15 ms·

The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

114 points by dananjaya86 5y ago

SavantIdiot 5y ago
> The irrationalities of power fascinated him, but he found the irrationalities of activism exasperating. Most activists, in his experience, would launch big campaigns about big issues and do things that they guessed would be beneficial, like running television ads or sending out direct mail, but they never did the work to figure out whether what they were doing was actually changing policy. This is the frustrating thing about any activism: it moves slowly. For someone who cannot finish projects, or needs immediate feedback, it appears to be constant failure. However, activist movements are less like drag racers (the cars ;) and more like xenon ion thrusters that NASA tested a few years back: they spew out tiny ions that individually barely move the satellite, but slowly, over time, the sheer number of the small exhalations translate to colossal speeds. The activists seem to be mired in failure, but they are slowly moving the needle. I wonder if as he got older he would have learned discipline to stick with longer-lead feedback loops. Or maybe not, perhaps his brain wasn't wired that way.
- santoshalper 5y ago
  Or maybe he was right and most activism is emotionally driven rather than rational or data driven, and is ultimately ineffective.
  - stathibus 5y ago
    Swartz was a rare breed of what I think of as real activism. Self-proclaimed activists these days have no skin in the game and don't go further than signal boosting. To really make a difference you have to get burned; most people don't have the guts.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    What has been your experience working with activists in NGOs/nonprofits? I've worked with several over the past few decades and emotions certainly are part of it, but trying to change a government doesn't happen overnight. For example, when Working with HIFIVE (Haiti Integrated Financing for Value Chains and Enterprises) I found that having government support was much more effective: things happened on a schedule, same when I worked with Habitat for Humanity. However, when I worked with a local homeless shelter in my city, they were struggling due both outreach and a logistics system that was sadly inefficient b/c none of them had experience with this: the heart was there but not the experience. I'd be eager to hear what you ran into while working in a nonprofit that turned you off due to being "too emotionally driven." Please share!
ppod 5y ago
Some of his writing in this reminds me a lot of David Foster Wallace (who is mentioned), in particular the way he is deeply concerned with seeming humble but feeling egotistical: self-consciously projecting humility but being aware of the humility as a kind of affectation in a recursive and tortuous cycle of self-awareness.
- borski 5y ago
  I relate to this so much. The very odd “aggrandizing” that is so often necessary for starting and running a company, coupled with my massive impostor syndrome that is just never going to go away at this point, is a very very hard cognitive dissonance to manage. I’ve done it, and will do it again, but it makes me squirm on the inside.
  - HumanReadable 5y ago
    Do you have any advice or wise words on how you manage this? I find myself in a leadership position, but I feel immensely uncomfortable when directing others. In my head there's always a nagging voice that replies 'who are you to tell us what to do?'
    - justinpowers 5y ago
      Seems to me the best leader might be someone who forever feels uncomfortable and uses that positively (eg asking for advice, promoting/delegating to betters, expressing gratitude, admitting mistakes, giving due credit) rather than negatively. A leader without discomfort suggests an unchecked ego…a recipe for eventual disaster no matter how long the good times (if any) may last.
    - mr90210 5y ago
      Prior to reading your comment, I had not been aware of such feeling. I aspire to be in a leadership position in the future. However, right now let me tell you why and how I would like to be led or directed by somebody: - You give me space to voice my opinions as if I am a specialist in the subject; - You give me space to make mistake and learn from them; - You are willing to admit that you don't know a certain topic; - You carry about your own self-development; - You are willing to support me on areas where I lack knowledge or experience without judging; - You often show that you care about the people in the team, and whether we are doing what matters; - You deal with me as the adult that I am, and you are open to have difficult conversations with empathy about topics such as: under-performance, misfit, interpersonal conflicts, or even about letting me go (firing); "who are you to tell us what to do" Well, you are the human capable of trusting each member of your team of doing the best they can, and capable of sitting with them when things are not working.
cryptica 5y ago
It's sad how the system punishes smart altruists. If you're smart, you'd better be evil or the system will destroy you.
- xibalba 5y ago
  I don't agree that "the system" punished a smart altruist. As this article makes clear, Swartz did something he knew to be illegal. This was not his first brush with mass copyright violation. He was then prosecuted for his crimes. IMO, the charges were vastly disproportionate, but you expose yourself to prosecutorial overreach when you (knowingly) commit crimes. This appears to have been a trend with Swartz. He seems to have had something of a God complex. And thus, for him, the ends justified the means, because he was right and they were wrong. He does not even appear to have been especially ethical or rational. For example, Reddit sells to Condé Nast. A condition of the sale was that he would work out of Condé Nast's SF offices. He took the money, but then rejected the terms post hoc and disappeared. When he was tracked down and it was clear that he'd simply flown the coup, he was justifiably fired. All of which he, and his enablers, viewed as a great injustice! They don't seem to entertain giving back the money though... He was a human, with all the attendant frailties and blindspots. He was not murdered. He was a person who struggled with mental illness, like so many of us. He committed suicide. His suicide is tragic. He was clearly a bright and dynamic person. But he also seems to have been pretty misguided, and his darker tendencies appear to have been rationalized, justified, and enabled by his family. That to me, is the greater tragedy. It didn't have to be like this.
