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Aaron Swartz Rememberance Day This Monday
805 points by mofosyne on Nov 8, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 192 comments
For the general public he was seen as just another hacktivist along with various hacktivist groups that were active around the time like lulzsec and anonymous. But for the wider internet community, he represents something much much more, especially post 2020 where we are all questioning many aspect of governance that we take for granted as the normal state of the world.

In November the eight of 1986 Aaron Swartz was born. While his early childhood was like any other kid, he showed early spark of someone who would be very consequential to internet culture.

One of his first website to be recognized by the public is "The Info Network" a user generated encyclopedia, created at the age of 12 years old which won the ArsDigita Prize.

But later on he was accepted into Y Combinator's founder program on a startup called infogami. While infogami failed to get further funding, his contribution to the wider Y Combinator, got him in touch with another fellow co-founder to work together on this small but potentially important firm known as Reddit.

If you are from Reddit or Hackernews, you will be very familiar with how the next few years will go for Arron as well and so no further introduction will be needed. (But you can follow further in his wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz)

However what will be consequential to the wider public is his work as an tech activist fighting for the same rights and values that digital natives in the wider internet culture would fight for. Especially in the realms of copyright laws and the wider debate on digital access and freedom.

This includes writing Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, as well as filing a FOIA request to find out how Chelsea Mannings was treated after she was detained for her alleged role in the WikiLeaks leaks. In addition to to leaking PACER digital court records to improve public access, which had him investigated by the FBI for potential copyright infringements. And most importantly to rally the internet against Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

However it was tragically his efforts to push for open access to academic journals (much of which was publicly funded research) that may have costed him his life at 2008-12-13.

Eight years later, as we emerge from the global pandemic, it is about time we celebrate his life and reflect on his his short time with us. As well as reflecting on how his actions had inspired countless digital natives current and in the future to continuously push and fight for the right for information to be free and transparent.




It doesn't as get much attention, but Aaron was working a lot on a lot of pro-democracy anti-corruption money-out-of-politics activism in his latter years, founding "Change Congress" with Lessig, which later became "Rootstrikers", an organization focused on eradicating dark money in politics.

Aaron Swartz was also a Progressive (having co-founded "Demand Progress") and a Keynesian (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/keynes) who believed in taxing the rich in the service of a functioning economy, I wonder what he would have thought about all the bullshit coming from Paul Graham these days in his vitriolic defense of the status quo. He couldn't be very happy to hear Graham saying we don't need to tax and spend on infrastructure to get us out of the climate mess.


Just to clarify, Keynesianism isn’t particularly about who you tax but when tax and spending should occur.

The idea is to be countercyclical. Cut spending and increase taxes during a boom, cut taxes and increase spending during a bust. Keeps inflation during boom and deflation during a bust from being too high. The idea is to keep the boom from burning itself out (prevent leading to a crash) and to shorten the depth and duration of a bust (and eliminate them if possible).

Keynes did point out that poor people are more likely to spend money they receive than the rich, so if you’re trying to get out of a demand-caused bust, dollar per dollar, redistributing to the poor is more effective. During a bust, the rich especially have a liquidity preference so they’ll hoard cash instead of spending it.


Somehow Keynes is very popular during the bust and somehow falls out of favor in the subsequent boom.


Since then we've learned two things.

The first is that inflation isn't the demon it was historically made out to be. Hyperinflation is bad, but some stable and predictable <10% annual rate of inflation mainly hurts people hoarding cash, which is a dumb thing to do in general. But if you have a moderate rate of inflation and just stop accumulating new debt during a boom, the old debt gets devalued over time, and then it's always "better" to only pay the interest now and pay the principal tomorrow (i.e. never).

The second, specific to the US at this particular point in history, is that the dollar is such a strong reserve currency that the government can create trillions of dollars out of nothing and still not get hyperinflation. The risk of this is that you go too far and people stop using it as the reserve currency, but apparently that risk isn't worth the trillions of dollars in "free money" you get by discounting it.


> the government can create trillions of dollars out of nothing and still not get hyperinflation. The risk of this is that you go too far and people stop using it as the reserve currency

If the other big central banks around the world print money at similar rates, the US dollar will remain the reserve currency. The pandemic was global.

If the US were to enter a recession alone (which would be strange), and then chose to print lots of money, that's when its reserve currency status might be threatened.


Prosperity is generated by production not consumption. And who's most likely to invest in improving productivity?

I don't worry about stimulating demand when bubbles collapse. The viable parts of the economy get to pay lower prices for everything. That stimulates ORGANIC recovery and growth and avoids re-inflating the bubble in the fake parts of the economy that will only re-collapse again.

Delaying the collapse of unsustainable pricing and investment in non-viable sectors only makes their collapse bigger and more wasteful.


> Prosperity is generated by production not consumption.

Ya sure? So, if the economy produces oodles of luxury goods, but nobody gets to live in luxury by using them, because they're all put in storage -- "it's all about production, not consumption, dontchaknow?" ... How does this production lead to prosperity?

Production and consumption go hand in hand.


Aaron was working a lot on a lot of pro-democracy anti-corruption money-out-of-politics activism in his latter years

No wonder the government was going so hard after him...


Unsurprisingly Aaron wrote about capitalism often, sometimes negatively (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001638), sometimes ambivalently (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001680), and sometimes positively (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001679, which describes some of his experiences with Y Combinator when the "summer founders program" was just getting started). He described people who called him anti-capitalist as "especially funny" (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001107).

It's an insult to the man to assert that he would have taken a position without thinking about its consequences, which is what you are doing when you say, "He couldn't be very happy to hear Graham saying we don't need to tax and spend on infrastructure to get us out of the climate mess."


> all the bullshit coming from Paul Graham these days in his vitriolic defense of the status quo.

Do you have a link to some examples of that? I don't remember pg being remotely vitriolic about anything in his recent writing, but I haven't followed closely, am not on Twitter etc.


Could we get a reference for that attack on PG? Ideally with a direct quote as well, so that we know where exactly you’ve seen that behavior.


For anyone who hasn't seen it yet.

The Internet's Own Boy

https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaro...


Such a great documentary, also available on yt iirc.


It sure is - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ


One of my favorite documentaries that I watch at least once every couple years. Brings me to tears — every time.


You can also remember him for his work on Markdown, which he developed together with John Gruber (Daring Fireball):

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001189

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown


And RSS! Fortunately it's still going strong and making so much information, even in the form of podcasts, accessible to all.


For reference he was the 11th listed author among 12 for RSS version 1. I’m sure he has some contributions but he was not the main inventor of it.


And RSS 1.0 was a RDF-based reformulation of the XML-based RSS 0.91 from Scripting News/Dave Winer. That in turn was a fork of the XML-based RSS 0.91 from Netscape, which itself was a reformulation of the RDF-based RSS 0.9 from Netscape by Danny Libby and Ramanathan Guha.

• https://web.archive.org/web/20060417192840/http://diveintoma...

• https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/16/the-rise-and-demise-of-...


