Response to The Internet’s Own Boy

Since a couple of years ago, there seems to be a yawning chasm that is constantly growing deeper and darker, filled with prospective danger eminating from the internet. Fear of cyber-anarchists/terrorists using their hollywood hyped computer skills to carry out a plethora of society altering schemes such as the resetting of all credit card debt. And yes that is from Fight Club. However, as we actually review what has happened in the last decade it becomes clear that there seems to be a form of benevolence mixed with wit, arrogance, and an anti-establishment sentiment. All of which culminate in a varied group of people who lay their freedom on the line for a desire to aid the population at large. From Assange to Snowden to Manning, however, there is one “hacktivist” as they are cynically called who actually did little to infringe on anyone’s freedom and suffered the steepest sentence (possibly due to the benevolence outweighing the arrogance or messiah complex that some of the other men seem to possess). This was Aaron Swartz, cofounder of Reddit and a smart politically active boy who wanted to make knowledge a public resource. He did not seem to care about NSA surveillance or mishaps by Icelandic Banks, all he wanted was for curious kids like him around the world to be able to learn for free. And the singular sentiment that seems present from the first moment of the movie, growing progressively stronger as the movie moves, is the idea of powerlessness. Through all he acomplished and all he cared for, Swartz removed himself from the planet due to a sense of dread in that he was powerless to defend even himself from injustice. Simply, the world functions well, yet it also seems to be encapsulated in a thin layer of lack of fairness, apathy, and dread that ever so often culminate to synthesize terrible situations such as Aaron’s. And even though the story is more complex than a 2 hour movie can portray, and Swartz is clearly more complex than presented, the main idea is awareness. Not to represent the government in a repressive manner, or the officials as soulless, or even that the American people seem not to care. In the end, the film encumbers upon itself the mantel of transmiting a human story of a great young man so that more people know of it, and not in any way single out a cause for hims demise, other than what circumstances led it to happen. Due to this it is effortlessly easy to watch and unbias to a respectable degree.