  - cryptica 5y ago
    I think it's a big deal that the charges were disproportionate in this case. Maybe what he did was illegal on paper, but it was not unethical. Disturbingly, there seems to be increasingly many things in our modern society which are ethical yet illegal. You'd think that in those cases, authorities should be more lenient; that they would have a sense of what is right and wrong from the perspective of the average citizen. The fact that they seem to be particularly more aggressive in those cases is what I find disturbing and why I'm saying that altruism is being punished. In many countries, the concept of right and wrong is increasingly being decided from the perspective of a tiny minority. We appear to be reverting to a society of lords and serfs. The government's moral compass is increasingly based on the elites' perspective.
rcoveson 5y ago
Alexandra Elbakyan is still alive and well, and Sci-Hub is going strong. Swartz' prosecution and persecution were totally pointless. Copyright is unenforceable.
- tiahura 5y ago
  Persecution? He broke the law and was likely to get a slap on the wrist.
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    Says who? He didn't get to have a trial to determine this because the prosecutor backed him into a corner with threats of excessive punishment.
    - tiahura 5y ago
      Says the judge when you admit to what you did and plead. He’s the same one that gave Lori Laughlin and Mossimo 6 months in minimum security “camp” and not the bazillion years the prosecutor originally threatened.
      - skinnymuch 5y ago
        Are you talking about the famous wealthy upper class and status people with your example? Not sure if you genuinely believe justice is blind. Something that has never been true.
        tiahura 5y ago
        Blind to what? He was guilty. White boys don’t do hard time for hiding in the closet to copy the library’s computer. The judge appears to be a conservative old navy man. I haven’t dealt with him, but I think I’ve been in front of the type. Trial would go something like this: On the morning of day 3, so before the second day of testimony, the judge calls the attorneys into chambers and lays into them, sometimes loud enough for half the courthouse to hear, for wasting everyone’s time on such a stupid case, and that the prosecutor better have really good evidence of hard damages otherwise he’s going to be pissed. And then you go out, talk to your clients, and settle.
NoGravitas 5y ago
> It is commonly assumed that the debate over what Swartz did, and, more generally, the debate over whether information does or does not want to be free, is between hacker culture and copyright culture, young people and old people, but this is not true. On the Hacker News site in the fall of 2012, many commenters disagreed with what he’d done, and argued with his supporters on the site that in a nation ruled by laws it was not O.K. for one person to just go and break a law he felt was unjust. Or, possibly, Hacker News doesn't represent hacker culture, but finance-adjacent right-wing techbro culture, which knows perfectly well which side of the copyright issue its bread is buttered on.
- pm90 5y ago
  > Or, possibly, Hacker News doesn't represent hacker culture, but finance-adjacent right-wing techbro culture, which knows perfectly well which side of the copyright issue its bread is buttered on. Spot on. I like HN for certain topics, but it’s by no means representative of the Hacker culture. Even the name seems like duplicitous marketing at best. As an example, the topic of immigration will bring out the nastiest takes and opinions (and straight up racism).
  - stathibus 5y ago
    A long time ago now, the word "hacker" was captured by regular programmers screwing around who wanted to sound cool. I doubt anyone is confused about which definition HN is concerned with.
    - fsckboy 5y ago
      are you saying HN is NOT populated by regular programmers screwing around who want to sound cool?
  - ciphol 5y ago
    Why assume that "hacker culture", whatever exactly that is, is immune to racism?
jelliclesfarm 5y ago
When I read this, I think of one of my fav poems by Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse. It begins like.. ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’… except it’s not mum and dad anymore but the entire ‘village’ that is raising you.
pipeline_peak 5y ago
"His girlfriend Taren always dealt with taxi-drivers, with waitresses." "The guy in front of me’s leaning all the way back, but I’m in the last row so my seat doesn’t go back, and I have to lift my legs up to stretch out a muscle that was sitting funny while I was asleep" I feel like Aaron Swartz was never truly an adult, just a boyish intellectual. I can't imagine his submissive behavior was a net positive to his mental health.
- nzmsv 5y ago
  And it sounds like he was perfectly aware of this. This feeling of being "not really a man" can be overwhelming, and I feel like this is an incredibly toxic thing perpetuated by our culture. It's possible to spend an entire lifetime trying to prove the opposite of this statement to the world, and most importantly oneself, and fail at this impossible task. But the saddest part is that because the majority of people think in these "man/boy" terms it's easy to start thinking that all people do. The next step is to consider oneself hopelessly broken and unworthy of affection, and dismiss any real friendship as a pity party. And yet: there was an outpouring of love and sadness following aaronsw's suicide. So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world.
  - mrtranscendence 5y ago
    > So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world. I think some things are being conflated here. There is the stereotype of manliness, conforming to which requires you to do or have interest in stereotypically manly things (sports, cars, home improvement, working outside, being tough, being reticent to show emotion). But there's also failure to conform to adultness -- being able to call a cab, order food, pay bills, manage finances, maintain steady employment. It sounds that Swartz, though not stereotypically manly, was also not stereotypically adult. The former's not a problem -- I'm not manly either, I say as I cuddle my pet rabbit -- but failure to be an adult can cause issues (at least for those without such indulgent friends and family as Swartz had).
