom, and human rights for all. Revolution destroys institutions that it believes need to be refashioned, but usually along the way the extremists justify the utopian end with criminal means -- and thus bring about a society very different from the freedom and equality they promised. (Of course, there's the mass crimes of humanity of the Bolsheviks, but fresher in the memory: like the 1960-iers in Paris, drunk and covered with lice, finally removed from the university bastions who eventually flamed out after spending years in the cafes drunk and publishing little magazines on the dime of exploitative rich publishers. Or like our own beatniks and hippies like Jack Kerouac or Richard Brautigan, the wonder children of the former Beatnik and Hippie ages, the former who died of alcoholism and the latter who committed suicide by shooting himself with a rifle alone in a cabin).
THE MEGABUS TO INTERNET FREEDOM FALLACY
Once I saw Swartz in the Megabus line to Boston. Like me, he was having to Megabus it because he was evidently poor, despite all his selling of companies and such. Even so, I was so furious at thinking about how nevertheless, Daddy or some rich person who was able to pay for his lawyer was able to spring him from serious felony charges that I almost went up to him to tell him a piece of my mind. What stopped me was that I could see that he was just a skinny young kid and wouldn't be able to fight. Like so many Internet freaks, he would just see me as a crazy cat lady telling him to get off of my e-lawn, and wouldn't be able to muster the intellectual strength and historical context to have any kind of informed debate. He was a cult victim. The Internet Revolution has produced lots of them. Many more than we are told come to no good end.
Comrade Larry's utopian notion that you can get millions of people to give up the inherent commodity value of their own creations, the inherent value of commerce, by prodding and even brow-beating them into putting Creative Commons "licenses" on the content, is at the heart of this sickness.
As I've often pointed out, there's no license that says "copy this but pay me something". That's deliberate. That's because Lessig wants digital communism, no matter what he says about his own personal beliefs or whatever silly counter-arguments people pull out about him (such as the fact that he once clerked for a Republican judge). Collectivizing content and then making it available as the loss-leader for giant platformistas to make their millions lets us know how the communism actually turns out. It's supposed to enable creators to "get the word out" (as if sales wouldn't achieve the same thing!); it's supposed to create commuuuunity; but in fact what it leads to is Facebook and Twitter and Google slurping up all the value from ad clicks and related revenue streams of data-drilling as people make and consume largely free content.
This could have all been different with the addition of a single license that enabled people easily to get paid on line and to tip and buy from others for their blogs; the payments system could be easily engineered as is for PayPal or Amazon.
All that stood in the way was ideology -- the kind of ideology that furiously drove Aaron Swartz and ultimately led to his death in despair.
YES, BREAKING AND ENTRY IS A CRIME
Violet Blue forgets to tell us that Aaron Swartz deliberately shielded his face with a bike helmut and broke into a computer closet physically -- it's amazing how that detail of physical breaking and entry gets left out in all the digital hagiographies. He used false ID. And he took something of value that JSTOR required to keep its operation afloat. It's ok to charge money for a product EVEN IF you already got paid for it in a research grant, because the system itself of storage and sorting and cataloging and management needs to have a revenue stream. In fact, students get most of JSTOR for free! In fact, most people find students to fetch things behind the JSTOR pay-wall all the time (Evgeny Morozov is famous for doing this on twitter).
And then, ultimately, JSTOR undid the communists and their delusions by releasing 4 million articles -- about as many as Swartz stole. It did so without breaking its business model of charging for content. Did that plunge the technocommunist into despair further?
The accounts of his last days in the tech press are filled with self-righteous, furious accounts of his legal struggles. If Daddy couldn't pay for the lawyer, then Larry Lessig's wife did, and was busy raising money for him. Swartz had no shortage of Big IT supporters, as he was the poster boy for the technocommunist approach -- but maybe they let him down (that would be no surprise and not news).
Violet Blue writes the annoying nonsense that we'll see on a zillion blogs:
Demand Progress - itself an organization focused on online campaigns dedicated to fighting for civil liberties, civil rights, and progressive government reform - compared The Justice Department's indictment of Swartz to "trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library."
But, um, you can't take "too many books" out of the library, dears. The library doesn't let you. There's a limit. It might be 5 or 8 or whatever depending on the library and whether you owe in fines. There is a limit on hard copies; there's no reason not to have a limit on digital copies to preserve a business model that is okay to have if you're not a communist.
And that isn't what this destructive young anarchist was doing. It wasn't like he was studying ancient medieval history and needed a lot of articles for his term papers. He deliberately smashed the system and swiped an enormous amount from it randomly (just like Bradley Manning) to make a point and openly bragged about his anarchist "propaganda of the deed" -- he liked smashing gates.
THE OPEN SOURCE CULT VS. THE RULE OF LAW IN CYBERSPACE
Redditt, often described as having been founded by Swartz although the story is complicated, is now called "the front page of the Internet" and far more important than the dying Digg to shape traffic on the web as well as news and views. But Redditt is a horrid, bullying cess-pool run by anonymous assholes much of the time and no proud achievement. And Swartz was forced to sell out of Redditt to make a living, but also because there is no viable business plan for any of these entities, ever, and even those who sell them regret it.
See, people like Lessig evidently love to take young idealistic men whose enthusiasm is fueled by the fact that they suffer from various disorders -- whether autism spectrum or bipolar or whatever -- and whip them into frenzies. That they are of age and willingly go along with the cult doesn't make it somehow "better".
Why? Because like all older men, they need company. Their own flawed utopian ideals are more visibly flawed if they can't attract the children to them...
