Lisa Rein, Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig at the Creative Commons Launch in 2002. Photo by Gosuhke Takama.
I wrote that the Internet Revolution Has Eaten Another Child. If everyone supporting Swartz was going to blame the government for his death and scream "prosecutorial overreach," I was going to claim "professorial overreach" and blame Lessig and Doctorow and all the rest right back.
I didn't see this devastating takedown of Swartz's mentors as a function of ultimately Big IT corporate greed until yesterday. It goes much father in condemning these people than I have, and he's one of their own.
Thomas Lord's "Using Aaron Swartz" is the article we should all have begun with on day one, not be reading today. I only found it (it isn't seeable in Google searches in the first few pages obviously) by noting the author's link to his own piece on Adrian Chen's cynical hyposter piece at Gawker. ["Hyposter" was a typo, but I think it actually is a great way to describe hypocritical hipsters].
I urge you all to read it and think about it.
Writes Lord, who I take it is some kind of computer geek himself in Silicon Valley:
I hate this popular telling of the story because is it completely ignores the middle aged male svengalis who brought the pretty 13 year old boy to the dance of tech industry celebrity, only to turn their back on him, defame him, and even drive him out of a job as soon as the blush was off the rose.
He writes of someone I never heard discussed in this story and in fact hadn't heard of at all, because I'm not a student of the dot-com boom, I tune in at Web 2.0:
At the very crest of the dot-com boom there is Philip Greenspun, emerging millionaire. The company he founded was building "community backed" web sites for clients, just before the big crash. That company, ArsDigita, spun off a publicity generating competition with cash money prizes encouraging teenagers to crank out their own "community backed" web sites.
13 year Swartz takes a $1,000 winner-up prize home for building an application that showed off some software Greenspun was trying to sell to grown-ups.
And away he goes -- read the rest. Devastating.
Basically, it makes the point that I've been making or that Tom Slee has been making differently from a more leftist perspective that the open source movement is merely a shill for these Big IT corporations.
Well, at root I don't disagree, but I actually think there's more to it than just corporate greed or evil capitalism, because these particular corporate titans always have this "capitalism for me, socialism for thee" mentality and of course their "Better World" notions.
Dave Winer isn't so much a technolibertarian in my view as a technocommunist, with all the nasty oppressiveness that comes with it. Imagine him, venting his spleen on a 16-year-old kid! He turned against his protoge.
Technocommunism is so hard to tell apart from technolibertarian sometimes, but I have made the point that they do differ in their willingness to support small business and freedom of thought and speech. The former do not. The latter do, although sometimes reluctantly.
ALL THOSE LONG MAGAZINE PROFILES
Adrian Chen's has told us Which Long Magazine Profiles of Aaron Swartz Should You Bother to Read as if he is the arch-hipster meta-meta-metastizer of the Metaverse. But of course, on the day the news broke, he was writing the perfectly politically-correct copyleftist piece in support of the "cause".
Make no mistake, we get it that Gawker is still the most hipsterish of all publications, but even they are forced to shift a bit to the center at the revelations of the New Yorker or the New Republic. For my money, Wesley Yang's piece is the best piece of journalism, as in "writing professionally" and "investigating facts and making cold calls" which so few journalists seem to do these days. I don't like his conclusions, but his job was more carefully done. The New Yorker may smack all the others done, as Chen says, but it's not well-written. It's confusing -- a pastiche of texts which one doesn't know are quotations from elsewhere or from Lisa MacFarquhar's own journalism.
The commenter "Recovering Hipster" took me to task in my previous thread for calling MacFarquhar's piece "smarmy and weepy" because he thinks unlike my little blog which is banned by other tech blogs (! really?!) she winds up taking the hagiographic spin away. I actually don't think she does.
Yes, she helpfully opens by letting us know that Aaron Schwartz is basically mentally ill, and his nearest and dearest were in a kind of folie-a-deux with him as I wrote. Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman says, "It’s taken me some time since he died to get used to talking about him because I was under such strict instructions not to" -- as if she was in a cult.