    - 5y ago
andreilys 5y ago
I would love to understand some of the rationale behind MIT not reversing it's stance. Is there any public/anon writing from someone inside MIT at the time? Was there some pressure being employed by scientific publishers to make an example out of Swartz? It just seems so strange, but then again as we've seen institutions can be easily hijacked and corrupted when populated with the wrong actors.
- schoen 5y ago
  MIT commissioned an entire report about its role https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ -- maybe that includes some of what you're looking for.
62f26d4 5y ago
Everything ever written about Aaron and everything Aaron ever wrote are part of one continuous humming noise that no one can hear. The difficulties Aaron lived need to be judged or diagnosed or both. There is neither redemption nor responsibility, but guilt and symptoms of a larger social or spiritual sickness. I've spent a large portion of my life blaming everyone including Aaron for everything and looking for heroes who would be able to make good on any of what seemed reasonable in his promises. In considering the worth of all these hours of reflections, I can't say I have changed my opinions but I have changed. What has been written about Aaron's life and accomplishments, let it suffice. The meta text is all now. Not "who was he?", but "what do we think of him?". This is what he wanted, and possibly because it concerns him, he was basically wrong, and this conversation is mostly unhelpful. I propose to ask "what do we think of what we think of him?". Those who could never see the value in information and knowledge have their knives out for a largely harmless and innocent man, while those who think hacking JSTOR would have unleashed a new age of enlightenment have yet to become cynical and stupid. His friends and family have largely avoided these debates and tried to elevate his achievements and explain his incongruities with compassion and grace, without taking sides, either out of fear of further government overreach or out of a sense that no one can speak to Aaron's entire belief set, and whether it was or would have been coherent and effective. As much as he held strong opinions on the subjects, he was trying to open a conversation about data, privacy, freedom of information etc., and he encountered a lot of people who realized that that conversation has extremely negative implications for data-driven business models, whether those were content publication models or user data ad-tech models. The corporate-academe was never willing to discuss any of it openly or honestly and was never going to leap to his defense as he might have thought at the time, as a socially-underdeveloped young man. He probably got it too late that corporate academics are not conservative so much as cowardly, not so much concerned as paranoid, not unaware but purposefully ignorant. And he certainly understood, too late, that the government is these things to an entirely incomprehensible degree. Whatever the personal motivations or ideologies of whichever prosecutor threw the book at Aaron, "the government" wanted him punished. Ultimately information is the scariest possible thing for any government, and Aaron had spent too much of his life knocking on the doors of the most closed-rank, insular and self-protecting people on earth, demanding a better public understanding of and regulation of data. He did this at a time when NSA et al. were harvesting unprecedented volumes of personal data and while trillions of private-side investment dollars were being spent on doing the same with no accountability. The hero-thief debate, and the autist-scumbag debate are for kids and morons like the New Yorker. Viz the fact he struggled socially---and to such an extent!--- is a "dark-side", warping his personality traits, his social and personal disorders, and his policy recommendations into a nice big meaningless pile. As another commenter here noted, like anyone with a soul he was a complex person.
low_tech_love 5y ago
Ok piece, but clickbait title. I read through the whole thing and couldn’t find any dark side. The only person trying to make him look bad is his girlfriend, and all the reasons seem to be due to their private relationship. I don’t see why they’re any different or special compared to most other relationships. All I saw in this was the description of a human being who was remarkable in some ways, flawed in others, and deeply normal in the rest. Like basically almost everyone else.
loeg 5y ago
(2013)
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axiosgunnar 5y ago
- ViViDboarder 5y ago
  It’s not, really.
  - Robotbeat 5y ago
    Then the headline is misleading. Doubly bad for pay articles
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  If someone said it was, would you avoid reading it? If I can guess, maybe your hero worship (I presume) of this guy is making you unobjective. Now when I say "hero worship", it sounds like I'm saying he's the opposite of a hero, to be honest I just know the name and the case, I haven't dug deep into it to make my own judgement, but I've seen a lot of comments championing him as a hero, and to me it seems their view of him clouds their judgement.
  - dpark 5y ago
    Why do you jump to “hero worship” from someone asking if it’s a “hit piece”?
    - TameAntelope 5y ago
      - dpark 5y ago
        Why are you engaging in the comments for an article about Aaron Swartz then?
        TameAntelope 5y ago
throwaway98797 5y ago
in time he may have gained to wisdom to be free. there was still so much more he could have done. i never met him but he seemed like a gentle soul that poked the wrong bear.
honkdaddy 5y ago
Refreshingly well-researched and honest piece from the New Yorker. My favourite writing by Aaron is his explanation of what happens in the "ending" of Infinite Jest. [1] I'm of the opinion DFW deliberately left it somewhat open to interpretation, and that his famous quote "If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you" was a tad tongue in cheek. That said, Aaron's explanation is certainly the most plausible, and I'd kill to know what DFW would have thought of it. [1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend
- Mikhail_K 5y ago
  > Refreshingly well-researched and honest piece from the New Yorker. My impression is quite the opposite. This piece by Larissa MacFarquhart was a contemptible whitewash of government bullies. "New Yorker" is squarely in the corner of intelligence agencies and law enforcement and against the people, and not just in this particular case.