> If you are from Reddit or Hackernews, you will be very familiar with how the next few years will go for Arron

99.99% of people from Reddit will have never heard of Aaron (not 'Arron'). I think people mis-estimate what most people on that site are for - but it's not tech activism anymore, if it ever was, and they don't have any interest in who runs the site, much less who used to run the site.


He'd be disgusted at the censored echo chamber Reddit has become.


As a current target of malicious censorship and threats by the admins, I'd have to agree that anyone from the original team would be horrified by what's happening at Reddit right now. Being directly and abusively gaslit by a billion dollar company is a level of Twilight Zone that I'm honestly struggling to cope with.


> anyone from the original team would be horrified by what's happening at Reddit right now

Except for Huffman (spez) who still works there and doesn't seem to care whatsoever.


I think he might care and believes this is the best he can do from a business perspective. It is not easy to remain firm to not censor content when there are thousands of users asking you to do it. That they removed any mention of Swartz from the site was pretty low though. Wonder what their rationalizations were. That he did commit suicide? That he was adamant about free speech and against corporate censorship? Reddit seems to be a bit clumsy here.


It goes far beyond people asking them to do it. They are extremely proactive about their censorship, and most of the time they have zero justification for it.

For one example of many, they permanently banned an autistic live streamer for asking a question about how the Reddit Live algorithm works, claiming it was "harassment toward the admins." In reality, they've been brazenly and repeatedly lying to everyone about how the algorithm works for over a year, including selling ads based on grossly inflated viewership numbers -- and "grossly" is honestly a huge understatement. But folks who mention the algorithm in any negative context tend to get banned permanently, or at the very least censored from using certain words, such as algorithm, admin, mod and ban.

There is no conceivable way that spez is oblivious to all of this, so it's safe to assume that he put his stamp of approval on the behavior, either intentionally or by inaction.


When you're making as much as they're probably making, why rock the boat?


For some people, money doesn't trump morality.


Yep, but that's not spez.


Err care to explain how you can assert that?


I just read this again, and I understand what the person I responded to was saying. Yes, correct - Spez lets money trump morality.


because they aren't rocking the boat.


Worse than that there are a large number of people actively calling for the censorship.

Maybe I'm getting old but I don't understand this current generations fervor for censorship of things they disagree with. I've always slanted toward letting better speech battle "incorrect" assumptions. I don't see anything helpful about banning or censoring people and just see it leading to authoritarianism.


I think it’s important to parse what is being censored. Speech that incites violence against an individual or group should be censored in my opinion. Misinformation should also be closely watched as “a lie will travel half way around the world before the truth can put its shoes on.” I’m someone that considers themself to be against the concept of censorship but the realist in me recognizes that the ideas we had about censorship pre-internet may not apply to an age where it is the main source of information. I am honestly surprised to find that I feel this way but the last decade has shown us how the anonymity of the internet has been weaponized to influence the uninformed masses through propaganda and frankly, dark psychological strategy that hijacks our brains reward system.


Propaganda was just as bad before the internet existed except people had no idea it was propaganda because there wasn't an easily accessible open space that allowed them freedom of communication with alternative views and without censorship like the internet.

I trust no one to censor in a neutral way. It's inherently impossible.

>dark psychological strategy that hijacks our brains reward system.

This is fixed by personal responsibility and properly teaching children how to handle the information. It's really not that different than any other addictive tendency. The fix isn't just banning it.


Its pretty otherworldly, I was an active member of a top 25 sub. Although the sub is decidedly non-political, the mod recently decided to post a politic-specific sticky as first post.

I commented in that thread "this sub is probably not the place for these overtly political posts"...the mod responded to me by banning me for "advocating politics / agenda pushing"...its literally orwellian newspeak site.


He’d probably also have been equally disgusted at what “free speech” manifested as.


In 02006 Aaron described himself as "something of a free speech absolutist": http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/becausewecan

So I have my own justification for freedom of speech: because we can. Human freedom is important, so we should try to protect it from encroachment wherever possible. With most freedoms — freedom of motion, freedom of exchange, freedom of action — permitting them in full would cause some problems. People shouldn’t be free to walk into other people’s bedrooms, take all their stuff, and then punch the poor victims in the face. But hurling a bunch of epithets at the guy really isn’t so bad.

Freedom of speech is one place where we can draw the line and say: all of this is acceptable. There’s no further logic to it than that; freedom of speech is not an instrumental value. Like all freedom, it’s fundamental, and the only reason we happen to single it out is because it’s more reasonable than all of the others.

Close readers will note that this theory doesn’t quite live up to my own goals. By laying freedom of speech’s provision on top of our reasonable ability to do so, I suggest that freedom of speech could be taken away if providing it became unreasonable. But I think this is the right choice: if people really, seriously started getting hurt because of freedom of speech, it seems right for people to take the privilege away. But, to be honest, I can’t even imagine how that might be possible. Words just don’t genuinely wound, they’re always mediated by our listening.

I do worry that people might try to stretch this justification — say that continued free speech might destroy the war effort, or the government, or civil society. But I have no problem destroying all of those. It’s only the destruction of actual people that I worry about.


I've no doubt he was very much a hardliner in his day.

What I'm speculating about is what he would have thought today, after the last 10 years and the maturation of reddit, facebook and co. Provided he hadn't spent that entire time incarcerated of course!


I don't think you should be speculating that he would endorse the repulsive views he spent his life struggling against, any more than you should be hurling a bunch of epithets at me. Please stop.


Epithets? What epithets? We’re having a fairly civilised discussion here. I’m about his age, and believed many of the things that he believed and I’ve seen my attitudes soften somewhat over the last few years. If anything, it is you trying to diminish my experience with your high handed rhetoric.


I was quoting from the excerpt I quoted above, not saying you were hurling epithets. I think that what you're doing is equally offensive.

I don't think you believed the things he believed for the same reason he did, in part because the quality of this conversation is so spectacularly different from any conversation I ever had with him.


That’s just snobbery.


You chose to commemorate my dead friend's birthday by speculating that, if he were still alive, he would have come to agree with your own odious and repugnant views, views he spent his life fighting against, offering nothing in the way of evidence. I deplore your conduct, and I do not think he ever would have done something similar. Dismissing my criticism as "snobbery" is in keeping with the rest of your vile calumny, but it is not a valid argument.


As someone that once considered themself a hardliner as well, I have found that the last ten years have had the very effect you’re addressing. The truth is there’s a lot of nuance in this topic and it’s beginning to look like a hardline stance resulted in destroying people counter to what Aaron wanted.


He would. It is a consequence that you will also always defend unsavory speech. This hasn't changed through the ages and is often mentioned preemptively because the experience tells you how people will react. I think he would have been smarter than to jump on the bandwagon against hate speech though.

But that isn't what you mean anyway.


> This hasn't changed through the ages

Hasn't it? A few hundred years ago you were talking about the right to speak unsavorily without being put in jail or worse.

In the last hundred years we have developed pervasive media and communications, and these days the discussion is to what degree the unsavory should be given a platform, granted air-time, provided with targeted advertising ... and perhaps more importantly the right to tune it all out if you want.

