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| Aaron Swartz |
Am I the last kid on the block to know who Aaron Swartz was?
Aaron Swartz’s story was outside my radar entirely. I know such names as Bill Gates and Steve
Jobs, of course, and could even name Mark Zuckerberg and Julian Assange, but
the second and third tiers of computer nerds are largely unfamiliar to me. I can’t recall now why I ordered Brian
Knappenberger’s documentary, The
Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, from Netflix, but I’m very
glad I did.
Five stars. No
hesitation. This is a seriously outdated
review – the film came out in 2014 and has has broad distribution and has met
with considerable acclaim. But the film has not lost an ounce of its considerable
punch in the past three years. If
anything, the story has even more relevance today, as our freedoms seem to be
slipping away before our eyes. It has a
Rotten Tomatoes rating of 97% and even the negative reviews, if you take a
closer look, are essentially positive. It tells the story of a young man who
just wanted to make a better world and got eaten alive by the government’s
obsessiveness with secrecy, which began as an overreaction to 9/11.
Aaron was upset that private corporations had managed to
assume ownershop of things in the public domain. It’s analogous to the situation with the
airwaves. Originally they were
considered public domain. Today we have
to pay billions to organizations who have taken control of them and politicized
them entirely. Aaron directed his attention to those agencies, like Elsevier,
who have managed to take control of academic research. Science should be free, he insisted. Science, after all, is knowledge, and the
control of knowledge by money-making organizations is wrong.
But try to get that message across
in capitalist America. Aaron Swartz did.
And it got him killed. He was under indictment for having stolen
ordinary information – not trade secrets, not secret formulas, which corporations
were treating as proprietary information, and made it public. Not because he wanted to make a profit from it. He simply wanted to make the statement that
this information belonged to the world and not a private corporation. He was facing thirty-five years in prison. There’s little doubt he would not have
survived that. He was not a saint; in
fact, he could be quite self-centered.
But he was, from all reports, an idealistic soul. An innocent.
Cynics and bullies make their way to the top. Some even become president. But the tender souls who show up now and
again on this planet can easily get crushed and thrown to the wolves. This is
the story of one of them.
If you see parallels with
Wikileaks, with Chelsea Manning, and with Edward Snowden and the work of Glenn
Greenwald and Laura Poitras to back him up, that’s because the parallels are
there. Except that the good that has
come from Wikileaks, the exposure of government malfeasance, is offset to some
degree by the risk to national security.
At least an argument can be made that that’s the case. With Aaron Swartz, the only harm done is the
potential diminishment of corporate profits.
You might also want to argue that
what Aaron did was the equivalent of pirating the work of composers and
musicians by making their work available to people without asking them to pay
for it. Or publishing copyrighted material. Or forwarding news articles without paying
the source.
Also arguments worth considering. But Aaron didn’t abuse the rights of creative
people to make a living. He challenged
the right of a corporation who wanted to appropriate information and then sit
on it until you paid up. The film makes
clear that from this nerd’s perspective, this was intended as a prank. To be sure, it had a political message,
similar to the one made by folks protesting that the coastline should not be in
the hands of private owners. The film’s
internet notables make the case for an open internet. I simply can’t see any convincing argument
for limiting the internet.
What is missing from the film is
the prosecuters side of the story. But
they were invited to present their side and chose not to. What can one say?
The specific charge was that he
illegally downloaded five million scholarly texts from the JSTOR database. He did that.
He was guilty of that. In the
end, JSTOR decided not to prosecute. But
the government went ahead anyway, in order to make an example of him and deter
others from trying to inject themselves into the world of profit-making. None of the material was sensitive, it is
worth repeating. And he earned not a
penny for his efforts.
Anyone following the fate of
Edward Snowden and the trial of Chelsea Manning, anyone interested in the
increasingly harsh treatment of whistleblowers in this country, should see this
film by all means. I’d take that even
further and say anyone interested in getting us out of the dark hole we have
fallen into should, as well. It’s a big
story, and includes surprising details, such as how MIT’s refusal to step in on
Aaron’s behalf illustrates the maxim that all it takes for evil to happen is
for good men and women to do nothing.
And a whole host of characters whose unabashed grief tells it all about
the impact Aaron had on people and colleagues.
These include Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World-Wide Web, and
Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford professor known for his brilliance, for once
clerking for Antonin Scalia, and for being an outspoken defender of net
neutrality. Watching Lessig cry over the loss of this young life brings home
the importance of making sure we get justice back into our justice system.
1 hour and 45 minutes.
photo credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
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