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?'
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
(My reading of IJ is that wherever a parallel to Hamlet can be credibly drawn, it's probably right, and that JOI was murdered by CT & Avril.)
"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.
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.
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).
I think it is telling that people close to Swartz, such as Lawrence Lessig, referred to him as a "boy" when talking about him. I have to think that Swartz himself got that vibe from them. The problem is, as the saying goes, you can't send a boy to do a man's job. To Swartz's credit, he didn't shrink from trying to do a man's job; but it might have helped if others around him had reinforced more that he was a man doing an man's job.
Being an activist and doing things to further causes you believe in, when those things are predictably going to anger those in power, means you are trying to do an adult's job. And that means you have to be an adult. That's not a "socially constructed persona"; that's a fact of life. You can't be a "boyish intellectual" and take on the establishment.
On the other hand if you have a social anxiety you probably need some kind of stronger help to be able to function.
Either way the alternative of avoiding much of the world and relying on oehters to get by probably isn't preferable.
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.
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.
https://swartz-report.mit.edu/
-- maybe that includes some of what you're looking for.
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).
Well, I would argue, that hackers can also be nasty racists.
I mean sure, by my definition the hacker spirit is open minded by definition. But people with a open mind, are also open for some very weird to disgusting ideas.
I disagree. Every time I criticize the (auth) left I get buried in downvotes. Big tech and a lot of HN seems to be vehemently left wing.
Let's see if they do it to this comment too.
Speaking of "cancel culture": HN is the only community where it tends to be almost accepted truth that Cloudflare or Youtube or Telegram doing anything to stop the vilest hate groups from using their platforms is tantamount to the end of democracy.
Do you know who ran Theranos? Do you know who ran Enron? Why not? Yes, there's a difference of a few years. I bet a text analysis would also show the female CEO being mentioned in connection with the demise of their company than the men do. See also: Ellen Pao.
HN went all-in on 'Gamergate'. For a brief time, it certainly did toy with the whole QAnon bullshit, although that went so crazy so fast, it couldn't take hold, thankfully.
It's more populism than right-wing canon these days, but this very thread has a few examples of mindless theorizing about the New Yorker picking its subjects with corrupt intentions. It is beyond me how someone would read this article and consider it a "hit piece", or anything a campaign or the CIA would want to see published. If the military-security-complex wants to change your thinking, they fly F-15 over football stadiums, not get the New England intelligentsia to put out 5,000 word essays sublimely sneaking in their ideas.
What's the alleged "darker side" that isn't just being (in part) a regular person?
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.
Depending on the laws, sometimes an altruist must do things that are illegal.
In the extreme case, consider that when authoritarian regimes round up ethnic or religious minorities, they invariably make non-cooperation with their attrocities illegal.
Laws should align with altruistic ideals, but it's a grave error to assume they always do.
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.
Altruism isn’t a fantasy like Robin Hood, there’s a way to do it correctly; it’s why Aaron was interested in policy. Dumb altruists are in a worst position, and giving out free information from the internet doesn’t affect libgen. Aaron was a dumb altruist in the way he didn’t just listen about how to download JSTOR articles.
So there's no place for a smart and motivated altruist in capitalism, because capitalism's oppression is what this person will fight and capitalism is usually the better fighter.
Smart altruists do become evil to be successful because of this, think of how many left-leaning idealistic early silicon valley types and their ethos was entirely shed to become, functionally, the same as any MBA or Chicago school economist and now, not capitalism's critic, but its driver and the wielder of the hammer that crushes people like Swartz or Lessig. Let's remember Steve Jobs, who is beloved and seen bizarrely as a "hippie" threatened Blackberry with his questionable patent portfolio over email because of "poaching." Poaching in this context being people leave jobs for better ones, but Steve felt a feudal-like ownership of his workers and used the corrupt mechanisms of capitalism to control them and suppress wages.
