A note on the martyrdom of Aaron Swartz | Hacker News Reader

A note on the martyrdom of Aaron Swartz

deseret-tech.com

46 pointscookiecaper14 comments

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Aaron isn't the first person whose life and untimely death has been a fillip to a cause.

Aaron's story today has 3 strands.

1) Depression and suicide, and the improvements in mental health that can be achieved

2) Judicial over reach and lawyers being bullies vs doing their jobs by going to the limits

3) The state of affairs with copy right law and the causes which Aaron himself fought for

Each strand has been taken up and defended, and of course not all of them can be done at once.

As far as I can tell, this topic is being taken up and handled better than it usually would be, when it would get spun into a political talking point without reflection on the events and their triggers.

I suspect that there are some sites and articles which lean to one angle or the other, but this must always be the case. Such is life.

Do note - the most recent article landing up on HN (the Slate article) has been a great example of Good Journalism, and it let the readers (largely) draw their own conclusions

Maybe there are other vastly biased articles, which I have missed.

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The poster isn't quite accurate on how someone contemplating suicide thinks.

> There’s an obvious connection here. If we want to stop people from killing either each other or themselves, we shouldn’t martyrize people who distribute death, whether to self or others. Despite external pressures, Aaron Swartz holds the ultimate responsibility for what he did.

Someone who intends to see suicide through, is NOT looking for attention or to be made a Martyr.

I am pretty sure that this has been discussed on HN. Others have taken this view, and fortunately people with an understanding of the factors behind suicide have commented how this isn't how it works.

The line "Suicide is a cop out" comes to mind, and its dangerous impact on driving people away from help has been mentioned.

The Human body is a vast complicated machine which is designed to do everything in its power to survive.

When its pushed to a level of compromised programming to the extent that it actively plans to end itself, a comment like that utterly mis reads whats going on, and does vastly more harm than good.

Don't like the use of the word Martyrdom here. Although there are quite a few definitions of the word, in general it means someone killed themselves to send a message or prove a point. I very much doubt Aaron killed himself to be a martyr, but largely because he was depressed (in the clinical meaning) and couldn't see a way out or a future.

Then what's with the outrage? If his death was merely a symptom of clinical depression, why all this unrelated activism in his name? It's not like a big fund for the Depressed Peoples' Support Group was set up, we're trying to get his prosecutors fired.

That he he was forced into that position is what outrages.

Depression took Aaron Schwartz's life. Others then took the anger at the obvioous waste of a life and directed it at prosecutors, or turned the anger into momentum for the causes which he held dear in his life.

He did not choose to take his life in order to promote his causes. I know you did not say that. But you did say the next will. But the next talented young person who will take their life will not do so for a desire for martyrdom either - depression will take their lives. Just as it did for Aaron

So if you are one of the OPs talented famous people, talk to someone - you, like Aaron, are more good to us alive than dead.

Two things: It's a but late for this. Second, I don't think the world works that way. We like to think that public pleas for individuals to abstain from voluntary action are effective, but it doesn't seem likely.

Consider that the number of people reading the web is in the millions to billions. Even if that message made it to all of them, there is very little chance that it will do much to deter the 50 or so people who choose to write something up and the several thousand who upvote those write-ups. The spread is too wide and there are enough people who are likely to consider the issues around his suicide more important than something as diffuse and hypothetical as copycats.

TL;DR 6 billion people don't act like a village.

>TL;DR 6 billion people don't act like a village.

FYI, We're up to 7 billion these days by most estimates. This village just keeps growing :D

It's not that people shouldn't talk about the issues around it, really, it's just that they shouldn't make him a martyr. Every post is about the righteousness of Swartz and the big mean bullies who made him kill himself. Very few place any culpability or responsibility on him. He's getting a treatment normally reserved for victims of aberrant crimes, what with the law getting his name on it and everything.

Talking about Aaron Swartz and how and why he died is fine. Doing it sanctimoniously and refusing to recognize any personal responsibility Swartz may rightly hold, which is the vibe of most articles I've seen, is effectively idolizing Swartz as a martyr, and that kind of religious exercise isn't productive for this case imo. It communicates to others that if they have a minor platform and are well-liked, they can be martyred too.

Also, I don't seriously expect people to stop writing about it because of this. Just a thing that's been bothering me, and thought it may provoke some interesting discussion.

It's human nature. People have done this for millennia and I think that they always will. That's why I don't get upset about it. I don't expect anything different from human beings. This is the way we act in aggregate.

Fight the battles you can win.

It's absurd. People are fetishizing someone who did nothing but kill himself. People need to get over his needless sacrifice and realize that the "onerous plea bargain" was merely six months in prison.

Or were we supposed to engage in a witchhunt against some prosecutor? I forget what we're supposed to do for "justice".

Why do you say he did nothing but kill himself?

He did a lot more than just that.

And does anyone think he killed himself because of facing 6 months of jail time?

Being branded a felon isn't a minor slap on the wrist in the US. It's a big deal.

As I understand it, being branded a felon in the U.S is a big deal... you essentially lose a bunch of 'rights' that you have as a citizen. This dominos on to making it harder to find jobs, places to live, loans... etc.

You could argue someone with Swartz status in the community would alleviate some of those things... but I'm not sure how far that goes.

One of the founders of YCombinator was convicted of a felony under the CFAA. In addition to having made enough money with pg to do that sort of thing, he's also an (excellent) professor at MIT.

A felony conviction sucks, but it's not a huge price to pay if you're serious about changing the world (or think you'll probably lose at trial).

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