In the days of Voltaire if you didn't like what somebody was saying you could just walk the other way. These days they follow you round YouTube.


More exactly we are not talking about giving it a platform. We are talking about removing hate from platforms and it is as ridiculous as it sounds.


What is "free speech" and how did it manifest?


I'm referring to the proliferation of hate groups, that flourished under the defense that they represented "free speech". I don't think it's quite what Swartz had in mind, though even if he felt it defensible at the time (as I would have) his feelings on the matter may have become more nuanced (as have mine) since then.


One of Aaron's reasons in 02012 for opposing the centralization of the web in services like Twitter (and, yes, Reddit) was precisely that people would get knocked offline with the excuse of "hate speech" http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/sfwants:

Imagine Tim had built the Web the same way folks built Twitter. All our web pages would be would be hosted by a single company, accessed through an API that they defined and could change at whim. Web applications would be far weaker than they are today (since it would be hard to store anything interesting on TimCo’s servers) and powerful corporations would constantly be knocking people offline permanently for various terms-of-service violations (no trademark infringement! no hate speech!).


This is an argument against centralisation, not against the bounds of free speech.


The premise of that argument against centralization is that silencing people for "hate speech" is a bad thing, rusk. If he'd thought it was good to silence people for "hate speech", or expected his readers to, then it would be an argument in favor of centralization, not against it.


My point Kragen was kind of the inverse of that. Not so much that the argument for censorship was strengthened but moreso what the human condition did with those provileges.


But the example given is quite literal. He described the inevitable development now being sold as "progress" or "maturity" when business takes a central position. This isn't rocket science.

It is an argument about who set the bound of acceptable speech if you are more precise.


Supporting freedom of speech means supporting people's freedom to say precisely those things you find most reprehensible. I think Aaron Swartz was principled enough to recognize that, so the allowance of any "hate groups" which might exist was, I hope, something he had in mind.

Freedom of speech is something that is good in and of itself. A situation in which the government ruled out some ideas from being discussed or developed is one I would find very unpleasant.


> A situation in which the government ruled out some ideas

and yet we have libel laws, anti hate speech provisions, corporate secrecy laws and so on and so forth all of which prohibit me from saying things just because I feel like it.

But I don't think that's even the discussion any more. The discussion is whether you should be obligated to provide these reprehensible views with a platform, and to what degree it should be possible for us to tune them out altogether, as a matter of personal preference.

Reddit made a choice, perhaps commercially driven to apply a certain modicum of taste and decency to their platform, to complaints from "free speech advocates". Just what these people stand for, and to what degree it should be defended, is different from what voltaire was talking about.


> and yet we have libel laws, anti hate speech provisions, corporate secrecy laws and so on and so forth all of which prohibit me from saying things just because I feel like it.

Not sure what you meant by this paragraph.

> But I don't think that's even the discussion any more. The discussion is whether you should be obligated to provide these reprehensible views with a platform, and to what degree it should be possible for us to tune them out altogether, as a matter of personal preference.

I think both discussions are extremely important at this point in time. Personally, I don't think companies should be obligated to provide a platform for people with all kinds of ideas, but I think that they should nonetheless do so (because I think freedom of speech is a good thing). I am in favour of freedom of speech on social media, but not in favour of this being mandated by law (because it isn't contradictory to freedom of speech to have some spaces in which freedom of speech is not allowed).

>Reddit made a choice, perhaps commercially driven to apply a certain modicum of taste and decency to their platform, to complaints from "free speech advocates". Just what these people stand for, and to what degree it should be defended, is different from what voltaire was talking about.

I'm not sure what Voltaire was talking about, because I have not read Voltaire. But if one believes that freedom of speech is valuable in and of itself, or that it is valuable because it leads to the discovery of great truths, then one ought to be in favour of freedom of speech on Reddit.


> I have not read Voltaire. But if one believes that freedom of speech is valuable

I find it very hard to believe you're not familiar with the famous Voltaire quote about free speech.

> it is valuable because it leads to the discovery of great truths

You might say this, but it doesn't make it universally true.


and yet we have libel laws, anti hate speech provisions,

You may not be aware of this, but in the US, "hate speech" is protected expression under the First Amendment to the Constitution.


The demand is that platform remove certain content and certain opinions. You are not allowed to have a wrong opinion on vaccinations currently for allegedly safety reasons. You have warped that claim, since you want to remove content. There are platforms where everything goes and they are under attack.


Mine have fortified because people declared reasonable statements as hate left and right. There really is no place for nuance and it doesn't net you anything. Places that forbid it aren't free from offense or conflict and are often quite fundamentalist. Hate speech rules simply do not work at all.


> I'm referring to the proliferation of hate groups, that flourished under the defense that they represented "free speech" I don't think it's quite what Swartz had in mind, though even if he felt it defensible at the time (as I would have) his feelings on the matter may have become more nuanced (as have mine) since then.

Setting aside the question of whether this has actually happened like you say it has, the much broader critique I'd offer is that nobody who was defending free speech from the left in the 1970s [0] would be surprised that hate groups are allowed to operate under the cover of those protections. It used to be taken as a given on the left that free speech is so important that it is worth defending the right to the worst kinds of speech.

I see this a lot, recently -- this sentiment that yeah free speech is important, but you have to consider that nobody expected it to be used like this -- and that's wrong. Your liberal predecessors did know that it would be used like this and they explicitly and clear-headedly defended it, anyway.

[0] The ACLU defended literal Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...


> whether this has actually happened like you say it has

This is a fairly contrarian line to take. How would you say that it hasn't?

> you have to consider that nobody expected it to be used like this

To me this seems a little bit of a naive take. Nobody is arguing that free speech should be curtailed - at least not in any legal sense. But as a principle it does compete against various other ones, such as decency and respect, not to mention security and business concerns.

It's the people arguing that free-speech as a right is absolute and overrides all else, and whatsmore outside of a purely legal setting (i.e. not just that the state can't prosecute you, but that it gives you the right to insult, and belittle people) that are missing the point.

Voltaire offered to defend the right of his opponents to express their thoughts, but did not volunteer to give them a platform, or even to listen.

> The ACLU defended literal Nazis

I don't see a conflict here. The state should be blind, after all it's important for democracy that Nazis and other dodgy straw men should see their side of the story aired, and thus buy in overall. It doesn't mean that society as a whole can't make judgements on the value of Nazism.


> This is a fairly contrarian line to take. How would you say that it hasn't?

When the KKK marched in Washington in 1925, there were 30k participants and more than 100k others showed up to watch.

What I'm arguing is that we are not in fact experiencing unprecedented times that call for new restrictions. The left lived through that and maintained their commitment to defending free speech.


> we are not in fact experiencing unprecedented times that call for new restrictions

I'm sorry, I think we might be talking cross purposes here ...

I was talking about Aaron Swartz specific advocacy around digital free speech, which reddit embodied spiritually up until rather recently. Some of the community activity went very far down the rabbit hole indeed. I was speculating if Aaron Swartz might have experienced some kind of dissonance at that, though public discourse being what it is he might not have been able to express that ... but alas he did not live to see his views challenged thus.