  - boppo1 5y ago
    Aww New Yorker is one of the few outlets I still like. Do you have examples?
  - mattzito 5y ago
    I'm curious how it's a whitewash of government bullies when that's not the point of the article? It's pretty clear at the start that it's about how his friends and family perceived him, and his backstory - I was aware of the overall narrative, but found it extremely interesting to hear stories of his challenges with interacting with the world. In general, I respect and appreciate content that takes someone who has been lionized (especially posthumously) and humanizes them. People are complicated, the narrative is rarely as simple as it's distilled down for public consumption. As far as the "squarely in the corner of intelligence agences and law enforcement" - that wasn't my impression, and while I did not spend hours researching, I went through the "police" tag on the new yorker website, and in the last year, 10 out of 21 articles were overtly critical of police, and only ~2 could be considered positive towards police. The remainder were either neutral, nuanced, or orthogonal (e.g. photo essays about a woman who was embedded with the police for several years). Do you have evidence to back up your assertion?
sxcurry 5y ago
The article might have been organized by Carmen Ortiz at the time - she was planning to run for Governor on the back of this case.
- KarlKemp 5y ago
  I have trouble even seeing the implied mechanism of how this article would have any impact on an election. And after reading the article, I wouldn't even be able to guess if people consider it slanted for or against Swartz. To me it reads of an exceptionally well-researched text showing that Swartz was a human being with all the complexity that comes with having a soul. And that a completely ridiculous prosecution was a necessary, but probably not sufficient, condition for his suicide.
- polynomial 5y ago
  This is the first time I have heard that and my jaw is on the floor.
coretx 5y ago
paywalled.
- password4321 5y ago
  ? not for me, but here you go: https://archive.is/tnHWq https://archive.is/tnHWq
brainzap 5y ago
I was reading through Aarons blog this week, like his writing style. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis
- tiahura 5y ago
  The anecdote about the pariahing of the doctor advocating chlorinated lime would be a clever retort from a qook to a lib about ivermectin.
gowld 5y ago
The article appears to be a rambling list of eulogies and tidbits. What's the alleged "darker side" that isn't just being (in part) a regular person?
- xibalba 5y ago
  It may be in response to the general beatification and mythologizing of Swartz after his suicide.
photochemsyn 5y ago
This article carefully avoids any analysis of the reasons why MIT chose to persecute Aaron Swartz. Here's a quick take on the actual situation, off the top of my head: "The Darker Side of MIT and the Academic Publishing Industry" While the Internet has been hailed from its inception as a tool that would open up access to information for the whole world, the reality has not matched that expectation. Much of the most important and useful information generated by scientists, engineers, historians and others remains hidden behind paywalls and is not accessible to the vast majority of people, regardless of whether they have access to the Internet or not. The reason is that academic research - the vast majority of it financed heavily by federal science agencies, i.e. the taxpayer - remains under the control of a small group of academic publishing houses, who earn exorbitant fees for licensing access to universities and other institutions. For example, if you want to manufacturer an antibiotic, you'd want access to the complete research record - the initial discovery of the antibiotic, the detailed production technology (found perhaps in the methods sections of papers published in the 1970s and 1980s, say), more modern biotech methods of production of said antibiotic (papers from the 1990s and 2000s), etc. Given the obvious benefit to all (except the parasites collecting the fees) of providing that information to anyone with Internet access, it's at first glance hard to understand why MIT - one of America's leading federally-financed research institues - chose to persecute Aaron Swartz for downloading the jstor archive, instead of merely warning him not to do it again. Clearly the MIT administration wanted to make an example of Swartz - the question is, why? The most rational explanation involves the corporatization of academic research in the USA in general, which began in the 1980s with passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to exclusively license inventions created with taxpayer dollars to private entities, rather than the prior situation, in which anyone could obtain such a license. This 'public-private' partnership situation has corrupted American academics, placing the profitability of research well ahead of the accuracy and reliability of research. As part of this sea change in American academia, the control of information has become more important than the prior academic norm, which was the open sharing of information (widely understood to increase the pace of scientific discovery). Now, many corporations have simply outsourced their R&D divisions to the murky public-private academic sector, utilizing financing provided by NIH or other federal agencies, while retaining control of the results of academic research (*and paying off the cooperating professors and administators by buying the academic start-up operations and giving them stocks in their larger corporations). This can be seen today in the highly profitable COVID vaccine and treatment business, in which initial academic research (such mRNA technology) was co-opted by the private sector under said exclusive licensing agreements (and note how open-sourcing the patents globally is continually blocked by pharma sector lobbying efforts). Hence, MIT - an institution which, along with the University of California, spearheaded the transition to corporate-controlled academic research, wanted to make an example of Aaron Swartz to warn other researchers that if they tried to open-source information - thereby harming corporate profit opportunities - that they would be severely punished. Well, at least there's scibhub, although their coverage is still spotty.
joshthecynic 5y ago

