The Idealists

by Justin Peters

  He returned to California the next evening and arrived at his dorm room to find his roommates busy on their computers, unaware that Swartz’s life had just changed. Swartz didn’t bother to tell them. “I put my computer away and go to sleep,” he wrote, “sleeping the sleep of a man who, whatever his surroundings, knows that at heart he is a capitalist.”17

  * * *

  BUT Swartz proved to be no more adept at capitalism than he was at college. When Stanford’s spring semester wrapped up, Swartz moved to Cambridge to begin work on Infogami alongside one collaborator, the young Danish programmer Simon Carstensen, whom Swartz had met online. “Aaron ended up renting this dorm room at MIT, and that’s where we worked over the summer on Infogami,” said Carstensen.18 The room was small and hot, and the sense of sweaty claustrophobia was heightened because the two men were virtual strangers. “When I arrived in Boston, I knocked on the door [of the MIT dorm room]. We both looked at each other. We’d never met. And we were going to be here for two months,” Carstensen recalled. “It was weird.”

  It remained weird. As the summer progressed, the eighteen-year-old Swartz’s deficiencies as a manager and collaborator became evident. Swartz didn’t trust Carstensen’s code and rewrote much of it himself. “It was a very tough summer,” Carstensen remembered, and when it was over he returned to Denmark. “[Swartz] asked me to keep working on the project, and I decided not to,” said Carstensen. Unfazed, Swartz decided to stay in Cambridge and to keep building Infogami by himself. His inability to successfully do so made him frustrated and depressed. “The whole experience was incredibly trying. There were many days when I felt like my head was going to literally explode,” he wrote. “One Sunday I decided I’d finally had enough of it [Infogami]. I went to talk to Paul Graham, the only person who had kept me going through these months. ‘This is it,’ I told him. ‘If I don’t get either funding, a partner, or an apartment by the end of this week, I’m giving up.’ Paul did his best to talk me out of it and come up with solutions, but I still couldn’t see any way out.”19

  Eventually, Graham suggested that Infogami merge with another understaffed Summer Founders start-up: a social bookmarking website called Reddit, which let users share and discover links to interesting online content. Graham had pitched Swartz to Reddit’s two original founders, Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, as a savvy programmer who could help them develop their website and take it to new heights. Swartz, meanwhile, could draw on the Reddit team for help with Infogami. Ohanian and Huffman bought in, and by November 2005, Infogami and Reddit had merged, forming a new umbrella company called Not a Bug. But what at the time felt to Swartz like a fresh start soon turned out to be yet another disappointment.

  “There was a time, for a couple of months, when we were, like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna start this new thing, and it’s gonna be bigger than Reddit, bigger than Infogami,’ ” Huffman recalled.20 “And then it became pretty clear a few months in that that was not going to be the case.” Ohanian and Huffman were recent graduates of the University of Virginia and close friends. Swartz was an introvert with an interloper complex. As he wrote on his blog in 2005, “I’m afraid of asking for things from people, even the tech support guy on the phone; I’m excellent at managing m[y] own free time, and thus distasteful of structured activities; I have trouble making friends with people my own age; and I hate competition.”21

  After an initial burst of productivity, during which Swartz and Huffman collaborated to rewrite Reddit’s code in the Python programming language and build a backend database that could support both Reddit and Infogami, Swartz’s working relationship with his new colleagues deteriorated. Infogami lay fallow as the more popular Reddit became Not a Bug’s top priority, and Swartz was dispirited by this outcome. “It’s not that I don’t enjoy my work; it’s just that I feel like I’m getting dumber doing it,” he wrote.22 While his colleagues spent their days and nights programming the website and bootstrapping the business, Swartz consciously played third wheel, working inconsistently on Reddit while pursuing other interests: running for a seat on the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, sitting in on random college lectures, incessantly blogging. He lost weight experimenting with fad diets. (“Friends and acquaintances urge me to eat more, doctors think I’m sick, family members suggest I have an eating disorder,” he wrote.)23 He acquired a sleeping bag and spent an evening in mock-homelessness, sleeping outdoors in the recessed entrance of a bookstore in Harvard Square.24 “What was so hard about that? I thought.”

  Swartz’s privileged youth showed itself in moments like these. “My grandfather was a capitalist. My father was a capitalist. I went to elementary school and junior high in the sixth-richest city in America. I went to high school in the third-richest,” he wrote in April 2005.25 His parents had had the wherewithal to underwrite his youthful exceptionalism; he had been free to opt out of systems that did not regard him as special. It is easy to sleep on the street when you know you are doing so by choice; it is easy to shirk tedious tasks when your well-being has never hinged on their completion.

  Aaron Swartz was nineteen years old when Reddit and Infogami merged, ferociously intelligent but inexperienced with life, thrust into an environment that demanded more maturity and commitment than he could supply. Not a Bug needed him to be one thing: a programming animal. Swartz refused to accept those constraints. “I don’t want to be a programmer,” Swartz wrote on his blog in May 2006.26 “When I look at programming books, I am more tempted to mock them than to read them. When I go to programmer conferences, I’d rather skip out and talk politics than programming. And writing code, although it can be enjoyable, is hardly something I want to spend my life doing.”