Of course there are historical parallels to this, across history and many other aspects of society. I don't see how the need to continue this discussion is any less relevant today than it was then though.


There are a couple of things feeding into this.

One is that everything is national or global now, so if there is one Nazi anywhere, everybody hears about it and misleads people into thinking there are more of them than there are. This also feeds into trolls pretending to be Nazis because they see what a rise it gets out of people, thereby causing people to overestimate their number even more.

The second is that there is always a boogeyman. In the early 20th century it was anarchists. Then communists had a good long run. It became terrorists after 9/11. Now it's racists.

You can tell when this is happening because the proposals are to censor/incarcerate/kill some vile subhuman Enemy who cannot be reasoned with, with isolated instances being exaggerated excessively. Whereas if there were actual Nazis as a meaningful political force you would see e.g. serious attempts to re-institute segregation or have to fight hard to prevent Nazis from censoring you.


Really doubt he would have argued in favor of corporate NDAs.


The joke here, is that it was is activism against corporate secrecy that got him into serious trouble and led probably to his eventual suicide.

What I mean is that everyday "free speech" in the legal sense is already curtailed (and accepted to be so) by various other concerns.


I was a free speech absolutist like you are describing until I realized that my belief was based on the fear of a “slippery slope” developing from limiting any kind of “hate speech.” I’m older now and I’ve recognized that a slippery slope argument is a weak minds way of coping with difficult ideas. It takes an approach that only considers one way travel when it comes to the destination or rather conclusion. There are too many possibilities to allow the the possibility of a “slippery slope” to guide our decisions. I have always viewed the ACLUs defense of nazis as being this kind of behavior as well, to prevent further erosions down the road that are being viewed as an inevitable conclusion to limiting speech to any degree.

I would say the other reason my views on freee speech have evolved because I now see “hate” as a virus of the mind and it is easily spread through the internet in the most deceitful and cunning ways, leading to destruction and violence toward the person or people it is directed at.


The issue is the sentiment that many free speech advocates are significantly less concerned where freedom of speech or expression at risk is being left wing.

When it is right wing suppressing speech or freedom, all is cool. When someone protests them, suddenly the protest itself is threat to free speech. The insuation is that free speech is less likely to be invoked to protect left or extreme left speech.


Do you think this hate groups just disappear when you censor them?

I think it's the opposite and you reinforce their behaviors and thinking.


I think that if you feed and water them they proliferate. You're going to have people with strongly held views, and theirs nothing you can do about that, but you can limit their ability to sway the weak minded however.


It's not just that. It's that hate and lies have the same weight as any other opinion.

Paradox of tolerance.


Please provide an example.

I find it more likely that most of what you're labeling as hate is just a difference in opinion.


I don't agree at all. I think you can see this is in action with the reaction to COVID in the last couple of years. They've censored anyone who questioned measures to the point where they created massive swaths of the public who don't even believe the disease is real and mistrust the vaccine.

Just because you're not seeing these people on your daily social media doesn't mean they're not gathering elsewhere. It's mostly likely a place that doesn't have any alternative views as well.

How do you explain large hate groups that existed long before the internet was invented? White supremacy is barely even a threat now, it's such a small minority of people compared to what it was in the past.


Mostly sea lions.


[flagged]


On the basis of what exactly?


On the basis of defending "hate speech", according to at least one organization he cofounded[0]:

>and in opposition to censorship and corporate control of government

I truly wonder what position he would have taken regarding covid/vaccine censorship. Or reddit's implicit authoritarian policy against criticism of LGB and especially T. He seems like an enough of an idealist to have been a free speech absolutist.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_Progress


As phrased your comment is implying that anyone who isn't a "free speech absolutist" isn't an idealist, which does not sound right to me, but I'll assume that was just an accidental byproduct of brevity.

That aside, the type of "censorship and corporate control of government" that was prevalent when Aaron Swartz found that organization had strong ties to the post-9/11 insanity that took over Western politics and media. It was a different situation than the ones that you are describing. I wouldn't make any assumptions about whether he would have judged them the same way.


It's no question he is against any kind of censorship.


He “was” against any kind of censorship. His principles forever frozen in time. I wonder had he lived would his position have softened in the interval. I think many of us have been on this journey.


He'd be Godly if he was still here, but there are others like young Aaron with us today. Let's take care of them.


And the fact they took him off the founder page.


Not only that, the hacker ethos has completely changed since the 2000s. Nowadays most people would defend the holders of intellectual property, where as before most hackers believed "information should be free" and "copying bytes is not stealing".


The hacker ethos didn't change. The software developer gold rush happened, bringing in an influx of people who are only coding for the big paycheck corporations provide, and that watered down who was considered a "hacker". There's no interest among them in exploring what one can do with computers, no interest in code elegance (the hallmark of the old-school hackers), and certainly no interest in any ethos other than "Greed is good".


This is 100% exactly what happened. Being a hacker was the un-sexy thing, done out of passion. Then people realized it paid a ton of money and now we have... whatever mess it is we have today.


It's the same thing as Eternal September, and complaining about cultural dilution by a mass of developer immigrants will do as much good.

What is productive is being a respectful evangelist for the ethos you want to inculcate in the next generation.

What's forgotten about enculturation of newcomers is that most of them have no strongly held beliefs about the new domain.

Which is an opportunity for education and pursuasion, with a little elbow grease and diplomatic effort.


It's very plain in the progression of BTC to me...

Invention: Fuck the gov't, have fun buying all the drugs on earth!

Mass-adoption: We can lock JPEGS in a box you have to pay to unlock!


>no interest in code elegance (the hallmark of the old-school hackers.

We know different old school hackers.


Right - just like the common attitude towards things like the FSF has changed, generally the hacker ethos' Overton Window has shifted. People don't value the same things anymore and you often see older people's incredulity at things like people using macOS and not really caring about whether it's open source or not.

Doesn't this happen in every movement? The movement shifts things far enough that people don't see the movement any more since they're more comfortable.


I dunno if that's the 'hacker' ethos or the 'Silicon Valley startup developer' ethos, basically saying companies should do whatever they want to make money but nobody should stand in the way of making that money.

I mean I'm generalizing as much as you are here; "most people" and "most hackers" are weasel words (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Weasel_word).


The golden age of hacker ethos is at whatever time one was teenager, assumed everybody shares his friends group opinions and discovered tech politics for the first time.


I was mainly the large influx of opportunists that called themselves hackers. Same with internet users in general that have overridden it by sheer numbers. Not that such a ethos was something that was ever absolute.


funny how we all changed our minds when our time and money was on the line


He might like r/antiwork, r/latestagedemocracy, & r/hermancainaward

Theres


I remember the Creative Commons launch party, and mistaking Aaron for someone attendee's kid - he would have been what, Jesus, sixteen or seventeen? At least until Larry Lessig introduced him. He was so wee, and so obviously brilliant.

I only ever met him in person once more, at CCC, but we were both working a little bit on an OLPC project. I had such respect for him.

Vaya con Dios, kid.