114 points by dananjaya86 5y ago

> The irrationalities of power fascinated him, but he found the irrationalities of activism exasperating. Most activists, in his experience, would launch big campaigns about big issues and do things that they guessed would be beneficial, like running television ads or sending out direct mail, but they never did the work to figure out whether what they were doing was actually changing policy. This is the frustrating thing about any activism: it moves slowly. For someone who cannot finish projects, or needs immediate feedback, it appears to be constant failure. However, activist movements are less like drag racers (the cars ;) and more like xenon ion thrusters that NASA tested a few years back: they spew out tiny ions that individually barely move the satellite, but slowly, over time, the sheer number of the small exhalations translate to colossal speeds. The activists seem to be mired in failure, but they are slowly moving the needle. I wonder if as he got older he would have learned discipline to stick with longer-lead feedback loops. Or maybe not, perhaps his brain wasn't wired that way.

santoshalper 5y ago
Or maybe he was right and most activism is emotionally driven rather than rational or data driven, and is ultimately ineffective.
- stathibus 5y ago
  Swartz was a rare breed of what I think of as real activism. Self-proclaimed activists these days have no skin in the game and don't go further than signal boosting. To really make a difference you have to get burned; most people don't have the guts.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  What has been your experience working with activists in NGOs/nonprofits? I've worked with several over the past few decades and emotions certainly are part of it, but trying to change a government doesn't happen overnight. For example, when Working with HIFIVE (Haiti Integrated Financing for Value Chains and Enterprises) I found that having government support was much more effective: things happened on a schedule, same when I worked with Habitat for Humanity. However, when I worked with a local homeless shelter in my city, they were struggling due both outreach and a logistics system that was sadly inefficient b/c none of them had experience with this: the heart was there but not the experience. I'd be eager to hear what you ran into while working in a nonprofit that turned you off due to being "too emotionally driven." Please share!

ppod 5y ago

Some of his writing in this reminds me a lot of David Foster Wallace (who is mentioned), in particular the way he is deeply concerned with seeming humble but feeling egotistical: self-consciously projecting humility but being aware of the humility as a kind of affectation in a recursive and tortuous cycle of self-awareness.

borski 5y ago
I relate to this so much. The very odd “aggrandizing” that is so often necessary for starting and running a company, coupled with my massive impostor syndrome that is just never going to go away at this point, is a very very hard cognitive dissonance to manage. I’ve done it, and will do it again, but it makes me squirm on the inside.
- HumanReadable 5y ago
  Do you have any advice or wise words on how you manage this? I find myself in a leadership position, but I feel immensely uncomfortable when directing others. In my head there's always a nagging voice that replies 'who are you to tell us what to do?'
  - justinpowers 5y ago
    Seems to me the best leader might be someone who forever feels uncomfortable and uses that positively (eg asking for advice, promoting/delegating to betters, expressing gratitude, admitting mistakes, giving due credit) rather than negatively. A leader without discomfort suggests an unchecked ego…a recipe for eventual disaster no matter how long the good times (if any) may last.
  - mr90210 5y ago
    Prior to reading your comment, I had not been aware of such feeling. I aspire to be in a leadership position in the future. However, right now let me tell you why and how I would like to be led or directed by somebody: - You give me space to voice my opinions as if I am a specialist in the subject; - You give me space to make mistake and learn from them; - You are willing to admit that you don't know a certain topic; - You carry about your own self-development; - You are willing to support me on areas where I lack knowledge or experience without judging; - You often show that you care about the people in the team, and whether we are doing what matters; - You deal with me as the adult that I am, and you are open to have difficult conversations with empathy about topics such as: under-performance, misfit, interpersonal conflicts, or even about letting me go (firing); "who are you to tell us what to do" Well, you are the human capable of trusting each member of your team of doing the best they can, and capable of sitting with them when things are not working.

cryptica 5y ago

It's sad how the system punishes smart altruists. If you're smart, you'd better be evil or the system will destroy you.

xibalba 5y ago
I don't agree that "the system" punished a smart altruist. As this article makes clear, Swartz did something he knew to be illegal. This was not his first brush with mass copyright violation. He was then prosecuted for his crimes. IMO, the charges were vastly disproportionate, but you expose yourself to prosecutorial overreach when you (knowingly) commit crimes. This appears to have been a trend with Swartz. He seems to have had something of a God complex. And thus, for him, the ends justified the means, because he was right and they were wrong. He does not even appear to have been especially ethical or rational. For example, Reddit sells to Condé Nast. A condition of the sale was that he would work out of Condé Nast's SF offices. He took the money, but then rejected the terms post hoc and disappeared. When he was tracked down and it was clear that he'd simply flown the coup, he was justifiably fired. All of which he, and his enablers, viewed as a great injustice! They don't seem to entertain giving back the money though... He was a human, with all the attendant frailties and blindspots. He was not murdered. He was a person who struggled with mental illness, like so many of us. He committed suicide. His suicide is tragic. He was clearly a bright and dynamic person. But he also seems to have been pretty misguided, and his darker tendencies appear to have been rationalized, justified, and enabled by his family. That to me, is the greater tragedy. It didn't have to be like this.
- cryptica 5y ago
  I think it's a big deal that the charges were disproportionate in this case. Maybe what he did was illegal on paper, but it was not unethical. Disturbingly, there seems to be increasingly many things in our modern society which are ethical yet illegal. You'd think that in those cases, authorities should be more lenient; that they would have a sense of what is right and wrong from the perspective of the average citizen. The fact that they seem to be particularly more aggressive in those cases is what I find disturbing and why I'm saying that altruism is being punished. In many countries, the concept of right and wrong is increasingly being decided from the perspective of a tiny minority. We appear to be reverting to a society of lords and serfs. The government's moral compass is increasingly based on the elites' perspective.

