The Idealists

by Justin Peters

  The author of Moral Mazes, the sociologist Robert Jackall, described the middle manager’s world as one characterized by compromise and justifications; a system in which managers are often rewarded for doing things that are bad for society but good for their employer. Most institutions, he demonstrated, were built for self-perpetuation. Their employees and partisans were expected to act with the health of the institution in mind, regardless of what the consequences of their actions might mean for the general welfare. The central lesson of the book, according to Swartz: “Corporate managers simply aren’t allowed to be moral, or even reasonable. And those who try are simply weeded out.”

  Swartz was thus ambivalent about the Condé Nast deal, about potentially becoming a cog in a corporate machine. The negotiations lasted for months, and they just exacerbated the tensions that had grown between Swartz, Huffman, and Ohanian. “We all started getting touchy from the stress and lack of productive work,” Swartz wrote. “We began screaming at each other and then not talking to each other and then launching renewed efforts to work together only to have the screaming begin again.”41 Swartz retreated further into himself, avoiding work and his colleagues, while Huffman effectively assumed the responsibilities of Reddit’s only full-time programmer. “The situation was so toxic we were, like, ‘This is not gonna succeed; we should just sell while we can,’ ” Huffman remembered.42 At times, it felt as if Reddit might implode before the Condé Nast deal was consummated.

  Finally, the sale went through on October 31, 2006. “Good news for the Reddit folks. And maybe a very very smart move by CondeNet,” enthused tech commentator David Weinberger.43 “I happen to think that the kind of thing Digg and Reddit and Netscape.com are doing makes a lot of sense as part of a media property of some kind,” commented the blogger Mathew Ingram. “No word so far on whether the rumoured price of $65-million has any relationship to reality (I would be suprised [sic] if it was anything close to that).”44 Though the terms of the deal were never publicly disclosed, the most common estimates for Not a Bug’s purchase price fall somewhere between $10 and $20 million. Swartz, an equal equity partner in Not a Bug with Huffman and Ohanian, gave Simon Carstensen some of his own share, in thanks for Carstensen’s early work on Infogami. Even after that, Swartz almost certainly received a seven-figure payout.45

  The night their company was acquired, the newly wealthy entrepreneurs celebrated in Harvard Square. Ohanian and Huffman were exuberant, distributing free Reddit T-shirts to pedestrians, flirting with girls wearing Halloween costumes. But Swartz was oddly sullen. He had dressed as a dot-com millionaire, his costume consisting of a steady gaze and an angry expression. As the evening progressed, the Reddit crew migrated to a bar in Harvard Square. Swartz grew more upset. “I didn’t want to be here, I didn’t want to know these people,” he confessed. “I went home instead and watched a show about a serial killer and found myself identifying with the lead.”46

  The Condé Nast deal required the Not a Bug cofounders to move to San Francisco, where they would work from the offices of Wired News. Huffman and Ohanian figured—hoped—that Swartz would take his money and depart. Instead, Swartz decided to stick with the company and relocate to California. He was unhappy from his first day of work at the new office: a large, airy space filled with lots of curious, talkative coworkers. It was, to say the least, a material improvement from the apartment where Reddit had been built. To Swartz, it was a velvet coffin. “The first day I showed up here, I simply couldn’t take it,” he wrote on his personal blog at the time. “By lunch time I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying.”47

  Swartz’s behavior was more than a little melodramatic. By normal adult standards, nothing was particularly wrong with Reddit. But it was a job, and that was what Swartz found so hard to take. Having a job meant subsuming your personal priorities to your employer’s, deferring your own ambitions to focus on the perfection of your product. Unfortunately, Swartz didn’t believe in the product, and he wasn’t good at pretending otherwise. He quickly shifted from crying at the office to avoiding it entirely. He worked from home, when he worked at all. In December 2006, he traveled to Europe to attend a computer conference and didn’t inform his colleagues of his plan; his whereabouts were revealed when his photo, as a conference attendee, appeared on the front page of the Wired website. After the conference, instead of returning to San Francisco, he went back to Boston, where he retreated to his old apartment and began working his way through David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest.