His birthday is November 8, 1986

Take the time to remember the kind of person he is.

Electron workshop is having a watch party for Americans today at Monday, November 8 at 1pm in Illionis, US.

https://venue.electronworkshop.com.au/b/dod-3rc-jhv-re0

For Aussies, the workshop is playing another session right now starting at 9pm Sydney time.


It’s also worth remembering that Aaron Swartz was driven to near bankruptcy and facing prison time over a victimless crime that in the greater scheme of things seems quite trivial.

The prosecutors, Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz, used their discretion to play hardball and this in no small part played a role in his decision to take his own life.

On the plus side, however, it appears their abuses of power more or less ended their careers. Heymann has not updated his LinkedIn in almost a decade and Ortiz’s ambitions to become governor of Massachusetts were squashed.


Naming the perpetrators, and continuing to name them, is important. It will never make things right, but it's critical to making the future righter.

Preventing crimes of a system require that system's individuals to set aside apathy and create ongoing consequences for perpetrators as an example to those who would do similarly.

Sometimes those consequences are just keeping a name and memory alive, and linking it with those at fault.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz#Prosecution_of_...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Heymann#Aaron_Swartz


There is a strong desire these days for prosecutors to punish "hackers", and this political pressure has intensified with the recent ransomware attacks. Politicians and prosecutors are frustrated that most the suspects are abroad so they crack down on any "hacker" they catch domestically with punitive zeal.

It is normal in highly technical cases for prosecutors to throw "experts" and jargon at the judge and jury - which without contravening testimony from a defense witness, it generally accepted.

This effectively turns the justice system on its head - placing the burden of proof and the heavy cost of defense on the accused.

Let me give some words that might help from cases I've worked on (not limited to hacking cases)...

Rule 1. Shut the F up. Transparency is not your friend. I have seen cases where sysadmins have told the truth about the tech, and then had charges of obstruction levied against them, because someone who had no knowledge of the tech in the accounting dept contradicted something they said. For example, provide exactly what's legally required by court order or your lawyer's advice - only in the exact time range requested and only the fields requested. Answer only the question you are asked, and as succinctly as possible. Make sure that any answers you give are either in writing or with the presence of a lawyer. I have also seen investigators claim someone provided contradictory information, just because the investigators themselves misunderstood the answer.

Rule 2. There are no "routine" investigations. Get a lawyer. Do not treat any interaction with authorities lightly. If they are talking to you or your company, they are not your friends. Make sure your lawyer pressures them to define and limit the scope and time period of any investigations to only exactly what's needed for whatever they're investigating. Do not assume that just because they're investigating one of your clients, that you have no legal liability.

Rule 3. Do not run a company like an infinite data retention store. Old files/records/databases/etc are a legal liability, because prosecutors can and WILL misrepresent data in court to try to pressure you. Hold data for legally required period, and then delete it permanently. Limit access within the company to only the data that people need to do their jobs. Transparency is not your friend.

Rule 4. Being innocent does not absolve you of legal liability. Being innocent does not keep you out of court. Disgruntled customers can make things up or misunderstand. Disgruntled employees can make stuff up or misunderstand facts. You competitors in the market can make things up or misunderstand. All of these people can and will testify against you in court, and prosecutors can and DO construct cases based on misinformation.

Rule 5. Do not engage criticisms on social media. You have a near-zero chance of convincing the mob of anything. Anything said publicly can and will be used against you in court. Also remember that legal liability extends to civil suits. Unhappy clients, employees, competitors, partners, will all use any information they can get to try to bias the court against you. I've seen cases where partners used social media content to claim grounds to break contracts without penalty.

In summary, as a company, STFU.


> may have costed him his life at 2008-12-13.

What does this line mean? Aaron took his own life several years later than that. That seems like a date copied from a Creative Commons event on his Wikipedia page and an odd error to make for someone following the story.


I have serious questionmarks with the OP; the post is badly written and it's a relatively low karma user.


And the following paragraph begins with "Eight years later, as we emerge from the global pandemic"

So definitely a copy-paste error on the date.


One of Aaron's contributions is not mentioned very frequently. He is also the co-founder of the site Demand Progress, created to fight for various progressive causes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_Progress


Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web, said that Aaron was a mentor to him. When I was doing a startup in 02000, we told him what we were doing; he replied by explaining all the problems we were going to run into in the next several months, and was mostly correct. He was 13.

I worked with him on another small project later, called Watchdog.net; whenever we disagreed, he changed his mind when I presented my arguments, except when I was wrong. I have never met anyone else of whom I could say that.

Aaron organized the successful effort to stop SOPA/PIPA, successfully provided public access to most of PACER at great risk to himself, founded Demand Progress, and made significant contributions to Markdown, RSS, Reddit (a company of which he was a founder), Creative Commons, Change Congress, and Wikipedia, all before committing suicide at 26 to escape legal persecution by the kind of people who use the word "hacker" to mean "computer criminal".

In this comment thread there are a few semiliterate baboons saying things like "I don't understand the cult of personality around Aaron". They should be permanently banned from HN.


It was a tragedy and good example of how the government will crush what it does not understand under a boot. Things haven't gotten better.


I guess this is his website?

http://www.aaronsw.com/

Interesting, that he introduced himself in the third person.

I wonder what made him take this approach?


I wouldn't over-analyze.

Third person intros are very common on personal websites, especially for folks who often give talks, invited lectures, or are written about in the press.

If your personal website starts with a short intro written in 3rd person then the person introducing your talk/lecture will, 9/10 times, simply read out your own description of yourself. Reporters will summarize the key points when introducing you in a story. Assuming the person speaking/writing about you is favorable or neutral, you control exactly how you're framed.

If you write the intro in first person or have an overly pithy description, then they'll sort of make their own intro which could go well or not so well ;-)


He also has his previous website, and his previous previous website (same url). Most of it is archived on way back machine, and there are many pages worth reading.


I have noticed that it is not unusual to do so on personal websites.


I dunno, it's not uncommon to do so on e.g. CVs.


His family/friends probably changed it.


You mean after his death? I don't think so. Waybackmachine shows it was like this in early 2012 already.


He did many great things, but to be honest I also think of him as an example of how activism can consume people and ruin their lives.


> I also think of him as an example of how activism can consume people and ruin their lives

The feds and those in power ruined his life. Our legal system ruined his life. Our society ruined his life.

This line of thinking is like "don't even attempt to change the status quo."


> This line of thinking is like "don't even attempt to change the status quo."

Well you can, but not on your own. There's a few people that try to shoulder the whole burden.


In most cases, people shouldn't die for causes (or if not die, devote most of their lives to them). Activism is also usually not the only way to change things.


I think I could’ve been friends with Aaron, he seemed like such a great person. That he took his own life says something about his attitude towards it and it resonates with me. It’s a choice and there may be reasons why you are willing to commit to it. Of course I wish he hadn’t but I respect it.


I don't think it's attitude or philosophy. His death cannot just be attributed to his character, it's a complex issue.

The prosecution put a huge toll on him and he talks in his blog about his problems with mood and ulcerative colitis and his emotional and sensory issues.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-d...


