The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I wish technologists would focus less on Aaron and his death.
I wish the Department of Justice would focus more on Aaron and his death.
I also wish the CFAA would die in a fire along with its authors, but that's not likely to happen. :(
The little bits of new information, but mostly just the reminder of him and his life, which prompt me to read his writings again, and they often help me get out of some funk I might be in and pursue things I find worth pursuing. His suicide is not the main point of the article for me.
As such, this article is, for me, probably the most useful link on HN today, if not the week.
We need to remember the heroes who were brave enough to challenge the way the world operates.
This article in particular gave the reader a good insight into the thinking of Aaron.
Aaron's case in particular captivates the internet because of what he stood for, and what a lot of us hope to stand for. This article is highly relevant because as great as Aaron was, he had his shortcomings as well. And for those who really look up to him (including myself), it's insightful to look at them.
What baffles me is that people are so reactionary and outraged about anyone mentioning it. Like they hate him for trying to be a martyr and nobody should criticize the sacred infallible system. It seems likely he killed himself because of depression not to make the prosecutor look bad or make a statement so lets not resent him.
I do believe the subjects (copyright law, police brutality, etc.) are worth discussing, but I also believe the politics around them make it difficult to discuss them rationally. People tend not to invoke Aaron Swartz to start conversations, so much as attempt to end them, or polarize them, or steer them into the same tedious and unproductive circles time and again.
I guess we're lucky there's no way to spin Marvin Minsky's death that way. If he'd gotten so much as a traffic ticket before the end, people would be implying his cerebral hemorrhage was caused by police batons.
“He was freed of all the disciplining experiences of life,” Lawrence Lessig says. “His parents got him out of school early, which was great because it allowed him to become somebody who wasn’t the product of puberty in a public school. But it was bad in the sense that it gave him a confidence about his own judgment, which is dangerous.”
I hated school and still hate work mostly due to the discipline aspect and the bureaucracy but I endured it. Before now I thought was bad but perhaps this discipline does make me stronger to deal with general bullshit that exists in our world, I deal with it fine for the most part. As a parent now I was thinking I should allow my son to do whatever he wants to avoid the nonsense I sometimes had to put up with but now I don't known if that hurts him too, it's difficult striking that balance.
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/09/17/how-to-be-a-precious-sn...
I think Aaron Swartz's life & death continues to fascinate us because many of us see something in him that we wish we could protect in ourselves. He's the ur-snowflake to all of us clods. It would be nice to live in a world of free access to information, universal compassion, freedom from power hierarchies, and everything that he stood for. It's just not very practical, when content creators need to eat and people have differing desires that are often at odds and reality needs to choose between multiple competing desires.
What? The activism was directed at giving free access to that should be free! The research that is being hoarded behind paywalls by gatekeepers who didn't create it and don't pay the ones who created it. The creators of the text are people paid by us through our taxes and other contributions and then locked away so only a select few can see it. This knowledge locked away that could save lives, be new areas of business or just simply improve the human condition.
And here you are and talking about this like he was trying to distribute movies for free.
This is a key lesson. The transition from protected academic life to "The Real World" (as we used to style it) can be alarmingly abrupt. It's best to plan for the worst.
We have to work within those real rules, but it would be a shame if those rules define us.
However, my point is that it's very dangerous to count on slack. Consider the theft of that cannon from Fleming House. Sure, it was a prank. And Caltech didn't press charges. All in good fun. But interstate theft is a federal crime.
His mistake was likely that he had become somebody important; something of a political figure. That's when people start about caring what you do (by definition).
Remember that bastard that hiked up the price of life saving drugs who got slapped with an old felony? Nobody would have bothered to find it if he wasn't the most hated man in America.
For anyone else suffering, there's been new studies on fodmap free diets which have been reportedly effective. http://bit.ly/fodmapfree
Thank you for the link. I'd love to get to the point where I no longer need to take this medication on a daily basis.
I've had it for 12 years. I've spent the last 2 years learning everything I can about web, building 2 saas ventures, and now trying to attack this problem: http://trials.humandataproject.org
I'd love to chat with you and learn more about what you've tried.
Keep in mind Tibetans have a 80% incidence rate of IBD. Feel free to reach out to me if you think I can be a resource.
College was different though with most people being much more mature. My diet has changed and I'm on a light dose of medication that's kept it at bay for almost 10 years. My last flare-up in 2008 was a killer because I also had the flu at the time, double whammy!