  His unreliability could no longer be tolerated. “He came to the office for the third time ever,” Steve Huffman remembered. “I was the only employee there. And I turned to him and said, ‘Dude, why are you even here?’ Just leave, right? That’s what we thought would happen.”48 It’s doubtful whether Swartz himself even understood why he was there. He’d spent the last two years working against his nature, following other people’s directions down unfamiliar paths. And he appeared to have lost his way.

  On January 18, 2007, while still in Massachusetts, Swartz posted to his blog a short story that resembled nothing so much as a suicide note. The protagonist was a young man named Aaron with “body image issues” who couldn’t stand the sight of himself. The “Aaron” character slowly starved himself to a cadaverous state. His friends deserted him. He grew listless. Eventually, he sought death:

  The day Aaron killed himself, he was awoken by pains, worse than ever. He rolled back-and-forth in bed as the sun came up, the light streaming through the windows eliminating the chance for any further sleep. At 9, he was startled by a phone call. The pains subsided, as if quieting down to better hear what the phone might say.

  It was his boss. He had not been to work all week. He had been fired. Aaron tried to explain himself, but couldn’t find the words. He hung up the phone instead.

  The day Aaron killed himself, he wandered his apartment in a daze.49

  Later, Swartz insisted that the story was entirely fictional and chided those who saw it as a cry for help. “I was deathly ill when I came back from Europe; I spent a week basically lying in bed clutching my stomach,” Swartz wrote.50 “I wrote a morose blog post in an attempt to cheer myself up about a guy who died. (Writing cheers me up and the only thing I could write in that frame of mind was going to be morose.)”

  Still, the story alarmed his coworkers enough that they dispatched the Cambridge police to Swartz’s apartment to prevent him from killing himself. Swartz’s mother called to break the news. “Alexis called the cops,” she said. Faced with an impending unpleasant situation he could neither avoid nor control, Swartz responded with what was becoming habitual behavior: he ran. “I just make it,” he wrote later. “I see the cops coming in front of my door as I make it to the next block.” The cops entered Swartz’s building. They knocked on his door. Then, getting no response, they broke the door down.51

  Swartz was fine, but his relationship with Condé Nast and his Reddit colleagues was beyond repair. “I am presented with a letter accepting my resignation,” Swartz wrote in January 2007, a few days after posting his suicide story. “I am told to collect my ‘personal effects.’ A woman from HR politely escorts me from the premises. She never says that she is escorting me, but she does stand behind me wherever I go. I think I am supposed to leave.

  “I leave. The sun is shining brightly. It’s a beautiful day.”52

  * * *

  SWARTZ’S departure from Reddit roughly coincided with the beginning of his first serious romantic relationship. He moved in with the writer and artist Quinn Norton, whom he’d met at the Emerging Technologies conference in 2002, when he was fifteen and Norton was in a long-term polyamorous relationship with two men. Now Swartz was an adult and Norton was single. She was also thirteen years older than him, but Swartz had never had a problem with wide age disparities. They began as roommates. They soon became more.

  Unchained from corporate life, in love for the first time ever—“[falling in love] takes
a shockingly huge amount of time!” he noted on his blog53—Swartz spent the first half of 2007 reflecting on his life and his future, and continuing to clarify his objections to Silicon Valley culture. The “animals” of his generation were being incentivized to use their talents on websites that were “the mental equivalent of snack food,” he wrote in March 2007.54 Though computer technology could theoretically be employed to solve many of the world’s problems, such an outcome “requires people to sit down and build tools that solve them. Which, as long as programmers are all competing to create the world’s most popular timewaster, it doesn’t seem like anyone is going to do.” On his website, he posted a quote from a writer named Paul Ford on the differences between for-profit and nonprofit endeavor: “If you work for a startup you can fool yourself into believing that the reward will be eternal wealth, but I work for a nonprofit, and the reward is: I did a thing, and I doubt I’ll ever do anything like it again.”55 Swartz started to pursue projects that could deliver these sorts of intangible rewards.