rcoveson 5y ago

Alexandra Elbakyan is still alive and well, and Sci-Hub is going strong. Swartz' prosecution and persecution were totally pointless. Copyright is unenforceable.

tiahura 5y ago
Persecution? He broke the law and was likely to get a slap on the wrist.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  Says who? He didn't get to have a trial to determine this because the prosecutor backed him into a corner with threats of excessive punishment.
  - tiahura 5y ago
    Says the judge when you admit to what you did and plead. He’s the same one that gave Lori Laughlin and Mossimo 6 months in minimum security “camp” and not the bazillion years the prosecutor originally threatened.
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      Are you talking about the famous wealthy upper class and status people with your example? Not sure if you genuinely believe justice is blind. Something that has never been true.
      - tiahura 5y ago
        Blind to what? He was guilty. White boys don’t do hard time for hiding in the closet to copy the library’s computer. The judge appears to be a conservative old navy man. I haven’t dealt with him, but I think I’ve been in front of the type. Trial would go something like this: On the morning of day 3, so before the second day of testimony, the judge calls the attorneys into chambers and lays into them, sometimes loud enough for half the courthouse to hear, for wasting everyone’s time on such a stupid case, and that the prosecutor better have really good evidence of hard damages otherwise he’s going to be pissed. And then you go out, talk to your clients, and settle.

NoGravitas 5y ago

> It is commonly assumed that the debate over what Swartz did, and, more generally, the debate over whether information does or does not want to be free, is between hacker culture and copyright culture, young people and old people, but this is not true. On the Hacker News site in the fall of 2012, many commenters disagreed with what he’d done, and argued with his supporters on the site that in a nation ruled by laws it was not O.K. for one person to just go and break a law he felt was unjust. Or, possibly, Hacker News doesn't represent hacker culture, but finance-adjacent right-wing techbro culture, which knows perfectly well which side of the copyright issue its bread is buttered on.

pm90 5y ago
> Or, possibly, Hacker News doesn't represent hacker culture, but finance-adjacent right-wing techbro culture, which knows perfectly well which side of the copyright issue its bread is buttered on. Spot on. I like HN for certain topics, but it’s by no means representative of the Hacker culture. Even the name seems like duplicitous marketing at best. As an example, the topic of immigration will bring out the nastiest takes and opinions (and straight up racism).
- stathibus 5y ago
  A long time ago now, the word "hacker" was captured by regular programmers screwing around who wanted to sound cool. I doubt anyone is confused about which definition HN is concerned with.
  - fsckboy 5y ago
    are you saying HN is NOT populated by regular programmers screwing around who want to sound cool?
- ciphol 5y ago
  Why assume that "hacker culture", whatever exactly that is, is immune to racism?

jelliclesfarm 5y ago

When I read this, I think of one of my fav poems by Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse. It begins like.. ‘they fuck you up, your mum and dad’… except it’s not mum and dad anymore but the entire ‘village’ that is raising you.

pipeline_peak 5y ago

"His girlfriend Taren always dealt with taxi-drivers, with waitresses." "The guy in front of me’s leaning all the way back, but I’m in the last row so my seat doesn’t go back, and I have to lift my legs up to stretch out a muscle that was sitting funny while I was asleep" I feel like Aaron Swartz was never truly an adult, just a boyish intellectual. I can't imagine his submissive behavior was a net positive to his mental health.

nzmsv 5y ago
And it sounds like he was perfectly aware of this. This feeling of being "not really a man" can be overwhelming, and I feel like this is an incredibly toxic thing perpetuated by our culture. It's possible to spend an entire lifetime trying to prove the opposite of this statement to the world, and most importantly oneself, and fail at this impossible task. But the saddest part is that because the majority of people think in these "man/boy" terms it's easy to start thinking that all people do. The next step is to consider oneself hopelessly broken and unworthy of affection, and dismiss any real friendship as a pity party. And yet: there was an outpouring of love and sadness following aaronsw's suicide. So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  > So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world. I think some things are being conflated here. There is the stereotype of manliness, conforming to which requires you to do or have interest in stereotypically manly things (sports, cars, home improvement, working outside, being tough, being reticent to show emotion). But there's also failure to conform to adultness -- being able to call a cab, order food, pay bills, manage finances, maintain steady employment. It sounds that Swartz, though not stereotypically manly, was also not stereotypically adult. The former's not a problem -- I'm not manly either, I say as I cuddle my pet rabbit -- but failure to be an adult can cause issues (at least for those without such indulgent friends and family as Swartz had).
  - 5y ago

andreilys 5y ago

I would love to understand some of the rationale behind MIT not reversing it's stance. Is there any public/anon writing from someone inside MIT at the time? Was there some pressure being employed by scientific publishers to make an example out of Swartz? It just seems so strange, but then again as we've seen institutions can be easily hijacked and corrupted when populated with the wrong actors.

schoen 5y ago
MIT commissioned an entire report about its role https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ -- maybe that includes some of what you're looking for.