For sure it’s complex and there are branches of the multiverse where he was never confronted with that decision because he had no major crises. But in this universe he made that decision consciously and ultimately voluntarily.


The day hope for justice died. Yes I remember.


But there wasn't an actual verdict, or was there?


No, Aaron never gave the justice system a chance to work.

In more serious cases involving crimes against the state, hopeful, merciful outcomes have been found, as in the Chelsea Manning case: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning

I don’t think we should be glorifying a person who took his own life before facing justice.


>No, Aaron never gave the justice system a chance to work.

I'd say his case was proof that the system didn't work. JSTOR dropped charges and urged for others to do the same yet that didn't go anywhere. It involve a credible threat of potentially up to $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison and restitution. A threat that would push anyone to to take the plea deal in the process avoiding reaching for actual justice. (And even that plea deal was ridiculous)

If that's how it's supposed to work then it's fucked.

>as in the Chelsea Manning case

Someone exposing crimes for moral reasons "only" sentenced to 35 years of maximum security. Was this attended as some misplaced sarcasm?


On the contrary, the justice system was working against him for the entire two years between his arrest and suicide. Additional indictments, plea deals, counter-offers, threats, etc. Two years of a person's life before they even get to trial! That's the American "justice" system.

In fact, in the federal justice system, only 2% of defendants end up going to trial -- most end up accepting a plea deal (and we can guess how much bullying and threatening go into that). By analogy to your argument, 98% of defendants never "face justice". Or maybe better put, they never receive justice.

A source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f...


For historical value, the effort to remove Aaron as Reddit co-founder by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman.

paulgraham 40 points 14 years ago

Aaron's not wrong to call himself one of the founders. The company behind Reddit was a merger of two startups, one that made Reddit and one that made Infogami, and in that situation the founders of both startups are considered founders of the combined company.

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_co...

previously:

2006 - https://web.archive.org/web/20070823200504/http://startupsto...

2007 - https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_co...

2007 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219

2010 - https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/d2njs/til_th...

2011 - https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/reddit-co-founder-...

2011 - https://archive.md/IRuu8

2020 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24677419

2020 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24713422

2021 - https://www.redditinc.com/#section-4


I clicked through your links and the explanations Paul, Alexis, Steve, and even Aaron himself write are pretty consistent.

This comment is very unfair


> 2020 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24677419

> ...

> 2020 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24677419

Did you link the same discussion twice on purpose?


Thanks for catching that, it was probably something different but I’ve deleted it now and added another discussion from 2007 where pg also commented, there’s a lot more discussions, these are just a sample.


also https://hn-saga.com/?q=aaron for past number one posts about Aaron


I put Aaron Swartz at par with Alexandra Elbakyan. I wish I could financially support Ms Elbakyan's efforts but I am not so good at cryptocurrencies.


Bitcoin is practically a consumer technology with youtube channels, tens of mobile apps and even bitcoin exchange machines in tech hubs. This is just a lazy excuse in 2021.


I know 12 year old fortnite kiddos that have purchased Bitcoin. It’s not really something to be “good with” anymore - if you want to support Alexandra, put your money where your mouth is :)


Aaron Swartz deserves a statue for future generations to know what he stood for and how he was martyred by the US government.


I once commented "The world would be a better place with Aaron Swartz in it" on Reddit and got downvoted. That's the sad world we live in.


His efforts and crusade went unnoticed for years and after his tragic death due to years of harassment and mental torture by lawyers and police, nothing changed.

The world and internet specially is cruel phony place which hardly remembers anything good, dismisses worthwhile endeavors while engaging in irrelevant culture wars.

Yes what Aaron did was illegal but the whole point of his crusade was that how unjust and inaccessible scientific research was to average person.

Neither the morally bankrupt left nor the completely inept libertarians took up his cause after his death.

His death will forever be in vain. It is a reminder for everyone to only take up “fashionable causes” which aren’t that important and only important for political mud slinging.

It is a reminder for all young people and me, don’t take up worthy causes, don’t try to change the world for better, they will kill you and make you irrelevant forever.

Just look after yourself like everyone does!


His death to this day frustrates me.

The world needs Aaron Swartz now more than ever.


They showed us that they have no qualms about murdering us when we speak up for what we belive is right.

If there is anywhere that we can go from here, it is not to be done as a united civilization.


Hopefully it is remembered that MIT had everything to do with it and people should go to other schools and stop supporting the corporate fascists at mit.


Where?

Is MIT truly beyond saving?


Is it worth saving? I don't think so. It's deep in with the war machine, it's deep in the student loan machine. It didn't relent after a human took his own life to protest their evil deeds, they still keep information under lock and key because they know it will set us free. You can't sell keys to the cuffs of ignorance if the cuffs come off for free brohizzle. Go elsewhere, start something new, with more awareness and responsibility.


Thread discussing the Aaron/reddit story etc in great detail, with a lot of comments from Aaron, gives a good taste of what he was like.

https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_co...


"They were singing, bye-bye, Miss American Pie.."

[edited]

I can remember the day, reading about Aaron's death. And the following days, reading up about his life. The investigation by MIT to see if they played any role in it. Led by Hal Abelson. Above song was playing whilst I read this submission, so I posted it because it felt appropriate. But I should have added some context..


Change title to "Today" or "November 8th" instead of "this monday" so people know before even reading


Here's a list of number one posts about Aaron in the past for those interested:

https://hn-saga.com/?q=aaron


Does anyone know when/how were the users of Infogami got merged with the Reddit ones? I barely remember a thing about Infogami but my user from there exists at Reddit.


i think the appropriate way to 'celebrate his life' is to actually push to achieve what he was trying to achieve -- namely, establishing free access to academic journals.


> costed him his life at 2008-12-13.

It's Jan 11, 2013.


I feel like remembering him is not enough.


I don’t understand the cult of personality around Aaron. It’s like a self insert for people that fantasize about sticking it to the man or something; the tragic hero, the genius boy who died not realizing his potential, the man who dared to defy the authorities. Yawn.

Fact is Aaron was an angsty teen with an axe to grind with the authorities . Reading Chomsky certainly didn’t help. Acting out childishly by spreading copy righted material, getting caught and whining about how all of this is so unfair…

Look, he was no genius. Genius does not invent reddit; it invents facebook and then proceeds to take over the world because actual, real, genius understands the rules of the game.

Aaron was smart enough to understand just how fucked things are but oh so very dumb to act out on his aggressive impulses. The very same impulses that later lead him to kill himself.

Ironically his suicide accomplished far more than his technical know how could ever hope to achieve.

p.s. aaron was no hero. You dont ever want to be him and you certainly dont want your children to be him. His ideals were pure and correct, but he could not accept we’re living in a world filled with trash humans. Should’ve played the game correctly imho.


Cult of personality? Are we living on the same planet? As far as I know people talk about him a couple of time a year. No statue, no memorial.

Yeah people erase his flaws a bit, yes it's a bit annoying, but he actually tried to do something positive in his life instead of trying to get rich at any costs like that "genius" of Zuckerberg (genius for what?).

