Yet another smarmy, weepy piece about Aaron Swartz -- there are so many of them now you could be forgiven for feeling that they all swim together.
This one in The New Yorker by Lisa McFarquhar is a series of texts, like the fragmented life of the Internet kids themselves, and if you take a critical eye to some of them, you can break out of the hagiographic narrative paralyzing analyses of this contradictory figure.
Take these two paragraphs directly from Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Swartz's girlfriend at the time of his death:
Then he ran over to the bathroom and started to close the door. I was afraid of what he would do in there alone, so I held the handle down, the door wouldn’t lock while the handle was down. We battled for a few minutes, him from the inside and me from the outside. Eventually he started winning, and I was scared. So I begged, “Please don’t lock the door. I’m afraid you’re going to hurt yourself.” He said, “But you’ll throw water on me!” I said, “I promise not to. Plus, I need to take a shower. Please let me in.” Then he gave up immediately and let me in.
At that point I felt like I should actually take a shower, so I did. Suddenly he started getting dressed. He did it quickly, and he put on his favorite outfit—a V-neck black T-shirt and the tan corduroy pants we’d bought together a few weeks before, so that he’d have something nice to wear for the trial. Then he put on his coat. I thought he was in a rush to head to the office so I got ready as quickly as I could. He said, I’m not coming. I said, really? Why did you put your coat on. He shrugged. I said, “O.K., I’ll stay here with you. I’ll take the day off. We can go for a hike or something.” He shook his head. “No, you go to the office. I need to be alone.” “If I leave you here, you won’t eat anything.” He thought about that for a second and said, “I’ll make some pasta.” “O.K., I’ll go, but only if you promise me two things: that you’ll eat something and that you won’t hurt yourself.” “I promise.” And then I left.
Imagine if you wake up and have this series of events happen with a loved partner, or a room mate, or your child.
Taken as is, starkly, directly, you wouldn't leave for work if you were actually in such a frightened state that you were crying into a locked bathroom door, "don't hurt yourself". If you believed that about a person that would be indication of a very, very serious situation.
And imagine bargaining with somebody over something like this -- bargaining! -- that you will only leave *if they don't hurt themselves* and promise to eat (like they are some kind of strange picky eater -- and worse, a self-harmer). How could that be a promise you could expect to be kept, really? If it reaches that point, aren't you in some sort of really, really wild place? Why can't anyone admit that?!
Of course you are. And that's what lets us know just how fucked up this person is, and this situation is, and the cult around him. What a manipulative little fuck! Promise to your girlfriend that you "won't hurt yourself," then lie, deceive, and hand her a present like that!
Why doesn't anybody think about this differently?! What it shows to me is not that we have to blame Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman for leaving a desperately mentally ill and sick suicidal man alone while she ran off to her NGO job fighting evil corporations. Her only fault is ever hooking up with him in the first place, but maybe she was the helpful Bide-a-Wee heart type (Nobody reads Frannie and Zoe anymore. They should). After all, she offered to stay home, and he refused. She extracted a promise from him, and he made it.
But surely if not now, in time she -- or some of the more sober-headed people around her -- will see what an AWFUL folie-a-deux this situation was. It shows the stress and strains and madness of weeks and months on end trying to deal with a manipulative madman. Trying to placate him and cajole him like a fractious child. Trying to give him to his whims and let him make his pasta for breakfast. Did he also refuse to put on the right pants for school when he was little?
Trying, in a deadly game of dare, to make him promise not to "hurt himself," a euphemism for what, self-harm? Cutting? Did he do that often? Sounds like it -- that it got so routine that she become dulled and inured and bargained and put a bandaid on it and went to work.
"Hurt himself?" Or commit suicide -- knowing he was prone to it? Why do people use this euphemism "hurt yourself" with suicidal types, anyway? Doesn't that just feed the sickness?
Just think normally, rationally, soberly here: if you have to plead with a person to open a bathroom door because you think they might be killing themself; if you have to enter into a strange bargaining game with them -- "don't kill yourself while I go to the office and make the money for the both of us today, honey" -- well, you are revealing lots more than about that one day.
You're revealing that you've been in a long-term abusive relationship with a madman, a manipulative sick person who would harm you for the rest of your life by making you take at least some kind of blame for his suicide, traumatizing you permantly. Yes, suicides are murderers.
This is so awful, no wonder this girlfriend and the family seem to have closed ranks around the idea that the government and the prosecutor are to blame instead of Aaron himself having a deep sickness.