I'm sure there are other examples, but 'hippie turned ruthless capitalist' is pretty much the story of the boomer generation, who quickly figured out that they can get defeated by the system on some level, or they themselves become the oppressors. They chose to become the oppressors. The same is true of millennial idealism when its thrown out the window when you have an IPO looming, Facebook being the most obvious millennial led company that is about as evil as you can be for a webpage and app.
The problem with right-leaning entrepreneurship spaces like HN is that there's no class consciousness and no real capitalism critiques. So Swatz was killed by the "government" not the capitalism that government serves. Or like this article says he was a depressed immature weirdo, so this was unavoidable. Neither of that is true. He became a valid threat to capitalism and the hammer fell on him. If not via this prosecutor (who enforces laws written by the oligarchy) then by something else (see Jobs using civil suits as a defacto government himself). He could have been sued for damages for all the PDFs he "stole," for example, if the wealthy couldn't wield the DOJ to their liking.
I can't think of any high profile idealists, IP critics, or capitalist critics in online spaces today. The system took down Lessig, Swatz, Doctorow, etc pretty easily. Swatz, of course is dead, but the others are now marginalized characters no one cares about and copyright and patent reform an entirely dead political horse. Instead the pendulum has shifted to an outright worship of billionaires, to the point of putting one in the presidency and filling the cabinet with them, on top of questionable Elon and Bezos worship, which seemingly gets stronger by the day.
No one seems to talk about this, but the late 90s and early 2000's financial and IP idealism was entirely crushed by the system. Today's smart altruists saw this and I imagine they are going to pick the Steve Jobs path, not the Swartz path going forward. They don't want to get destroyed either.
Source: someone who is older and witnessed all this in real time and is heartbroken over how everything turned out
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.
"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.
It didn't. Read the Abelson report (which has been discussed ad nauseam in past HN threads). MIT did not want Swartz prosecuted, and told the prosecutor that. The prosecutor chose to go after Swartz anyway. MIT's error was that they didn't push back harder on the prosecutor (for example, by making a clearer public statement along the lines of the one JSTOR made, that since the stolen data was returned, no further action was necessary or desired).
> Clearly the MIT administration wanted to make an example of Swartz
No, it didn't. It just made an error of judgment (described above). It had nothing against Swartz and was not trying to make an example of him. The Federal prosecutor was the one trying to do that.
from the Abelson report (pg 53, https://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.p...):
"With regard to substance, MIT would make no statements, whether in support or in opposition, about the government’s decision to prosecute Aaron Swartz"
Am I missing something? Been a while since I read the report in full.
"While MIT did not conform precisely to this rule, in this sense of similar responses MIT—broadly speaking—did not side with the prosecution, nor did it side with the defense. In consequence of the differences in the powers, timing, and goals of the two parties in the case, neutrality in responses was not consistent with neutrality in outcomes, and MIT was not neutral in outcomes."
I agree that MIT was not trying to make an example out of him. But it wasn't that "they didn't push back harder on the prosecutor", it was that they didn't push back at all. The Ableson report correctly criticizes MIT for this.
> This 'public-private' partnership situation has corrupted American academics, placing the profitability of research well ahead of the accuracy and reliability of research.
Private profitability research is no different. I don’t understand what you mean by losing accuracy, for some research corporate hardware or copyrighted work is required or the best choice.
I thought they gave the ability for other pharma to make the mRNA drugs that require incredible investment, to make it seem open.
Most of the information we mentioned is out there now. But it’s much more fun watching tiktoks and liking posts.
Prior to that, if academics wanted to get involved in industry and make some money thereby, the route to take was called consulting, which seems fine with me, as long as conflicts of interest are stated honestly.
MIT was called Boston Tech when it was founded in 1861 to bring to life William Barton Rogers's vision for a “new polytechnic institute”
Pretty hard slap, that.
[0]https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/why-did-...
Sometimes, the law is unjust and it is greater injustice to administer any punishment at all.