So people remember him, I doubt most people will care when Zuckerberg will die, he just didn't do anything to deserve it, your money doesn't make you a good person.


Zuckerberg will be remembered in the annals of history. Swartz won't even be in a footnote.

One of the things about having ridiculous amounts of wealth is that it affords you to make a ridiculous number of bets. You only have to hit on a few to be remembered as a genius.

Just ask Tommy Edison.


Not sure whether this is your intention, but your comment comes across as lacking some empathy. Had he been convicted, he would face 1 Million USD in fines as well as 35 years in prison. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be under such pressure. Please do not make light of the complex motives that drive people to suicide.

(and if someone is reading this who is mentally in a bad place right now, please seek out some help: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/)


My recollection/understanding is that the authorities/court system locked up his bank account, he was legally not allowed to say that while trying to crowd source funds to help pay his attorney and cope in the midst of the case so people jumped to the wrong conclusion and lambasted him rather than support him and his suicide followed shortly on the heels of that (like within a day or two, iirc).

He was painted into a corner with seemingly no way out.

People who are suicidal frequently have intractable problems and are frequently treated like they are merely crazy. The best way to help people who are suicidal is to not be dismissive of their very real problems and, of possible, actually be helpful. But as a baseline, don't act like it's all in their head. That actively makes it harder to solve intractable personal problems.


> Had he been convicted, he would face 1 Million USD in fines as well as 35 years in prison.

That's a common misconception, largely due to the ridiculous way the DoJ writes its press releases.

Each Federal crime carries a range of possible prison time. What you actually get depends on a large number of factors, such as how much damage you caused, whether or not your crime was a drug crime, past criminal history, and many others.

When the DoJ writes press releases they just add up for each charge the maximum that it is theoretically possible for someone to get from the crime if they hit all the factors that push for longer sentences and none of the factors that push for shorter sentences.

So when they arrest you for crime X and write their press release, they don't actually tell what you, the first time offender who committed a mild instance of the crime with no aggravating factors and several mitigating factors is facing. No. They tell what the Voldemort or Moriarty or Hitler of whatever activity you were doing would face for crime X.

It is even worse, because they actually even exaggerate what Voldemort or Moriarty or Hitler would actually face, too! If a person is charged with multiple crimes from the same underlying act, say crimes X, Y, and Z, and is convicted of all of them the crimes are grouped together into one for sentencing, with the sentence for the group being the sentence you would have received for whichever for X, Y, or Z you would have gotten the longest sentence for if that was the only one you were convicted on.

Here's a good article on this in general: "Crime: Whale Sushi. Sentence: ELEVENTY MILLION YEARS." [1]

Here's a couple articles specifically on the Swartz charging.

This one covers the charges themselves: "The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz (Part 1: The Law)" [2]

This one covers the prosecution, including a look at probably sentencing: "The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz (Part 2: Prosecutorial Discretion)" [3]

[1] https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...

[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/

[3] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...


We get that the justice system threatens people larger penalties to see what charges they can get to stick, but they also use it to force a plea bargain. In Aaron's case, the prosecutors were adamant that Aaron should get at least 6 months of prison, and would not offer any plea bargain that did not include this half a year of jail time (Ortiz wanted to make an example out of him). The fact that the prosecution was seeking jail time at all is utterly insane. This is why Aaron chose to fight.


Aaron didn’t choose to fight. He chose to kill himself. Which turned him into an unreasonably glorified martyr whose case people still talk about to (and on) this day.


You couldn't be more wrong. The plea bargain was offered early in the case, Aaron thought he could fight it, but the case went on too long, and he ran out of money to fight it. Only after he had absolutely nothing left for the fight did he take his own life.


Why do you think he and his causes are unreasonably glorified?


Thanks for the clarification; these are the comments I go to HN for.


Wow this is some harsh criticism.

I'd be curious to know why he deserves to be attacked for his technical know-how. Also I am curious to know why you think committing a crime out of conviction is inherently immoral. If we equate laws with morals we will never improve our ethical understanding of the world.

It is exactly the people willing to commit crime with the goal of improving our moral compass that should be celebrated as heroes.

If we would all "play ball" then we would be stuck without voting rights in a feudal system of kings and peasants.

Finally, if genius invents Facebook let's pray we ran out of geniuses.


Maybe not a genius, but definitely a hero.

Following your logic, then the real heroes are actually the cowards?


A hero in the same sense that Che Guevara or even Pablo Escobar are considered heroes by some people.


So a hero in the dictionary sense of the word? In the sense of the commonly agreed upon definition?


The fact that you don't agree with a person's cause does not preclude them from being heroic. Pablo Escobar was a drug kingpin, but Che Guevera at least thought he was fighting for his people.


I don't like how people downvoted this comment without even saying why.

The wording may be harsh (not what I think, just attempting to guess) but I believe there is truth in it; although the idea of allowing free access to academic journals is laudable, the way he went about it was naive/wrong in my opinion and impulsive as you say.


Because it's disrespectful, and dismissive of the effort Aaron made to make our world a better place. It's also overly pessimistic, sure there's trash people on the planet and they're often in positions of power. But they are not a majority and it is possible to genuinely affect change through activism and drawing attention to causes, no how matter how childish or petty the activism might seem.

Finally and most importantly on this site specifically it should be down voted because it is flagrantly anti intellectual to resign to the status quo and to tell people to not be disruptive and to basically "play the game" and go work for Facebook or whatever.

What's a person who has those views even doing on this site? Just go outside and play golf with the governor of Missouri or whatever.


I don't know which way the OP intended the "play the game" sentence, but I didn't take it to mean go work for Facebook or whatever; instead I took it as don't be naive in thinking you can fight against injustices in the system like so, because it will land you in prison (or worse); instead maybe find alternative ways that let you accomplish the same end goal, even if you have to accept progress cannot be achieved as quickly as the direct unsafe approach.


Do you have better suggestions how to allow such access? As far as I know, Sci-Hub is the current leader in this field, with methods not that different from Aaron's. The official methods to achieve this proceed at snail's pace and one doubts if they would move anywhere without the pressure caused by the activism.


No I don't have any suggestions myself but as you point out there are already other alternatives, and I believe none are as blatantly obvious as when Aaron downloaded hundreds of documents per minute:

SciHub itself may be similar but there are some important differences, e.g., the creator is not a citizen or resident of the US where this would be prosecuted (I think she lives in Russia, which only "recently" ruled to block the site, but I'm unsure she'd face any criminal charges) and the way they source the paywalled articles/journals is less easy for the authorities to circumvent.

In addition, (some) universities and other institutions are slowly moving towards open access journals and other measures; not at an ideal pace, I agree, but certainly done on a better foundation to ensure publishers don't just bury people with lawsuits and so on.


I agree with you that the SciHub's difference to Aaron is the different legal environment. But I think this is not a good explanation why SciHub might be morally better. Indeed protesting unjust laws could be considered moral good, whereas operating from Russia is merely a legal hack, if useful one.

The open access movement is precisely what I meant with the snail pace activity. I'm doubtful it would happen in even present degree without the activism.