WHY THE NEW YORKER IN FACT ISN'T AN EXPOSE OF SWARZ
But unfortunately, Lisa repeats all the same hero-worship misinformation that the adulatory tech community has thrown up:
At the age of fourteen, he helped to develop the RSS software that enables the syndication of information over the Internet. At fifteen, he e-mailed one of the leading theorists of Internet law, Lawrence Lessig, and helped to write the code for Lessig’s Creative Commons, which, by writing alternatives to standard copyright licenses, allows people to share their work more freely. At nineteen, he was a developer of Reddit, one of the world’s most widely used social-networking news sites.
As we know from more careful pieces, including Yang's, he didn't "help develop the RSS software that enables the syndication of information over the Internet" because in fact other people, particularly Dave Winer did that, and Swartz only worked on a branch or fork of the code that in fact was left behind by further developers and is not in use today on this blog or somebody else's blogs. It's an oddball footnote, really, to the story -- and the story is one of sectarian bitching and sniping and fighting as you can read if you look up Winer and others on this.
Lessig's Creative Commons shill to browbeat people into giving up their intellectual property rights online and not accept money for digital content -- a deliberate decoupling of content from commerce that was never any accident, comrade -- does not need "code" to function. It's a little icon that people cut and paste with a right click. They don't need to be in the coded site statistics or whatever or "register" even with his site. They just use it. It's not a real license. The entire thing is fake. The very notion of Aaron Swartz "coding Creative Commons" as if it is a coded thing on the Internet that everyone uses as code is just absurd. I'm happy to be corrected if I'm wrong about this, but I'm not seeing it.
And he wasn't a developer of Reddit. Something else happened. Ycombinator's guy, Paul Graham, a venture capitalist, told Swartz, whose start-up was called Infogami and in which he had invested, to merge with his other investment, Redditt, because he felt they were too similar to stay separate -- why have your two toys compete with each other in a limited market? You will note Swartz's start-up was swallowed by Reddit, and not visa-versa, and Redditt itself is no big "invention," but just a web page with likes and dislikes pushing links up and down -- dirt simple stuff. Community management is way more important than code on that job -- and Swartz didn't like either. Soon after collecting his money, he stopped showing up for work and then was fired. Hello. This is not heroics. It's dysfunction.
WHY DOES PAUL GRAHAM FUND SUICIDES?
Why does Paul Graham fund suicides? Either Y-combinator is not doing enough quality control and funding fragile dysfunctional people who shouldn't be funded because they are too crazy. Or his funding and the stress of Silicon Valley start-up land is breaking people that in fact are good and creative people. Either way, it's not good. Not for him, his company, or Silicon Valley.
Then Lisa writes this -- which in fact furthers and reiterates and sodders in the tech-mania boilerplate about him and will become gospel because it is so much more widely read by serious people than Gawker:
After Reddit was sold, to Condé Nast, he turned away from money-making start-ups and became a political activist. He spoke often at technology conferences and activist gatherings, and was admired in both those worlds. Since his death, he has become a hero to programmers who have not turned away from money but wish they had, and to those who believe that governments are crushing what was once the freedom of the Internet. When Anonymous hacked the State Department Web site on February 17th, they declared, “Aaron Swartz this is for you.”
Two years ago, he was indicted on multiple felony counts for downloading several million articles from the academic database JSTOR. It is not clear why he did this. He may have wanted to analyze the articles, or he may have intended to upload them onto the Web, so they could be accessed by anyone. It is clear that he did not anticipate the astonishing severity of the legal response. He did not consider his JSTOR action an act of civil disobedience for which he was prepared to sacrifice a portion of his life in prison. It was not a project that was particularly important to him. There had been a time when he cared deeply about copyright issues, but he had moved on
It's not that she hasn't written truthiness here, but she hasn't put the context: that it was MIT's IT people who called the cops because it was a serious break-in. Her coyness about "not being clear" about why he did this is just not sustainable, given his Guerilla Manifesto which I was one of the few to condemn years before his death.