Strangely, none of this detracts from this extraordinary individual. Oh, but I wish he hadn't committed suicide! It's not like I don't understand it, I am a person at risk of this myself. I just wish he didn't leave his devastated loved ones behind like that.
If somebody broke into my house and was caught I supposed I could overreact and go into massive debt fortifying it with castle walls, a moat, and alligators.
But I don't think the legal system should side with parties doing damage to themselves just because they don't understand computer networks.
Where did you get the information that the entirety of JSTOR was shut down, even temporarily?
The second statement doesn't in any way follow from the first. There are call kinds of reasons why JSTOR might have decided not to pursue civil litigation. Swartz quite possibly didn't have enough money to make it worthwhile, and it would have been bad publicity. On top of that, given that Swartz was already facing criminal prosecution, there was no need to pursue civil litigation as a deterrent to others.
>Where did you get the information that the entirety of JSTOR was shut down, even temporarily?
http://swartz-report.mit.edu/faq.html ("This activity was in violation of MIT's licensing agreement with JSTOR, and its scale threatened JSTOR's network so profoundly that JSTOR blocked all MIT access for three days in October 2010.") My original post was open to the interpretation that JSTOR shut down everywhere for everyone, which is not the case. But anyway, it's clear that Swartz's activities were significantly disruptive.
What you seem to be missing is that Swartz's actions were a direct challenge to JSTOR's entire business model. The only way that JSTOR can make money out of scanning old journal articles is to charge fees to someone or other for access to those articles. If the entire JSTOR database becomes freely available, then this income stream is cut off. It's worth considering what the effects would have been if Swartz had succeeded in doing what he intended to do, i.e. release JSTOR's entire database of articles. This wasn't merely a prank or a protest. It was something that had the potential to destroy JSTOR entirely. (And JSTOR isn't even evil -- it's a non-profit that does a lot of great work.)
http://about.jstor.org/news/jstor-statement-misuse-incident-...
"The criminal investigation and today’s indictment of Mr. Swartz has been directed by the United States Attorney’s Office. It was the government’s decision whether to prosecute, not JSTOR’s. As noted previously, our interest was in securing the content. Once this was achieved, we had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter."
They genuinely weren't interested in making him an example.
More generally, that fact that JSTOR did not pursue civil action is totally unsurprising given that Swartz was already facing a criminal prosecution, and it tells us very little about what JSTOR did or didn't think about what Swartz did. It's like saying "you must not think that the burglar harmed you by burgling your house because you're not pursuing civil action against him" -- in an instance where the burglar was already facing a criminal prosecution.
If JSTOR had believed Swartz's actions not to be harmful, they clearly would not have blocked JSTOR access from the MIT network. And indeed, Swartz didn't actually succeed in doing JSTOR much harm becuase they successfully stopped him. What you're effectively saying is that being caught before you've succeeded in completing a crime ought to count as a good defense. In other words, if I try to burgle your house and you catch me before I succeed in making off with your stuff, then you can't complain, because after all, I didn't actually get hold of any of your stuff!
And it's not just that I'm not a big fan of newyorker's style (even though I'm not), the whole read is composed in a very specific way. It isn't biographical, not documentary, it's more of an essay, purpose of which is not to tell Aaron's story as such, but the writer's story, with it's own premise and morale.
So what is this story all about? The suicide. And the whole Aaron's life is shown as a prelude to it. The suicide is the point, and the whole life is "an explanation" for it: story, which, we are given to understand, was likely to end with a suicide sooner or later. As the writer eloquently calls it — "the darker side".
It's easy to convey that, because it's a social norm to view a suicide as a tragedy, regardless of circumstances. But let us be cynical just for a minute and look at what happened: some guy was fighting for his ideals; the party he was fighting against was something way bigger than him, a mere mortal; he lost; he died. Suicide never was a big deal, apparently not for Aaron, anyway. What was a big deal for him: his war for the social justice. And, let's face it, there're plenty of other guys who end their lives with suicide, newyorker doesn't write about them. So, as a matter of fact, the suicide isn't a big deal for a newyorker as well, even though MacFarquhar won't admit it, maybe even to herself.
Yet it's made to look as if it is precisely what is the big deal and it's socially acceptable to display it that way. What the story really was about — the fight, and those on the other side of it — that we won't be thinking of, we won't discuss it, we won't remember it. Instead, it will be all about "a darker side" and a tragedy.
Regardless of whether what Aaron did or was doing was right or wrong, regardless of if he was a hero or just a fool — I think it's a pity. To take the most insignificant part of the story, and to make it The Story, because it's so easy to do that.