Comment is flagged now. Bizarre.


Agree completely. By all accounts he was a bright guy, bu he did something very foolish. He did a crime and rather than play ball he martyred himself. Yes there probably was prosecutorial overreach and yes our criminal justice system could use reform. But this guy was no saint in the matter and could have easily got off with a minor sentence.


So you think Rosa Parks was also a criminal for having the foolishness to refuse to give up her seat for a white?

Breaking immoral laws is a sign of being a hero, not a criminal. Unfortunately the monied interests were more powerful than a brilliant kid, so we have to live in a world without Aaron Swartz but with rich idiots in charge of scientific publishing.


> rich idiots in charge of scientific publishing.

You know who’s to blame for scientific publishing? Fucking academia. The web was built to allow research papers to be shared. Seriously - it’s fucking purpose built for that very task.

There are no resources involved in scientific publishing besides the time of the authors and reviewers, none of whom are employed by the publishers.

So why do we have any academic publishers at all, over 30 years after the web was invented? Surely we could have solved the problems with organizing peer review, etc by now. The answer is: academia wants it to be this way. Researchers want to publish in prestige journals. The cred from prestige journals is integral to the academic career path in enough disciplines that the system is allowed to self perpetuate.


They still have the currency of being established journals. That is waning these days but I think it will take a long time.

Politics also has an interest in protecting such established venues the same way as it works for the press.


The cred isn’t to stroke a researcher’s ego, it’s because the alternative is to not get to do any research. Or to not have access to research institutes. Or to not eat. Privileged researchers in areas that aren’t as affected by this problem (eg. compsci) can afford to publish on Arxiv, but others aren’t so fortunate.

Publish(-in-prestiguous-journals)-or-perish is real, and the for-profit journal system is a parasite profiting from it. Ultimately the fundamental cause of this is the application of capitalist and for-profit systems to scientific research - but good luck speaking out against that.


What is the alternative to prestigious journals? Each scientist should read all of the papers published in their field every day?

The work of curating a journal for various metrics (subject matter, standards of peer review, impact etc.) is crucial to the everyday working of science. This doesn't mean that a few for profit corporations should get to extract profit from it, but it also doesn't mean that academia should give up the whole idea and just read all of scihub or arxiv to make up their own minds.


> Ultimately the fundamental cause of this is the application of capitalist and for-profit systems to scientific research

This is an unsupported declarative statement, and I view the evidence as pointing in the opposite direction. For-profit publishers are filling a “need” that is entirely due to the culture and economics of academia.

A good portion of the economics has nothing whatsoever to do with private enterprise, and instead involves academic career paths and grant applications, often to non-profit or government grantors.

Imagine that all of academia elects, tomorrow, to jettison for-profit publishers and self-organize around open access. Would that change the fundamental economics in a meaningful way? The money to pay researchers is not coming from publishers.


> For-profit publishers are filling a “need” that is entirely due to the culture and economics of academia.

They are filling a need they created and maintain themselves. Publishers with extremely deep pockets bought out prestigious non-profit journals [1], turning an inelastic market (originating from the value of peer-reviewed journals in a pre-Internet era) into an oligopoly that continued to raise prices as much as possible. No extra need was filled by the takeover, no value was provided, only more profit was extracted because it was economically possible. Now, this profit is used to fund the continued existence of this need, by lobbying against any effort to remove this need. It makes perfect sense economically, but is plainly detrimental to society and is at a stage that makes any gradual change very difficult.

> Imagine that all of academia elects, tomorrow, to jettison for-profit publishers and self-organize around open access.

This sort of thought experiment is meaningless as any kind of proof because it doesn't consider the complexity of the human element. Academic researchers aren't perfectly rational units independent from any other system, like the simple fact of having to pay rent to live and that rent being available from this month's paycheck, and that paycheck being dependent on continued employment whose loss would likely take months to resolve. You're only demonstrating that if we lived in some abstract, perfect world, some problems would solve themselves. But in that same abstract, perfect world that problem likely wouldn't even manifest in the first place. So what are you really proving?

[1] - https://phys.org/news/2015-06-companies-academic-publishing....


Rosa Parks committed a crime. Yes, the law was immoral and wrong, but it was a law. Rosa Parks is considered a hero because she stood up against an unjust law KNOWING that she was going to be prosecuted for her actions.

Aaron Swartz committed a crime. Yes, the law was immoral and wrong, but it was a law. Swartz believed that his internet status and his MIT association would shield him from the consequences of his action, and he killed himself when he realized he was going to be treated like a nobody and subjected to the same sorts of prosecutorial pressure that affects thousands of Americans every day.

He was no hero, and it's frankly ridiculous and demeaning to the memory of Rosa Parks and what she went through to use her life story to prop him up. The US Civil Rights movement is one where people took actions that they KNEW were illegal partly because they knew how bad the optics would be. Famous Civl Rights leaders used the after-release press conferences as pulpits to preach their sermons of racial equality.


You’re seriously comparing Aaron Swartz to Rosa Parks?

Mental illness needs to be destigmatized, and access to treatment is imperative. Aaron’s death was a tragedy, and the government was engaged in serious prosecutorial overreach.

But, Rosa Parks? Seriously now? Aaron was engaged in a puerile “hack” that spun out of control when the school and feds got involved.

The hagiography around this poor guy is nauseating sometimes.


Rosa Parks was involved with stubbornly giving up her seat in the front of the colored section for a white woman, which "spun out of control when the feds got involved" but like Swartz she pushed her way through the Justice system to challenge unfair laws. Segregation was obviously more disgusting, but I don't like the idea that activists of the past are incomparable saintlike figures, especially when they were extremely contentious for their time. I'm sure plenty of people said that Parks was being "puerile" at the time and should have just given up her seat instead of making it an issue, but sometimes making something an issue is the only way to create an opportunity for progress.


I cried when he died. He chose the path less travelled by, and that made all the difference.


*Remembrance


Julian Assange and Edward Snowden are at least still alive despite the all the moves done by autocrats like Obama/Trump/Biden. Aaron unfortunately is not around us still.

Let's remember how heavy handed the autocratic Obama administration was:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/01/08...


Can anyone get an archive.is link for this?


Here https://archive.ph/htHfA


> Can anyone get an archive.is link for this?

FYI that's just the link:

  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/01/08/in-a-long-delayed-petition-response-obama-refuses-to-fire-u-s-attorneys-over-aaron-swartz/
Plus archive.is prefix:

  https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/01/08/in-a-long-delayed-petition-response-obama-refuses-to-fire-u-s-attorneys-over-aaron-swartz/
Which is a page: https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-s...

With link to article: https://archive.md/htHfA


Check out the Bypass Paywalls plugin for chrome/firefox. Its a lifesaver:

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma...


Aaron seemed like the was dealing with a Huge amount of stress caused by his school, and the Fed, by himself basically.

He needed more support. More than we gave him.

It makes a huge difference when going through legal troubles if you have the right people around you, and I'm not taking just lawyers.


He'd be horrified at what Reddit has become.




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