Remembering Aaron
Written by Demand Progress co-founder David Segal.
January 11th marked the seventh anniversary of the passing of our co-founder, Aaron Swartz, and it has become our tradition to use this date as an opportunity to remember him and to take some time to reflect on the work that we carry forward, in some substantial part in his name.
As many of you know, Aaron took his own life seven years ago — while suffering under the obscene threat of more than 50 years in prison for allegedly using MIT’s open campus internet network to download too many academic articles from the cataloging service JSTOR, to which he had legitimate access. The pressure of this circumstance, contrived by glory-hungry prosecutors, was too much for him — at the age of 26 — to bear.
Here is a collection of tributes to Aaron from the days following his passing.
Here is an obituary of Aaron written at the time by Glenn Greenwald.
We hope Aaron would be proud of the work that he helped spur at Demand Progress, just a small corner of his expansive legacy, but through which he has touched the lives of millions.
As I consider the impact he has had on me, so many members of my community, and people across the world, it is extraordinary to realize that Aaron has now been gone for substantially longer than I knew him. We hope that he would be proud of the work that he helped spur at Demand Progress, just a small corner of his expansive legacy, but through which he has touched the lives of dozens of staffers, millions of activists alongside whom we have worked, and an untold number of people whose circumstances we hope that we have bettered through our advocacy for civil liberties, democracy, economic justice, and broader social justice.
I’ve noted over the years that while the public consciousness understands Aaron to have been foremost a technologist and internet freedom activist — and that these were important aspects of his legacy — he ought not be essentialized as such. Even in those seeming halcyon days of the internet of a decade or two ago — rife with naive boosterism of “disruption” and “innovation” — Aaron saw through thin conceptions of cyber-utopianism. He understood that securing the internet as a tool of liberation and for justice would require an unending fight against the impulses of both authoritarians in government and prospective corporate hegemons who even then were conspiring to lock up key online spaces and functions and leverage them for private benefit of scales never before seen. His prescience grows ever more evident.
Moreover, Aaron cared as much about broader social and economic justice as he did online rights as such. In fact, we founded Demand Progress as an economic justice outfit before internet freedom called upon us because efforts to control the internet — through government censorship regimes, mass corporate and government surveillance, and the warping of information flows towards the end of private profit — were not being confronted by sufficient popular force.
With each passing year, as our organization has grown more robust and expanded its work, and as it has become more clear that internet freedom fights are economic justice and social justice fights, we have been able to make Demand Progress more reflective of Aaron’s broad, rich, ideological and philosophical impulses — and of our designs when we founded the institution.
Below is a (non-exhaustive) accounting of some of our accomplishments from over the last year or so. We are ever grateful to Aaron and to all of you for helping to make this possible.
-David and the Demand Progress team
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We are confronting corporations that have too much power over our economy and our government:
- Demand Progress has remained at the forefront of efforts to defend net neutrality principles: Last spring we helped to secure passage through the House of the Save the Internet Act, which would codify strong net neutrality rules that are analogous to those that were repealed by Trump’s FCC a couple of years ago.
- We are attacking Silicon Valley’s extraordinary power over the economy, our government, and our broader society — foremost through the Freedom From Facebook effort which we co-chair and which has helped spur forth demands that big tech be broken up. We are also helping to lead burgeoning efforts to confront the power of Amazon and Google.
- We have co-led efforts to buck up a regulatory state that has for too long been subservient to the industries over which it is supposed to have authority. For instance, we are working to wake the Federal Trade Commission out of its decades-long stupor and encouraging it to confront monopoly power, and have helped ensure that progressive regulators are installed at key federal agencies.
- We are among a handful of groups preparing to make sure that if a new administration takes power in 2020, the executive branch will be staffed with progressive decision makers who are willing to reorient the economy so as to make it serve the needs of the broad American public.
We are pushing a more progressive foreign policy and national security vision:
- Demand Progress has been at the forefront of efforts to urge Congress to assert its authority over war-making.
- Organizing alongside more than 100,000 of you, we helped to spur the House and Senate to, for the first time, pass a War Powers Resolution — specifically to end US involvement in the ongoing Saudi-led war on Yemen. (Trump vetoed this resolution, but our efforts have begun to lead to a scaling back of US support for the war.)
- These efforts helped to till the soil for this month’s ongoing attempt to pass a War Powers Resolution to constrain the Trump Administration’s drive towards war with Iran. The WPR passed the House this week and will soon be taken up by the Senate. (We have organized more than 100,000 people to speak out against war with Iran over the last year.)
- We have co-led efforts to block the upcoming re-authorization of the Patriot Act unless substantial reforms are secured — and last spring we completely reoriented the conversation about these authorities by helping to break the news that the NSA had ceased the collection of telephone metadata.
We are making our government more democratic and progressive:
- We helped secure the passage of National Popular Vote legislation in Colorado, Delaware, New Mexico, and Oregon, bringing a system by which the President would be elected by popular vote to the brink of enactment across the country.
- We have cultivated, alongside a couple of key allied organizations, a slate of more than 150 motivated, progressive candidates for key staffer positions in the new Congress — and dozens of them have since secured jobs on the Hill, supporting the Squad and other progressive lawmakers. They are hard at work helping organizations and activists implement a progressive legislative agenda.
- And once great staff is in place, we need to make sure that Congress is a place where they want to work: We’ve helped get the House and Senate to commission a study of Congressional staff pay and retention, including a review of whether staff are paid appropriately and get equal pay for equal work.
- We were at the center of coalitions helping usher new and progressive members of Congress onto the most powerful committees. For instance, most of the Squad now serves on the House Financial Services Committee, where we’ve had the opportunity to work with them to confront the big banks and interrogate Mark Zuckerberg over his efforts to create a new currency.
- We proposed — and saw the House adopt — an array of new rules that will make governance better. For instance, they instituted an Office of Whistleblower Ombudsman to help protect whistleblowers who want to communicate with Congress, created a committee to oversee the modernization of key Congressional functions, and are studying re-establishing the Office of Technology Assessment, a legislative branch agency that historically provided advice to Congress on technology matters.
- We have helped ensure that Congress will become more transparent: The Library of Congress began publishing its Congressional Research Service Reports online and is publishing a calendar for all House and Senate committee hearings and bill markups, including links to video of the proceedings. We oversaw passage of the Open Government Data Act, which requires federal agencies to make data open by default and conduct regular inventories of public data assets.
Thank you for taking a moment to remember Aaron with us, to consider his legacy, and to learn more about the work we carry forth in his name.