62f26d4 5y ago

Everything ever written about Aaron and everything Aaron ever wrote are part of one continuous humming noise that no one can hear. The difficulties Aaron lived need to be judged or diagnosed or both. There is neither redemption nor responsibility, but guilt and symptoms of a larger social or spiritual sickness. I've spent a large portion of my life blaming everyone including Aaron for everything and looking for heroes who would be able to make good on any of what seemed reasonable in his promises. In considering the worth of all these hours of reflections, I can't say I have changed my opinions but I have changed. What has been written about Aaron's life and accomplishments, let it suffice. The meta text is all now. Not "who was he?", but "what do we think of him?". This is what he wanted, and possibly because it concerns him, he was basically wrong, and this conversation is mostly unhelpful. I propose to ask "what do we think of what we think of him?". Those who could never see the value in information and knowledge have their knives out for a largely harmless and innocent man, while those who think hacking JSTOR would have unleashed a new age of enlightenment have yet to become cynical and stupid. His friends and family have largely avoided these debates and tried to elevate his achievements and explain his incongruities with compassion and grace, without taking sides, either out of fear of further government overreach or out of a sense that no one can speak to Aaron's entire belief set, and whether it was or would have been coherent and effective. As much as he held strong opinions on the subjects, he was trying to open a conversation about data, privacy, freedom of information etc., and he encountered a lot of people who realized that that conversation has extremely negative implications for data-driven business models, whether those were content publication models or user data ad-tech models. The corporate-academe was never willing to discuss any of it openly or honestly and was never going to leap to his defense as he might have thought at the time, as a socially-underdeveloped young man. He probably got it too late that corporate academics are not conservative so much as cowardly, not so much concerned as paranoid, not unaware but purposefully ignorant. And he certainly understood, too late, that the government is these things to an entirely incomprehensible degree. Whatever the personal motivations or ideologies of whichever prosecutor threw the book at Aaron, "the government" wanted him punished. Ultimately information is the scariest possible thing for any government, and Aaron had spent too much of his life knocking on the doors of the most closed-rank, insular and self-protecting people on earth, demanding a better public understanding of and regulation of data. He did this at a time when NSA et al. were harvesting unprecedented volumes of personal data and while trillions of private-side investment dollars were being spent on doing the same with no accountability. The hero-thief debate, and the autist-scumbag debate are for kids and morons like the New Yorker. Viz the fact he struggled socially---and to such an extent!--- is a "dark-side", warping his personality traits, his social and personal disorders, and his policy recommendations into a nice big meaningless pile. As another commenter here noted, like anyone with a soul he was a complex person.

low_tech_love 5y ago

Ok piece, but clickbait title. I read through the whole thing and couldn’t find any dark side. The only person trying to make him look bad is his girlfriend, and all the reasons seem to be due to their private relationship. I don’t see why they’re any different or special compared to most other relationships. All I saw in this was the description of a human being who was remarkable in some ways, flawed in others, and deeply normal in the rest. Like basically almost everyone else.

loeg 5y ago

(2013)

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axiosgunnar 5y ago

ViViDboarder 5y ago
It’s not, really.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  Then the headline is misleading. Doubly bad for pay articles
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
If someone said it was, would you avoid reading it? If I can guess, maybe your hero worship (I presume) of this guy is making you unobjective. Now when I say "hero worship", it sounds like I'm saying he's the opposite of a hero, to be honest I just know the name and the case, I haven't dug deep into it to make my own judgement, but I've seen a lot of comments championing him as a hero, and to me it seems their view of him clouds their judgement.
- dpark 5y ago
  Why do you jump to “hero worship” from someone asking if it’s a “hit piece”?
  - TameAntelope 5y ago
    - dpark 5y ago
      Why are you engaging in the comments for an article about Aaron Swartz then?
      - TameAntelope 5y ago

throwaway98797 5y ago

in time he may have gained to wisdom to be free. there was still so much more he could have done. i never met him but he seemed like a gentle soul that poked the wrong bear.

honkdaddy 5y ago

Refreshingly well-researched and honest piece from the New Yorker. My favourite writing by Aaron is his explanation of what happens in the "ending" of Infinite Jest. [1] I'm of the opinion DFW deliberately left it somewhat open to interpretation, and that his famous quote "If no such convergence or projection occurred to you, then the book’s failed for you" was a tad tongue in cheek. That said, Aaron's explanation is certainly the most plausible, and I'd kill to know what DFW would have thought of it. [1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