  In July 2007, Swartz took to his blog to announce a project of this sort. “Early this year, when I left my job at Wired Digital, I thought I could look forward to months of lounging around San Francisco, reading books on the beach and drinking fine champagne and eating foie gras,” he wrote facetiously. “Then I got a phone call.”56 The phone call was from Brewster Kahle, who wanted Swartz to help him build the ultimate online library.

  Since driving his bookmobile to Washington for the Eldred v. Ashcroft arguments, Kahle had continued his flamboyant efforts to bring public-domain literature to the public. In 2005, he and others founded an organization called the Open Content Alliance, a consortium of libraries, publishers, and technology companies that agreed to collaborate in digitally scanning books and making them accessible online. “The ancient library of Alexandria collected 75 per cent of all the books of all the peoples of the world in 300 BC,” Kahle told the New Statesman in October 2005. “Our opportunity is to do that again, but then to one-up the ancients by making it available universally.”57 The Open Content Alliance eventually helped digitize more than one million books—which, while a substantial number, fell far short of Kahle’s ultimate ambition.58 “Brewster is a collector,” one of Kahle’s collaborators told Elisabeth A. Jones during an interview for her dissertation, “Constructing the Universal Library.” “Have you ever met any collectors? Whether they collect maps or cars, they just . . . are acquisitive of STUFF. And that’s what he is. And collectors don’t stop until they’ve got all the stuff.”59

  The Open Content Alliance was formed in response to Google Print for Libraries, Google’s hugely ambitious attempt to visit academic libraries with advanced scanning machines and systematically digitize every single book in those libraries’ collections. It appeared to be the most significant step yet toward making the infinite library a reality, and, indeed, Google today stores many complete public-domain texts on its servers, which can be read and downloaded by anyone.60 The problem, as Kahle saw it circa 2005, was that Google seemed less interested in building a vast online library than in building a vast online bookstore. “We have been very clear that we want to build a book-finding tool, not a book-reading tool,” a Google Print official told the San Francisco Chronicle.61 The project would not create an organized, browsable online library. Instead, it would present limited excerpts that would direct Web users toward retailers where they could purchase the books in question.

  The Open Content Alliance wanted to offer an open alternative to Google Print. “As the project proceeded, Kahle’s drumbeat of Google criticism grew steadily louder and more strident,” wrote Jones. “By 2007, his rhetoric about the company had begun to consistently position it—literally—as an Orwellian information overlord, hungry to absorb and privatize not only the entire library world, but the entire information ecosystem.”62 In a bid to thwart Google’s tentacular machinations, Kahle came up with Open Library, another hugely ambitious project that proposed the creation of a separate webpage for every single book that had ever been published. Kahle asked Swartz to help him build it. The site would contain identifying information on each book, and, if available, a link to an online version of the book that a curious reader could browse for free.

  Swartz came aboard to build the site’s user interface and supervise its metadata implementation. “Our goal is to build the world’s greatest library, then put it up on the Internet free for all to use and edit,” Swartz wrote on his blog when the site launched in July 2007. “Books are the place you go when you have something you want to share with the world—our planet’s cultural legacy. And never has there been a bigger attempt to bring them all together.”63 For free, anyway.