Then MacFarfarquhar writes:
Since his death, his family and closest friends have tried to hone his story into a message, in order to direct the public sadness and anger aroused by his suicide to political purposes. They have done this because it is what he would have wanted, and because it is a way to extract some good from the event. They tell people that the experience of being prosecuted is annihilatingly brutal, and that prosecutors can pursue with terrible weapons defendants who have caused little harm. One of the corollaries of this message is that Swartz did not kill himself; he was murdered by the government. But this claim is for public consumption, and the people closest to him do not really believe it. They believe that he would not have killed himself without the prosecutors, but they feel that there is something missing from this account—some further fact, a key, that will make sense of what he did
But she never really tells us that key. This is an unfinished piece. Why can't even the New Yorker write long pieces of research journalism anymore?!
And then there's this:
...he was compiling a report about the relation between candidates’ wealth and their electoral success, and, while successful candidates’ financial disclosure records were available on the Internet, unsuccessful candidates’ records, while public, were not online. If you wanted to see them, you were supposed to make paper copies in a library, but he wanted digital files so he could analyze the data.
Again, it's that technocommunism. Yes, I'm going to call it that. That everything is economically motivated. That it's all about evil capitalism. Oh, but as we learn from the New Yorker piece, Swartz was all set to eliminate scores of NGOs, too, because they were redundant and inefficient.
Lisa goes out of her way to say he didn't "hack" MIT because "he didn't have to". But he did hack MIT, it was wrong, and he went downtown because of it, and then couldn't face the consequences. That's the story -- and she most certainly does not tell it.
ACTUALLY, FREEDOM WAS TOO SMALL A CAUSE FOR HIM
It's like you have to read between the lines or over her shoulder, to get the real story coming form the snippets of text, like this gem:
“There was not a cause that was dear to his heart,” Holden Karnofsky, a friend and a co-founder of the charity evaluator GiveWell, says. “There wasn’t. Except for the big one: ending suffering, maximizing human empowerment, making the world an awesome place—that is what he cared about. I think any cause that you can come up with that’s smaller than that, like freedom, you could find a situation in which Aaron would go against that for the broader cause.” “He was disturbed by things he felt were wrong,” his father says. “To the extent that he felt that the world was unjust or unfair, that bothered him. And if a font was wrong that bothered him, too."
In other words, freedom was a lesser cause than "ending suffering" or "making the world an awesome place" -- which is of course the credo of all totalitarianism and why I fight it and am only doubling down on fighting it lately.
There's more -- I have not achieved "Swartz completeness" as Chen snottily says I could if I read the Rolling Stone piece.
MAD HATTER
But let me link to Danah Boyd's piece, which I keep forgetting to do in part because it's so loathsome.
I first saw danah boyd, as we are to cutely write her self-disparaging faux-modest name, at New York Law School State of Play Conference in 2004. That was almost nine years ago. She had her trademark furry hat like a Turkmen then, but she was merely a PhD student lovingly mentored by the tech giants who adored her, like Philip Rosedale of Second Life. I have such a vivid image of her animatedly talking to an enthralled Philip back in that day, in a softly-lit wine lounge, while Philip's other fanboyz champed at the bit because she was taking up their precious air-time with the god of the virtual world scene, famous for his blinking scripted codpiece on his avatar -- which his worshipping fans gave to him as a real-life present at that meeting, and made him blush.
I followed danah then for some time -- and marvelled that she wound up at Microsoft. How did it happen that this cool person on all the web 2.0 tech conference circuits ended up with the hated Man. Well, because she was a valued Stanford PhD grad and they snapped her up and made her an offer she couldn't refuse. She still blogged about teens and women and stuff and still had an adoring fan base.
So here's her take on Swartz.