Mikhail_K 5y ago
> Refreshingly well-researched and honest piece from the New Yorker. My impression is quite the opposite. This piece by Larissa MacFarquhart was a contemptible whitewash of government bullies. "New Yorker" is squarely in the corner of intelligence agencies and law enforcement and against the people, and not just in this particular case.
- boppo1 5y ago
  Aww New Yorker is one of the few outlets I still like. Do you have examples?
- mattzito 5y ago
  I'm curious how it's a whitewash of government bullies when that's not the point of the article? It's pretty clear at the start that it's about how his friends and family perceived him, and his backstory - I was aware of the overall narrative, but found it extremely interesting to hear stories of his challenges with interacting with the world. In general, I respect and appreciate content that takes someone who has been lionized (especially posthumously) and humanizes them. People are complicated, the narrative is rarely as simple as it's distilled down for public consumption. As far as the "squarely in the corner of intelligence agences and law enforcement" - that wasn't my impression, and while I did not spend hours researching, I went through the "police" tag on the new yorker website, and in the last year, 10 out of 21 articles were overtly critical of police, and only ~2 could be considered positive towards police. The remainder were either neutral, nuanced, or orthogonal (e.g. photo essays about a woman who was embedded with the police for several years). Do you have evidence to back up your assertion?

sxcurry 5y ago

The article might have been organized by Carmen Ortiz at the time - she was planning to run for Governor on the back of this case.

KarlKemp 5y ago
I have trouble even seeing the implied mechanism of how this article would have any impact on an election. And after reading the article, I wouldn't even be able to guess if people consider it slanted for or against Swartz. To me it reads of an exceptionally well-researched text showing that Swartz was a human being with all the complexity that comes with having a soul. And that a completely ridiculous prosecution was a necessary, but probably not sufficient, condition for his suicide.
polynomial 5y ago
This is the first time I have heard that and my jaw is on the floor.

coretx 5y ago

paywalled.

password4321 5y ago
? not for me, but here you go: https://archive.is/tnHWq https://archive.is/tnHWq

brainzap 5y ago

I was reading through Aarons blog this week, like his writing style. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/semmelweis

tiahura 5y ago
The anecdote about the pariahing of the doctor advocating chlorinated lime would be a clever retort from a qook to a lib about ivermectin.

gowld 5y ago

The article appears to be a rambling list of eulogies and tidbits. What's the alleged "darker side" that isn't just being (in part) a regular person?

xibalba 5y ago
It may be in response to the general beatification and mythologizing of Swartz after his suicide.

photochemsyn 5y ago

This article carefully avoids any analysis of the reasons why MIT chose to persecute Aaron Swartz. Here's a quick take on the actual situation, off the top of my head: "The Darker Side of MIT and the Academic Publishing Industry" While the Internet has been hailed from its inception as a tool that would open up access to information for the whole world, the reality has not matched that expectation. Much of the most important and useful information generated by scientists, engineers, historians and others remains hidden behind paywalls and is not accessible to the vast majority of people, regardless of whether they have access to the Internet or not. The reason is that academic research - the vast majority of it financed heavily by federal science agencies, i.e. the taxpayer - remains under the control of a small group of academic publishing houses, who earn exorbitant fees for licensing access to universities and other institutions. For example, if you want to manufacturer an antibiotic, you'd want access to the complete research record - the initial discovery of the antibiotic, the detailed production technology (found perhaps in the methods sections of papers published in the 1970s and 1980s, say), more modern biotech methods of production of said antibiotic (papers from the 1990s and 2000s), etc. Given the obvious benefit to all (except the parasites collecting the fees) of providing that information to anyone with Internet access, it's at first glance hard to understand why MIT - one of America's leading federally-financed research institues - chose to persecute Aaron Swartz for downloading the jstor archive, instead of merely warning him not to do it again. Clearly the MIT administration wanted to make an example of Swartz - the question is, why? The most rational explanation involves the corporatization of academic research in the USA in general, which began in the 1980s with passage of the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities to exclusively license inventions created with taxpayer dollars to private entities, rather than the prior situation, in which anyone could obtain such a license. This 'public-private' partnership situation has corrupted American academics, placing the profitability of research well ahead of the accuracy and reliability of research. As part of this sea change in American academia, the control of information has become more important than the prior academic norm, which was the open sharing of information (widely understood to increase the pace of scientific discovery). Now, many corporations have simply outsourced their R&D divisions to the murky public-private academic sector, utilizing financing provided by NIH or other federal agencies, while retaining control of the results of academic research (*and paying off the cooperating professors and administators by buying the academic start-up operations and giving them stocks in their larger corporations). This can be seen today in the highly profitable COVID vaccine and treatment business, in which initial academic research (such mRNA technology) was co-opted by the private sector under said exclusive licensing agreements (and note how open-sourcing the patents globally is continually blocked by pharma sector lobbying efforts). Hence, MIT - an institution which, along with the University of California, spearheaded the transition to corporate-controlled academic research, wanted to make an example of Aaron Swartz to warn other researchers that if they tried to open-source information - thereby harming corporate profit opportunities - that they would be severely punished. Well, at least there's scibhub, although their coverage is still spotty.

joshthecynic 5y ago