  Swartz harbored more intangible ambitions. As early as March 2005, back before he had left college to chase start-up riches, Swartz had described his burgeoning disillusionment with the programmer’s life. When an acquaintance asked Swartz why he switched majors “from computer science to sociology, I said it was because Computer Science was hard and I wasn’t really good at it, which really isn’t true at all. The real reason is because I want to save the world.”27

  Since the days of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, young men and women have yearned to save the world: to live according to their ideals and spend their days fighting social injustice and effecting substantive change. This dream is usually abandoned with age, deferred into idle bar-stool radicalism and the occasional protest vote. The world has many problems, and even the most effective individual would be unlikely to solve all of them absent divine intervention or black magic.

  The novelist Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Third Law states, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is also true that any sufficiently advanced technology encourages magical thinking. New technologies are indistinguishable from magic wands, imbued with great and implausible powers that can transcend societal barriers and the laws of thermodynamics. Silicon Valley is rife with examples of aspiring messiahs touting the world-historical potential of their products. These promises are generally unfalsifiable, which is why they are simultaneously so attractive and so empty.

  The informaticists Rob Kling and Roberta Lamb have argued that “talk about new technologies offers a new canvas in which to reshape social relationships so they better fit the speaker’s imagination.”28 Since his early teens, Swartz had imagined a world free from “laws that restrict what bits I can put on my website,”29 a world where culture could not be owned.30 Occasionally—only just—Swartz encountered other people his age who felt the same way.

  In June of 2005, just before relocating to Massachusetts, Swartz traveled to Washington, DC, to attend a conference on free culture. There, he met three young political activists from Worcester, Massachusetts—Holmes Wilson, Nicholas Reville, and Tiffiniy Cheng—who had been living out their ideals for a while and had enjoyed some success at grabbing the world’s attention. Swartz had met Wilson before, in San Francisco, and had marked their meeting on his blog
, writing that Wilson was a “very cool guy,” but, surprisingly, “less radical than Downhill Battle’s extremism led me to believe.”31

  The advocacy group Swartz referred to, Downhill Battle, argued vehemently in favor of digital file sharing. Wilson and Reville had founded it in 2003, just as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), like a dying wasp reflexively stinging everything in its flight path, tried to frighten America’s digital music downloaders away from their computers and back to Best Buy where they belonged. In that year, the RIAA filed suit against 261 Internet users nationwide whose online history indicated that they had illegally shared music files over the Internet; the trade organization sought exorbitant financial damages in reparation. (A brief personal aside: One of the people who was sued was my mother, whose name was on the Internet account that my teenage sister used to illicitly share some tracks by Destiny’s Child and O-Town. My mother has never illicitly shared anything in her life. My mother was named Woman of the Year by her church.)

  The Downhill Battle activists mounted a flamboyant protest of the RIAA’s tactics. They designed some black-on-red stickers reading “WARNING! Buying this CD funds lawsuits against children and families”—a grassroots version of the famed “Parental Advisory” tags. Then they visited various chain retailers and surreptitiously affixed the agitprop to unsold CDs by major-label musicians. Their efforts didn’t end with principled consumer vandalism, though: Downhill Battle also created a “Peer-to-Peer Legal Defense Fund” to help individual defendants contest the RIAA lawsuits.

  The group found other targets for its ire, too. When the iTunes online music store launched in 2003, for instance, Downhill Battle released a parody of the iTunes interface dubbed “iTunes iSbogus” and argued that the Apple music marketplace exploited both artists and consumers. Rather than use the Internet to create a better music-sales system that returned a higher percentage of profits to singers and songwriters, iTunes simply duplicated the existing model, in which the bulk of the profits went to the distributors. This wasn’t innovation, Downhill Battle argued; this was the same imbalanced system in a new, streamlined skin. “If you want to support the musicians you love, the best way to begin is by downloading the song for free on a filesharing network,” they wrote. “Then send them what you want to give, no middleman.”32

  This particular idea was more than a little starry-eyed. “If you want to make digital music distribution work, then send your favorite musicians whatever you want, if you want, no obligation” isn’t a business model so much as a magic wish. While a few musicians would, years later, find some success with the “pay what you can, and don’t worry if you can’t” strategy, most of these had already developed large fan bases during their years with major record labels. Emerging artists would find it exceedingly difficult to earn a sustainable living from such an ad hoc business model.

  Nevertheless, the members of Downhill Battle were living out their principles, and Swartz admired them for it. After a full year at Stanford among young people who neither knew nor cared about the intellectual justifications for free culture, Swartz was invigorated by the Worcester group. “At a time when most copyright activists were painstakingly careful to insist they opposed downloading copyrighted music and arguing that the music industry should find a way to make downloading music legal, the website’s opposition to one of the first moves in this direction and its full-throated support of file-sharing software was nothing less than shocking,” Swartz wrote of Downhill Battle’s position.33 The young activists aggressively defended their beliefs and fearlessly engaged with their ideological opponents. They were comfortable with themselves and their place in the world.