The last 24 hours have been an emotional roller coaster. I woke up yesterday to find that a friend of mine – Aaron Swartz – had taken his life. My Twitter feed went into mourning – shock, sadness, anger, revenge. I spent the day talking with friends who were all in various states of disarray. I watched as many of them poured out their hearts on their blogs, a practice we’ve all been doing for over a decade.
Etc. Although danah boyd did not organize a petition for Swartz; she did not donate money to his defense fund that I can see although she could well afford it; she did not blog about him before when he was first arrested (maybe I missed it). So yeah, cry me a river.
She then writes this:
There’s no doubt in my mind that depression was a factor. I adored Aaron because he was an emotional whirlwind – a cranky bastard and a manic savant. Our conversations had an ethereal sense to them and he pushed me hard to think through complex issues as we debated. He had an intellectual range that awed me and a kitten’s sense of curiosity. But when he was feeling destructive, he used his astute understandings of people to find their weak spots and poke them where it hurt. Especially the people he loved the most. He saw himself as an amateur sociologist because he was enamored with how people worked and we argued over the need for rigor, the need for formal training. He had no patience for people who were intellectually slower than him and he failed to appreciate what could be gained by a university setting. Instead, he wanted to mainline books and live in the world of the mind.
Now, that makes sense if you read Thomas Lord's piece, and click through to reading Dave Winer's rage rant, and all the rest. In other words, there was a steadily growing list of people burned by this prodigy who would turn on his mentors and various other people willing to work with him. He "poked them where it hurt" and they didn't like it. He was weird and nasty. You know, like Steve Jobs.
And here we get what it's all REALLY about, and no one has written about this except danah boyd, because most of the people writing are men, and most of them don't care about the social side of hacking, and most of them aren't real journalists (except for the New York Times) interviewing MIT's geeks. They're the key to this. And boyd helps us get the story better:
What made me so overwhelmingly angry yesterday was the same thing that has been boiling in my gut for the last two years. When the federal government went after him – and MIT sheepishly played along – they weren’t treating him as a person who may or may not have done something stupid. He was an example. And the reason they threw the book at him wasn’t to teach him a lesson, but to make a point to the entire Cambridge hacker community that they were p0wned. It was a threat that had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with a broader battle over systemic power. In recent years, hackers have challenged the status quo and called into question the legitimacy of countless political actions. Their means may have been questionable, but their intentions have been valiant. The whole point of a functioning democracy is to always question the uses and abuses of power in order to prevent tyranny from emerging. Over the last few years, we’ve seen hackers demonized as anti-democratic even though so many of them see themselves as contemporary freedom fighters. And those in power used Aaron, reframing his information liberation project as a story of vicious hackers whose terroristic acts are meant to destroy democracy.
But what she fails to do -- and what Lisa MacFarqurar doesn't have the intellectual breadth on this subject to render -- is explain that these people themselves are anti-democratic. They aren't just sick. They're a threat to freedom.They aren't just taking out too many books from the library. They are preventing the library from being able to meet its costs and from authors from having a livelihood. That is called "communism" where I come from. I don't see why this is so hard to keep explaining!
Now, why didn't Ms. Microsoft Darling of Silicon Valley get behind her boy?
I was too scared to speak publicly for fear of how my words might be used against him. And I was too scared to get embroiled in the witch hunt that I’ve watched happen over the last three years. Because it hasn’t been about justice or national security. It’s been about power. And it’s at the heart and soul of why the Obama administration has been a soul crushing disappointment to me. I’ve gotten into a ridiculous number of fights over the last couple of years with folks in the administration over the treatment of geeks and the misunderstanding of hackers, but I could never figure how to make a difference on that front. This was a source of serious frustration for me, even as SOPA/PIPA showed that geeks could make a difference.
Sigh.
Tragically Misunderstood Artists! It's never enough. Obama gives them his pre-emptive veto of SOPA, as promised after that Silicon Valley pow-wow dinner, remember? He even applauds jail-breaking phones. He gives his friends jobs and puts socialists or collectivist-tropic ideologues everywhere -- and it's never, ever enough for them!