I've seen people in these kinds of situations before, like frogs in slowly boiling water -- compensating for, adjusting for, working around, people who are severely psychiatrically ill or alcoholics or just suffering from something like Alzheimer's that nobody wants to admit yet. These kind of selfless caregivers indeed enter into a solipsistic self-centered world that the French term folie a deux, "madness for the two of us" really does capture.
Look, if you have to try to convince your boyfriend not to kill himself and to eat something so he doesn't get sick before you come home for work, you have a problem -- and it's mainly not your problem, and your coping with it and not handling it isn't a reflection on you -- if you can have the sense to get out of the situation and turn the person over to competent authorities.
But, it was not to be.
Now, let's go over to Quinn North's anguished confession of what she believes to be her role in Swartz's prosecution -- another woman -- herself damaged from a drug-dealing Vietnam Vet father who went to San Quentin when she was 17. There's of course the self-serving fake frame that copyleftist coverer Alex Madrigal brings to the table, forgetting to mention the plea bargain and the real context of the crime.
So...this out-of-touch (or conniving) girl hacker believes Swartz's prosecution is ""something about a wiring closet at MIT".
I'll say.
She then writes:
"I had to Google grand jury to find out what it was."
See, people raised on the Internet never learn civics, and don't learn about the justice system, and just think code-is-law. You would think that if you at least watched cop shows on TV, you'd get what a grand jury is, but people don't watch TV anymore, they chat online and watch Youtube.
Her idea of a moral code: "Don't get caught".
In a spasm of self-pity, she tries to make us believe she's the one who sent Aaron to his death by making it possible to prosecute him -- which is all a self-promoting sick fantasy and more folie-a-deux. She makes much of the fact that she somehow tipped off the feds to the existence of Aaron's Guerilla Manifesto.
Only a dysfunctional hacker could think there'd be something "profoundly foolish" about telling the FBI about something they simply hadn't noticed on the *open Internet*.
Self-serving blogs don't always give insights into crime, and it's precisely because the government *doesn't* prosecute thoughtcrime that they don't sit and mine blogs for "evidence," duh.
She writes about prosecutor Steve Heymann:
Aaron told me that Steve had been viciously gleeful to Andy about the manifesto, that he'd said Aaron would never get as good a deal as he'd turned down now that they had that bit of evidence.
But this is wilfully misleading and quite ridiculous because at the time of his death, the six-month plea bargain still held, as his lawyer knows full well.
It's my thesis that Swartz wrote the manifesto (she claims it has four authors but I don't really buy that, or at least, don't accept that it's mainly his -- he signed it, after all) because he really did conceive of a world in which he was a hero, liberating content, "expropriating from the expropriators" like a good bolshevik.
Norton supplies a different take obviously:
Later I listened to Aaron on the phone with a journalist describe downloading 400,000 law journal articles to do text analysis revealing what kind of legal research was being funded by what kind of companies in 2008, and publishing an academic paper at Stanford about it, all as explanation of why he might have downloaded the JSTOR articles. It was the best answer legally to the question I'd been asked in that small fluorescent room surrounded by big men. Listening to him say that I felt my insides collapse.
But that still amounts to bolshevism.
Bolshevism isn't just some red label you stick on people you don't agree with -- this is what I am always accused of -- and I don't care. Bolshevism is a descriptive term that is accurate about the beliefs of these people.
These hackers believe that they are an advance-guard, an intellectual cadre trained and prepared to liberate information and make a Better World.
They believe they are doing this on behalf of "poor people".
That they weren't asked to do this by any actual poor people troubles them not one whit -- they dig and edge-case and make up stuff on behalf of these imaginary "masses" whom they never really consult and by whom they are never elected.
No one in Africa is waiting for 4 million JSTOR articles by some musty old professors about obscure topics written in arcane language in order to have, oh, clean water and jobs to secure their livelihoods. It's just first-world hubris of the sort that brought us One Laptop Per Child and other Many Idiotic Ideas Per Adult.
And when Aaron said he needed to examine the funding of legal research by corporations, he's revealing a narr0w-minded, literalist, Internet-bred notion of evil corporations that somebody like Lessig inculated in him. It's puerile, myopic stuff. It's obvious that he was sicced on this by Lessig and it played into that whole "evil money in politics" notion that Lessig is obsessed about (although not about the Soros side of it).
It as if Swartz really believed the Marxist cant that corporations are evil and driven by greedy economic motives, and they twist and bend laws to get off their evil corporate clients. In fact, his stubborn defenders would defiantly say, what, they aren't? And what's wrong with *you* that you believe corporations are good?
