The Idealists

by Justin Peters

  In March 2008, Swartz traveled to Calgary to address a group of young Canadian leaders at the Banff Forum, an annual festival of conventional wisdom for the middlebrow elite attended by people with expensive business cards that suggested nothing whatsoever about emergent cultural anarchy. The topic of Swartz’s panel was “The Internet and Mass Collaboration,” and the discussion focused on their implications for politics, business, and rentier capitalism. Swartz stated what he believed. Free culture wasn’t a business model in disguise. It was a revolution:

  The rhetoric often suggests that some magical force of “peer production” or “mass collaboration” has written an encyclopedia or created a video library. Such forces do not exist; instead there are only individual people, the same kind of people who drive everything else.

  The power is that these people are collaborating. But they are collaborating because they have come together to form a community. And a community works because it has shared values. But here’s the thing: these shared values are profoundly anti-business. [Laughs from the audience.] I mean, look at Wikipedia. This is a group who wakes up every day and tries to put the encyclopedia publishers out of business by providing a collection of world knowledge they can give away to everyone for free.

  If you want someone to do your company’s work for you, finding a well-organized online community with strong anti-business values seems like a bad idea. [Laughs.]

  So what do you do? I have a friend who is even more brash than I am and when anyone asks her for business advice she tells them simply: Well, in the future, your servants are going to rise up and eat you. So, invest in toothpicks.72

  Upon leaving Stanford, Swartz had called himself a capitalist. By early 2008, he had tossed that self-portrait into the dustbin of history. That spring, Swartz prepared to return to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he would busy himself biting the hands of the business world that had once tried to feed him. His days in Silicon Valley were behind him forever.

  7

  GUERILLA OPEN ACCESS

  As long as man has lived in society, he has yearned to escape that society and run off to live in a cave. This dream is usually abandoned once the would-be escapee realizes that caves are uncomfortable and that society is where his things are. The material comforts of civilization are magnetic, indeed, and those few individuals who do escape society’s pull are almost always drawn by some more powerful force, love or religion or misanthropy or madness, occasionally all at once.

  Faith first brought Paolo Giustiniani to the Caves of Massaccio in 1520, faith and disaffection.1 Born to a noble Venetian family, Giustiniani traded his finery for a friar’s habit and joined the Camaldolese, a religious order founded in 1012 by the monk Romuald, who counseled his followers to “put the whole world behind you and forget it.”2 But such exhortations are easier to address than to follow—the world has a way of intruding, even in a cloister. Giustiniani found monastic life insufficiently contemplative, and his fellow monks insufficiently detached from the outside world. When his brethren balked at his suggestion that they resuscitate Romuald’s rule, Giustiniani left the community, in search of a spot where he and others could live apart in silence and self-abnegation, contemplating the wickedness of the world and the glories of God, in hopes that the latter would soon obviate the former.3

  He found his hermitage in a canyon near Cupramontana, in central Italy, where earlier travelers had carved a warren of caves into the rough tuffaceous rock. The caves offered shelter and silence; the canyon was sylvan, serene. In a letter to a friend, Giustiniani noted that he was forced to write “on my knees, not even having a stool.”4 But if you wanted to save the world, you had to first be willing to forsake it. Giustiniani moved in. Others soon followed. For centuries, the monks lived there in the transcendent quiet.

  Then modernity came, and with it came disrepair. As went the monastery, so went the friars; vocations, like buildings, can grow worn and weathered.5 The few remaining monks dispersed between the First and Second World Wars, and today the entire property is deconsecrated and privately held, used as a retreat and conference space by secular groups that also seek to escape society, if only for days at a time.6

  Though it has evolved from its original purpose, the hermitage still stands as a monument to radical idealism, a physical reminder that we have a choice, that we are not bound inextricably to social convention. It takes courage to opt out of the world, its comforts and vices, in pursuit of less tangible rewards, but it can be done. Uncomfortable as caves may be, we can eventually learn to live in them. If society makes no sense, we can always stop listening. If the world disappoints us, we can leave it behind.

  * * *

  WHEN he came to Cupramontana in the summer of 2008, Aaron Swartz had already made his choice. Like Giustiniani, he had known great wealth and had deemed it curiously insubstantial. “A friend told me to be sure not to let the money change me,” Swartz wrote on his blog in November 2006, less than a week after Condé Nast had purchased Not a Bug. “ ‘How could it possibly do that?’ I asked. ‘Well, first you’d buy a fancy new car.’ ‘I don’t know how to drive.’ ‘Then you’d buy a big house in the suburbs.’ ‘I like living in small apartments.’ ‘And you’d start wearing expensive clothes.’ ‘I’ve worn a t-shirt and jeans practically every day of my life.’ ”7

  The brass ring he had grabbed turned out to be an anchor, leaving him mired in other people’s priorities. “Let’s say you want to make a difference in the world. You can learn a skill and go into a profession, where you get bossed around and told exactly what to do by people more powerful than you,” Swartz wrote two months after leaving Reddit. “Want to actually make a difference? You’ll have to buck the system instead of joining it.”8

  “The system,” in all its incarnations, that vague authoritarian stronghold of imprecise menace and organizational inefficiency, had long been Swartz’s primary antagonist. Organized schooling, traditional employment—all of these existed in opposition to Swartz’s brand of restless, polymathic nonconformism. Systems exist to perpetuate themselves, so they naturally discourage deviance and promote pliant, normative behavior. “The system,” in Swartz’s understanding, was designed to sustain those who controlled it and to marginalize those who were unwilling or unable to comply.

