Aaron Swartz: “I want to make the world a better place.”
“Growing up, I slowly had this process of realizing that all the things around me that people had told me were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be, they weren’t natural at all. They were things that could be changed, and they were things that, more importantly, were wrong and should change, and once I realized that, there was really no going back.” — Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz was a valiant man who like any heroic historical figures stood up for what he thought was right. He is the hero of our generation. This might seem like an overstatement; I will let you decide for yourself.
Aaron Swartz was an activist distraught by many things concerning the internet and the digitizing of information. He fought against online databases, congress, and other corporations.
“Once I questioned the school I was in, I questioned the society that built the school. I questioned the businesses the schools were training people for. I questioned the government that set up this whole structure.” — Aaron Swartz
In 2008, Aaron Swarts drew his attention to PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). PACER was a database managed by the Administrative Office of the United States Court. Swartz believed that PACER was being corrupt in over charging users who needed access to “public” court files. Swartz dowloaded 2.7 million federal court documents to a website that encouraged PACER users to recycle previously perchased documents so that others could access them for free. This caught the attention of the FBI who later decided to not to press charges, as the court documents should have in fact been public.
In 2012 Swartz fought against the passage of the SOPA or the Stop Online Piracy Act. The SOPA would have eventually shut down websites accused of violating copyright. Aaron Swartz saw this as censorship and federal oppression. He believed in the freedom to connect. The SOPA bill was not passed. In his speech “How We Stopped SOPA” he says, “We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom.”
Aaron Swartz was found dead on January 11th 2013 in his apartment in Brooklyn. He committed suicide while he was being prosecuted for hacking the database Jstor. He downloaded articles from Jstor using MIT’s(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) access to the Jstor database. Despite Jstor dropping charges, and MIT’s neutral stance, the government wanted to make of Aaron Swartz an example of the gravity of commiting cyber crime. If found guilty the government would have given Aaron Swartz more than 35 years in jail. He didnt do this make a profit from the artcles he downloaded, he did this to make a point. In the “Guerilla Open Access Mifesto” Aaron Swartz writes,
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.”
He wanted to change this. He didnt want the internet to prompt centralization of power, he wanted fairness and equality for all internet users.
Aaron Swartz had the intellect and the resources to become a Steve Jobs. He was capable of using his knowledge to become a rich man. He was on his way to becoming ecomically successful, but he didnt settle for economic success. Money was not what he was after. He wanted change. As Cory Doctorow puts it “ He got to where he was supposed to be going and had the self-awareness, the orneriness, to realize that he had climbed the mountain of shit to pluck the single rose and discovered that he had lost his sense of smell, and rather than sit there and insist that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, he climbed back down again.”
If you look at Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, they started by selling a Blue box, which was a thing designed to defraud the phone company. If you look at Bill Gates and Paul Allen, they initially started their business by using computer time at Harvard, which was pretty clearly against the rules. The difference between Aaron and the people I’ve just mentioned is that Aaron wanted to make the world a better place. He didn’t just want to make money.
– Robert Swartz
Aaron is dead.
Wanderers in this crazy world,
we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.
Hackers for right, we are one down,
we have lost one of our own.
Nurturers, carers, listeners,
feeders, parents all,
we have lost a child.
Let us all weep.– Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Cory Doctorow : “I can’t go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.”
Cory Doctorow and Aaron Swartz are very similar. Like Aaron Swartz, Cory Doctorow is an activist who is in favor of liberising copyright laws. He prompts change through his writing. He writes science fiction novels that deal with the problem with digital rights management, and file sharing.
In 2008 he published a novel called “Little Brother”. He writes about a 17 year-old hacker from San Francisco. Through this character Cory Doctorow tackles issues reguarding civil liberties and social activism. In 2013 Cory Doctorow wrote a sequel to “Little Brother” he called in “Homeland”. For this book he wrote to Aaron Swartz. Aaron helped him with ideas reguarding futuristic technology that could be used by “committed, passionate candidates who didn’t want to end up beholden to monied interests and power-brokers”. AAron Swartz wrote back to him, and everything he seggested was written verbatim in the book.