  Swartz could not say the same for himself. He got along reasonably well at tech conferences, surrounded by introverted computer programmers in GNU Project T-shirts and cargo shorts. But he was clumsy and self-conscious around most other people his own age. His cringe-worthy account of his first collegiate party—“Teenagers moving their bodies in bizarre and vaguely rhythmic positions in close proximity to one another. I’d seen the practice frequently enough on TV, so on one level I knew what to expect, but on another it was wholly bizarre”34—underscored his physical and social distance from his age-group peers.

  He wrote of attending a house party with the Worcester people and retreating alone to the kitchen “with a neck ache” when the music swelled, the lights dimmed, and most of the attendees began to dance. Swartz was used to self-segregating while other people had fun; this was likely a way to minimize his social anxieties and camouflage his discomfort with his own body. At this particular party, however, Holmes Wilson came into the kitchen and asked Swartz if he was happy sitting on his own. “Because I want to know if I should pressure you to come join us and I know there are some people who are just totally OK with who they are,” said Wilson.

  Swartz paused. “Well, right now, this person I am right now, has no desire to go dancing. But I’m beginning to wonder if I should be a different sort of person.”35

  Over the weekend of the conference, Swartz and the Worcester activists explored Washington, DC, going to restaurants, skateboarding—“things go too fast and I arch my back and scrape my wrist and knee,” Swartz wrote. They even sneaked the eighteen-year-old Swartz into a bar for the first time in his life. (“It’s quite stylish, with globe lights and fake branches as plants,” Swartz observed.) Swartz’s account of the experience was one of the longest and happiest blog posts he had ever written, evincing a palpable sense of self-discovery. “I hang out with Tiffiniy on the front steps for a bit and then she grabs my hand and drags me across the street and over a fence, up some stairs into this amazing urban meadow between two houses that’s been allowed to run wild, grass growing tall and crawling up a defunct fountain in the middle,” he wrote. “ ‘Isn’t this beautiful?’ she asks and indeed it is. After some time we head back and some time after that she heads off with some people to a bar. ‘Do you want to come?’ she asks and I do but I also don’t want to cause trouble again so I stay behind and head back to the hotel, looking at myself in the hotel’s many mirrors, checking out how I look in the tight-fitting Downhill Battle tee they gave me.”36

  In a time of life when Swartz was trying on identities, “free culture activist” seemed to fit him well.

  * * *

  IN the middle of 2006, Condé Nast, the parent company of Wired, the New Yorker, and many other magazines, expressed interest in acquiring Not a Bug. Despite the tensions between Swartz and his colleagues, Reddit attracted roughly five hundred thousand unique visitors per month.37 Although most of the site’s users probably didn’t realize it, they were Reddit’s product. Their attention and loyalty could be sold to advertisers eager to promote their goods on the site; their browsing and sharing histories could conceivably be mined for a wealth of personal information that could also be sold off. Content producers could, theoretically, even pay to have Reddit show users their stories. If attention was currency on the nascent social Web, then Reddit seemed primed for riches.

  The prospective acquisition presented Swartz with an existential quandary. Though he claimed to not care about money, he didn’t object to having or making it. But he wondered whether he and his colleagues actually deserved the sums under discussion. On his blog, Swartz openly questioned Reddit’s real value, recounting a conversation with an author who was astounded at the site’s popularity:

  “So it’s just a list of links?” he said. “And you don’t even write them yourselves?” I nodded. “But there’s nothing to it!” he insisted. “Why is it so popular?”

  Inside the bubble, nobody asks this inconvenient question. We just mumble things like “democratic news” or “social bookmarking” and everybody just assumes it all makes sense. But looking at this guy, I realized I had no actual justification. It was just a list of links. And we didn’t even write them ourselves.38

  Just a list of links. That assessment wasn’t quite accurate. Years later, Reddit would develop i
nto one of the Internet’s most robust community platforms, a site that brings disparate users together to form interest groups, converse, and collaborate. In 2006, though, Swartz didn’t foresee this massive popularity—or, if he did, he wasn’t about to wait five years for the site to find its legs. A list of links wasn’t what Swartz had left college to work on. “You can say a site is cool, stupid, popular, a flop, innovative, or clichéd,” Swartz wrote on his blog. “But the one thing you can’t say, the one thing that everybody skips over, is that these sites aren’t anything serious.”39 Silicon Valley seemed, to Swartz, to operate on an inverted moral calculus that granted start-ups rewards disproportionate to the value they added to the world. Swartz was leery of acculturating to that sort of environment.

  The summer before he enrolled at Stanford University, Swartz had read a book called Moral Mazes, an ethnographic study of middle management at several large corporations. (He later called Moral Mazes his favorite book of all time.) On his blog, Swartz remarked that the book “tells the story of a company, chosen essentially at random, and through careful investigation from top to bottom explains precisely how it operates, with the end result of explaining how so many well-intentioned people can end up committing so much evil.”40