If the DOJ sought to "make an example" of Aaron Swartz, there is also one thing to blame for that: the entire Google-fueled and Electronic Frontier Foundation-fueled frenzy against any form of legislation whatsoever that would regulate the Internet -- like SOPA or PIPA.
One of the key reasons I supported SOPA was because I believe real-life law applies online, and that the Internet is not a special, holy, exempt place (which is how Lessig and his cult followers viewed it). It needs to be under the rule of law, and that means something like SOPA that in fact legitimately criminalizes and penalizes piracy on a mass scale for commercial reasons, and therefore defines what is not to be prosecuted but merely technically thwarted or discouraged with removals, i.e. a video on a teenager's Tumblr blog. In the outrageous noise around SOPA, it's hard to get across the simple notion that case law -- precedent under the Supreme Court and lower courts -- will build up the rule of law that will both prevent abuses by police or ICE in over-reach, will not place a chill on speech, but which will enable content creators and IP owners to have livelihoods and businesses on the Internet -- which shouldn't be some zone exempt from human law and human enterprise in the organic world. That's all.
You would think it was advocating the massacre of innocent babies, but my support for SOPA is based on that simple premise: definitions in law, definitions backed up by court rulings, establishment the rule of law over the Internet and in fact work to prevent the need for frustrated officials to "make examples". We will never know now how Swartz's case could have been tried but there's no question in my mind that if SOPA had passed and provided definitions, anyone who didn't make a commercial benefit from their theft would not be facing the kind of heavy sentences that the tech press hysterically claimed Swartz would suffer (and which I don't at all believe he would suffer, given his massive cult backing, and the capacity for the liberal and leftist tech media to make a circus).
And it's irresponsible for bloggers to keep screaming that Swartz would "face 50 years" (as Declan McCullagh is outrageously insisting) when there were mitigating circumstances, among which was the fact that JSTOR itself was not pressing charges and he did not monetarize the content he stole. It is right and just that he would have gotten some kind of punishment that most likely would have amounted to community service or at most a year in jail; this would hardly have been 35 years.
THE DEATH CULT OF TECHNOCOMMUNISM
What Swartz's suicide should prompt people like Lessig and Cory Doctorow to do is to ask themselves: why are we continuing to peddle the death cult of technocommunism? Why are we sending young men to their doom, to arrest or despair and even suicide? You cannot eradicate commerce from human beings through collectivism; people need to live. Someone is always getting paid and someone is always the product in these "free" collectives -- why is it us and why are the coders the first to be sacrified with their zeal?And it is more than fine for the state to protect private property: this *is* the system -- unlike their communism -- that ensures the best life and freedom for all.
And it's not as if their technocommunism leads to any actual socialist paradise. Why do only the Big IT companies make billions, why do only the venture capitalists get their exits, but nobody else does? Why can't people -- users -- get paid? Why can't Redditt cost $19.95 a month and why can't I tip commenters? This is a revolution largely on the backs of the coders like Swartz. Their selfless dedication to the cause of "the open Internet" is supposed to be waged even unto death, and Swartz's death will be exploited only to celebrate this death-cult of collectivization even more. Why, oh, why?
As with the Newtown massacre, much will be discussed about the role of depression, autism spectrum, mental illness in this death as therefore somehow exonerating any ideological issues. But that's nonsense; as I said before, people like Lessig are all too happy to exploit the meglomania of the bipolar and the obsessive-compulsiveness of the autism spectrum in their open source cult -- and that's morally reprehensible. They have made an entire cult and culture out of the "neurally atypical" and celebrated it as "evolution".
Lawrence Lessig and Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow and Cory Doctorow should be the ones having a dark night of the soul over this man's death and questioning their utopia, along with all their tech press celebrators. But this won't happen, in the din of thousands of tech bloggers pumping themselves up to red fury now blaming The Man for his death and doubling down on their technocommunist revolution. More young people will head off the cliff...
Y-combinators will continue the deadly cycle and feed the revolution, and keep telling themselves its about a security state fighting a dying industry. Nonsense. Technocommunism is inhuman and based on false premises -- its results are before us.
Swartz himself seemed to realize this at some level in his last post analyzing The Dark Knight film about Batman:
Throughout the film, we’ve seen various desperate attempts to change the system by ignoring the usual rules: Batman originally thought he could inspire change by being a cultural exemplar, but only ended up causing a bunch of kids to get themselves hurt by dressing up as him. Dent thought he could clean up the system by pushing righteously from the inside, but ended up cutting more and more ethical corners until his own personal obsessions ended up making him a monster. The Joker had by far the most interesting plan: he hoped to out-corrupt the corrupters, to take their place and give the city “a better class of criminal”.
And the crazy thing is that it works! At the end of the movie, the Joker is alive, the gangsters and their money launderers are mostly dead, and their money has been redistributed (albeit though the deflationary method of setting it on fire). And, as we see from the beginning of the third movie, this is a fairly stable equilibrium: with politicians no longer living in fear of the gangsters, they’re free to adopt tough anti-crime policies that keep them from rising again.3
The movie concludes by emphasizing that Batman must become the villain, but as usual it never stops to notice that the Joker is actually the hero. But even though his various games only have one innocent casualty, he’s much too crazy to be a viable role model for Batman. His inspired chaos destroys the criminals, but it also terrorizes the population. Thanks to Batman, society doesn’t devolve into a self-interested war of all-against-all, as he apparently expects it to, but that doesn’t mean anyone enjoys the trials.
Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it’s no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide.
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