Swartz, like other technocommunist hackers, had no nuanced or subtle perception of the various good motives and good deeds that corporations have and do which make them a preferred system for most people. He had no notion -- and wouldn't have cared -- of how a centralized, controlled economy run by "enlightened" people like himself and his friends rapidly becomes hell for other people.
We get more of the meglomania of this person with this telling anecdote:
At the end of April, Aaron, Ada, and I went to DC, and took Ada to the museums. We walked along the sidewalk in front of the White House together. Aaron looked past the lawns at the grand doors and said quietly "They don't let felons work there." I replied it was ironic, given how many felonies were committed there. But Aaron didn't laugh.
This is either made up, exaggerated, or actually true, and letting us realize that Aaron was not content to be an NGO worker, a hacktivist, a creative guy doing good. He wanted power. But...they always do, these Better Worlders. They actually want to get into this government they hate and run it, because they crave power. The technocommunist movement is about coming to power, not really just reforming things or making them better as they are: it's radical revolution for the sake of bringing the advance guard into power, with the masses obediently following their directives.
It also reveals more of that folie a deux of Quinn that she wouldn't find anything at all wrong with the notion that a sickly, self-preoccupied, troubled youth with a very checkered resume who could never hold a job or finish a project would somehow be suitable to get into the White House and that if it were not for that one felony blighting his record, why, he could become president or rise high in the ranks of the president's advisors. Really, Quinn? What were they smoking? Why would they even *want* to get into the White House?
No, Aaron, no felons need apply. But why were you not taking responsibility for your felonious actions in the first place? There was a magic fairy realm called the Internet that would save you?
Over and over again, I've heard haughty and pious hackers and copyleftist shills say that Aaron's life would have been ruined with a felony with the six months plea bargain, and that this was just too awful to contemplate.
Oh? For a person who disdained Congress and successfully prevented them from ever voting on legislation that he organized a flashmob against?
A person who so hated institutions and their impediments that he simply hacked and destroyed their point? That person is going to "serve the public" in "public service"? Really? You're quite sure?
A person who thought the very existence of a wealthy country was somehow leaching life from the poor? A redistributionist who had no notion of how wealth is created because he'd never had a normal job in his life?
And now, this weepy stuff:
I believe my contribution to Steve's case was to give him the manifesto during the latter half of his initial investigation and then reducing, but not eliminating, its value as evidence. However that story reflects on me, it is important the people know that the prosecutors manipulated me and used my love against Aaron without me understanding what they were doing. This is their normal. They would do this to anyone. We should understand that any alleged crime can become life-ruining if it catches their eyes. Innocence and goodness are only factored in as risks to their case. This is the system that we, as citizens, have agreed to.
Well, sure. Because stealing is stealing, even if its digital, as Carmen Ortiz explained. This manifesto wasn't really "evidence" so much as an explanation of possible motive. The defense was free to try to prove it was misused as thoughtcrime and they had been on their way to having certain things throne out of the case when he killed himself.
Prosecutors did their job, they didn't manipulate a woman who was already totally manipulated in her abusive relationship with this man-child who ruined her life in a number of ways. Let's not be children here. And this self-serving notion that these prosecutors were rendered red-faced and sputtering in their effort to argue against her lame, insular, self-serving logic just doesn't literally stand up in court. I really hope we will hear the side of these prosecutors some day.
Says Quinn, in this bolshevist folie a deux gives people:
You've asked me to contextualize this, and I've given you the only context that I can imagine-- giving the global poor tools to better their state.
Barf. Truly, barf. The global poor cannot use 4 million JSTOR articles you dumb bunnies. They might use one, but they don't need to pay for it. Their are African universities that make it available to students for free, too. There are African universities with international community or individual donor money that are always striving to make knowledge available. It's insane to think that some sickly white hacker kid busting the ability of people to have choices about their distribution and access model are somehow holding back the advancement of the poor in Africa.
It's just sheer manipulative bolshevik hubris. Of the sort that people are entirely unreflective of, so they reject my use of this label.
Really, the "helpful" bunch of hacktivists going around with their Ushahidi and self-destroying smart phones and apps should attend to their own socieities and stop destroying their ability to sustain free enterprise before they inflict the kind of communism on poor societies that the Soviets inflicted on them decades ago to no avail and worse, to great destruction persisting to this day (and ANC politics in South Africa are only some of the whirlwind of violence sown by the Kremlin and the KGB in this region.)
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