  * * *

  IN October 2007, a year to the day that Not a Bug had been acquired by Condé Nast, Swartz announced on his blog that he had started writing a novel. Called Bubble City, it concerned the start-up scene in San Francisco; he promised to post the chapters to his blog as he finished them. “A novel is disguised memoir, as anyone who is friends with a novelist can readily discern,” wrote Swartz. “And, like a memoir, writing them can be therapeutic, exorcising a writer’s demons, while hopefully being more entertaining.”64

  The novel was set at a small news-aggregation start-up called Newsflip, a barely disguised version of Reddit. The protagonist was a Swartz stand-in named Jason: a new Newsflip hire with a true heart, a keen mind, and terrible social skills. “Curiosity and courtesy were behaviors he had worked hard to learn to imitate so that others didn’t find him too strange,” Swartz wrote, “but he did his best to make sure other people took no more than a couple hours of his time.”65

  The plot, such as it was, involved Jason’s discovery that the code that ran Newsflip had deliberately been corrupted. The site was supposed to work like this: A user logged in, and Newsflip tracked his activity. Eventually, the site took the information it had compiled about the user’s habits and preferences to surface the sorts of stories that the user would want to read. But some malign entity had altered the code to show users the stories of the entity’s choosing.66

  That malign entity turned out to be Google, which specialized in projects that appeared to be for the public’s benefit, in keeping with its unofficial corporate motto: “Don’t be evil.” In Bubble City, Swartz opined on this hollow-hearted promise. “Don’t Be Evil was some hacker’s PR ploy that got out of hand,” Swartz wrote. “Paul Buchheit, the guy who made Gmail, suggested it in an early meeting and Amit Patel, another early Googler starting [sic] writing it on whiteboards everywhere. A journalist saw it and the rest was history—but don’t be mistaken, it was never official corporate policy.”67

  How could it be? Moral Mazes had taught Swartz that companies cared first and foremost about their own survival and self-perpetuation, and evaluated their business strategies based on those criteria. If it was more profitable to be good than evil, then a company would be good. If it was more profitable to be evil than good, then a company would be evil.

  As a teenager in Chicago, Swartz maintained a blog about Google’s products and internal affairs, which proved so popular that he had been invited to Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters for a tour and a visit. By the time he turned twenty-one, his enthusiasm had curdled. With a heavy hand, Swartz depicted Google in Bubble City as a ruthless, all-powerful organization that would stop at nothing—not even murder—to get its way, and its employees and partners as weak-willed collaborators who were forever devising justifications for the compromises forced upon them. As one character in the book put it, “There were a lot of other evils out there to fight, and if working with Google made him more effective at fighting those, wasn’t it, on balance, a good thing? And the free food was nice too.”68

  Apathy and amoral corporate solipsism ultimately lay at the tale’s heart of darkness. Compromise and rationalization were attitudes that stained the soul. Bubble City, which Swartz never finished, breaks off with Jason on the run after discovering Google’s secret,
while Google invests all its power and energy to track him down. “ ‘So what do you do when you find him?’ Wayne asked. ‘The usual,’ Samuel said as if it was obvious. ‘Co-opt or destroy.’ ”69

  Swartz published eleven chapters of Bubble City before becoming sick with ulcerative colitis. His odd eating habits—he favored bland, white foods, such as plain rice—were efforts to manage a lifelong medical condition that was debilitating when it flared up. “Huge pains grind through my stomach, like it’s trying to leap out of my body,” Swartz wrote on his blog at the time. “Food is always followed by pain, followed by running to the bathroom.”70 He juxtaposed this description of his digestive ailment with an account of what it felt like to be depressed. “Surely there have been times when you’ve been sad,” he wrote. “Perhaps a loved one has abandoned you or a plan has gone horribly awry. Your face falls. Perhaps you cry. You feel worthless. You wonder whether it’s worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak—the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either.” It’s hard to say which condition sounds worse.

  Swartz no longer had time for ambivalence, or to make foreign suns the center of his universe. On his blog, he described how alienated he felt in San Francisco: “When I go to coffee shops or restaurants I can’t avoid people talking about load balancers or databases. The conversations are boring and obsessed with technical trivia, or worse, business antics.”71 Furthermore, he hated the noise of the city, which was inconducive to serious, sustained thought and concentration. The place was filled with people saying things they didn’t believe, that they couldn’t believe, as if, by some extraordinary mass delusion, they had collectively confused the inessential with the elemental, noise with signal.