Yes, danah, while she affects the style of weepy female, is a very tough and smart cookie and knows which side the bread is buttered on. So she turns in this conclusion:
There is a lot of justifiable outrage out there. Many people want the heads of the key administrators who helped create the context in which Aaron took his life. I completely understand where they’re coming from. But I also fear the likelihood that Aaron will be turned into a martyr, an abstraction of a geek activist destroyed by the State. Because he was a lot more than that – lovable and flawed, passionate and strong-willed, brilliant and infuriatingly stupid. It’ll be easy for folks to rally cry for revenge in his name. But not much is gained from reifying the us vs. them game that got us here. There has to be another way.
She seems, then to call for restrain by hackers themselves, even as she blesses Biella, one of their biggest fangirlz:
What I really hope comes out of this horrible tragedy is some serious community reflection and a deep values check. Many of the beliefs that Aaron stood for – the liberation of knowledge, open access to information, and the use of code to make the world better – are core values in the geek community. Yet, as Biella Coleman astutely dissects in “Coding Freedom”, this community is not without its flaws. Nor was Aaron. He did things his way because he believed that passion and will and action trumped all. And his stubbornness made him breakable. If we want to achieve the values and goals that are core to the geek community, I don’t think that we’ll ever make a difference by creating more martyrs that can be used as examples in a cultural war. As we collectively mourn Aaron’s death and channel our anger into making a difference, I think we need to look for an approach to change-making that doesn’t result in brilliant people being held up as examples so that they can be tormented by power.
But in the end, that's just not a plan. She's not for martyrizing Aaron, but she's still for demonizing the Man she works for and who eagerly slurps up the work of open source coders like Aaron every day of the week and converts it to profits.
Colour me unimpressed. I'll believe that Ms. Apophenia is ushering in a world of less crazy radical hackers with totalitarian ideals she is tacitly celebrating when I hear what the new moderate plan is for political action. Haven't heard it yet. Instead, she's still writing thinky thumb-suckers inciting young kids to overthrow the state and corporate world.
danah did try to marshal her analytical skills a few weeks after her shock to come back to reflections on her friend's death. But it prompted her to go to Miami:
I was in awe of their strength, of their commitment. Because I relished the activist in Aaron and I was completely intellectually with them in their efforts to use this moment to make a difference, to speak out against the structural inequities and abuses of power that Aaron was fighting for. But I wasn’t able to be there; I was still in a dark place that wasn’t productive. So I pushed my own escape valve, a privileged valve I’ve learned to use whenever things got dark. I spent my frequent traveler points and went to Miami to hug the sun and the beach and get a grip on my mental state.
All she ends with is the CryptoParty's kid call for safe, encrypted hidden spaces and Dave's Darknet:
With each new geek death by suicide, folks ask what we should do about the depression in our community. I can’t help but think that we’re paying the costs of the public-ness that we’ve helped create. We’ve made geek culture something to watch, an economic engine, a dependency. And in doing so, we haven’t enabled safe spaces to grow.
She gushes:
In NYC alone, we’ve lost two geeks in two years because their worlds spun out of control in ways that didn’t leave them with enough strength to grapple with their demons while also trying to make the world a better place. Throughout this country, there are geeks and hackers facing serious pressures by structural power as a byproduct of the public-ness we’ve created. And many of them are also facing serious demons. I’m definitely among those who want to hold political entities accountable for capitalizing on vulnerabilities in their pursuit of the status quo, but I am also hoping that the geek community can figure out a way to make sure that those who are struggling have enough support to fight both their demons and their oppressors. Before we lose another one.
Well, let me tell you something. You can start by not trying to make a Better World. Stop the technocommunist grab for power on people who didn't elect you. Start with maybe making your apartment a better place, your own relationship a better place, your workplace a better place. These totalitarian aspirations lead you to a death cult, if not for us, then yourselves. Stop it.
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