Until last week, when I watched the film "The Internet's Own
Boy," a film cataloguing Swartz' massive technological and political
contributions to the world today, I knew nothing about Swartz's widely
forgotten life-story.
But Swartz's story and message are something we all should know.
Swartz grew up in Hyde Park, Illinois (our very own Chicago boy!).
Starting at a young age, he was a gifted programmer. At age fourteen, he helped
develop the RSS software which allows internet users to compile web-page
summaries for easier and quicker reading. By fifteen, he had contributed to the
code for the Creative Commons which offers a less stringent alternative to
standard copyright licenses. Graduating from high-school early, at nineteen, he
worked on the development of Reddit and enrolled at Stanford for a year before
being recruited by a major Silicon valley tech corporation, Wired. He worked
there for a short time, already a millionaire in his early 20s, but he found
the corporate world stifling despite its material benefits, and he quickly got
himself fired from his Silicon Valley job by not showing up to work for weeks
at a time.
Seeking a new challenge, Swartz entered the world of politics. Swartz
had begun questioning the existing power-structures, their inefficiencies and
corruption, from a very young age, and now that he had the technical know-how
and the resume to effect change, he threw himself into campaigns for freer
access to information.
Among other things, Swartz wanted to make the fruits of academic
research available to the masses, instead of locked-away in expensive databases
where only subscribing individuals could read and benefit from them. He wrote
about his beliefs with other like-minded individuals in the Guerilla Open
Access Manifesto
Swartz decided to target a major Academic Journal provider, JSTOR,
by piggy-backing on MIT's subscription to the service to download a massive
numbers of articles from the database onto external hard-drives. No one is
certain what he intended to do with the articles he downloaded. Even still, it
was at this point that Swartz began to face legal push-back for his egalitarian
mindset.
For breaking into JSTOR’s database, Swartz faced 13 felony
counts. This legal pressure ultimately broke him, but not before he
successfully organized a social and political movement stopping SOPA (Stop Online
Piracy Act) from passing in 2011, which would have allowed the government to immediately
shut-down any website that posted any copyrighted material without adequate
permission, whether it was intentional or not.
Swartz hanged himself in 2013 at the age of 26, before he ever went
to trial for the JSTOR breach.
In accounts of Swartz and his life, we not only glimpse into
Swartz' incredible contributions to the tech world, and creative use of
programming to combat inequality, but we see into his personality, his
motivation, the personal qualities that allowed him to achieve what he did, as
well as the Achilles' heels he suffered that lead to his demise. In his story,
we hear echo many of the characteristics of creatives we have been learning
about this semester.
Swartz’ personality was complex to say the least. His girlfriend
Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman describes his neurotic fear of being talked about.
Friends and family reflect how seemingly normal his behavior was prior to
killing himself. His father remembers: “There were times when Aaron would-
where he would, all of a sudden, not be himself, for a short period of time.”
His motivation, too, was intrinsic as much as extrinsic. Not
interested in money, his motivations were humanitarian and far-reaching.
And collaboration, in the broadest sense, in the open-source world
of the internet was his passion and what he fought for his whole life.
Aaron wielded his technical genius in creative and
impactful ways that have forever shaped our experience of the internet. In light of the current threats to internet equality that the
net-neutrality proposal brings, we should all look to courageous and creative figures
like Swartz to find new and equally creative ways to fight back.
https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt
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