  Before college, Swartz read a book called Understanding Power, a series of transcribed discussions with the MIT linguist Noam Chomsky in which Chomsky analyzed and explained the ways in which political power is wielded, acquired, and guarded. Chomsky’s theme was the system—and, particularly, defenders in the mass media. A political logic determines everything that does and does not appear in the press. By design the mass media validates and legitimizes the system while excluding unfamiliar perspectives.

  Understanding Power resonated with Swartz like few other books he’d read. “The Book That Changed My Life,” Swartz called it in a blog post from May 2006. “Reading the book, I felt as if my mind was rocked by explosions. At times the ideas were too much that I literally had to lie down. . . . Ever since then, I’ve realized that I need to spend my life working to fix the shocking brokenness I’d discovered.”9 At age twenty-one, he was starting to do so in earnest.

  Years after he first read Chomsky’s book, Swartz thought he understood power pretty well. Knowledge is power. Therefore, free, unimpeded access to information is an inherently political issue, not just a slogan to be monetized or a memorable line in a presentation to a venture capitalist. Open data, attractively presented, can promote organizational transparency. Open access to culture and scholarship can expand perspectives and open minds. By sharing knowledge with people, you can empower them to better apprehend the world and to act on that new apprehension.

  In June 2007, Lawrence Lessig also decided to buck the system. On his personal blog, Lessig announced that he was going to stop working on copyright issues and instead shift his focus to political corruption. Lamenting that “our government can’t understand basic facts when strong i
nterests have an interest in its misunderstanding,” Lessig characterized “corruption” as the product of excessive money in politics.10 Take the Sonny Bono Act debates, for instance. Congress passed a copyright term extension that enriched the entertainment industry at the expense of the public domain—a decision, Lessig implied, that stemmed from legislators prioritizing the interests of campaign funders over those of the general public. Policymaking in the United States was too often an exercise in willful ignorance. “I am someone who believes that a free society—free of the ‘corruption’ that defines our current society—is necessary for free culture, and much more,” Lessig concluded. “For that reason, I turn my energy elsewhere for now.”11

  During a conference on open government in December 2007, Lessig inquired whether there was any sort of community resource for “scrapers”—people who used the Internet to download large data sets.12 Swartz decided to create one and launched a website called theinfo.org. “This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them,” Swartz wrote by way of introduction.13 Swartz loved them more than most. Concurrent with his work for Open Library, Swartz had crawled the Google Books archive and downloaded approximately 530,000 public-domain texts.14 In collaboration with the Stanford law student Shireen Barday, he downloaded the entire Westlaw database of law-review articles and analyzed the corpus to assess the outcomes of corporate-funded legal research. He had launched a website called watchdog.net, which sought to “make government data accessible and useful”15 by compiling freely available and politically relevant data sources—voting records, campaign finance disclosures, demographic information—and presenting them in a way that encouraged visitors to take political action.16 If “the system” relies on institutional opacity to conceal its aims and to consolidate its grasp on power, one way to buck the system, Swartz seems to have believed, is to reveal the information that it actively keeps hidden.

  “Getting ‘real information’ to people on the World Wide Web is 13-year-old Aaron Swartz’s job,” the Chicago Tribune had written in 2000, after Swartz launched his proto-Wikipedia.17 The job remained the same, except now Swartz was working on a bigger scale. Initiate a discussion about “real information” and the Internet, be it on a blog, mailing list, message board, chat client, social networking site, or tin-can telephone, and you could count on Aaron Swartz eventually joining the conversation. He traveled the world evangelizing on these topics, like a man touched with ideological tinnitus, unable to escape the sound of social dysfunction and desperate to make others hear the ringing in his ears.

  In July 2008, Swartz traveled to Cupramontana as the guest of the international library consortium Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL), which works to provide libraries in developing countries with access to the same resources as their first-world counterparts. EIFL booked the hermitage for a two-day board meeting and “visioning retreat,” and had invited Swartz to come help the group envision its ideal future.

  Norton accompanied Swartz, and they both stood out in the middle-aged crowd. Swartz was by far the youngest attendee, but he found it easy to fit in among the graying librarians who shared his concerns. Over the course of the weekend, the EIFL discussants sat and talked about the issues dear to them all: the fate of open information on an increasingly profit-driven network and the role of the Internet in a world governed by fear and willful misunderstanding.

  That’s what Cupramontana was for, after all: the contemplation of serious, world-historical questions. But when Giustiniani and the other White Friars arrived at the caves, they had reached the end of their journeys. Although he didn’t know it yet, Aaron Swartz’s journey was just beginning.

  * * *

  OPEN access is an anodyne term for a profoundly transformative idea. Advocates argue that academic research should be made freely available to the world at the time of publication, and that access should not be contingent on an individual’s or institution’s ability to afford a subscription to a given journal or database. Academic authors do not usually write for profit; rather, their work aims to augment the common store of knowledge. What’s more, since the government often funds their research, it’s not a stretch to claim that the fruits of that research should belong to the public. So why should this material be subject to the same access restrictions as a mystery bestseller or a Hollywood film? As with many other inexplicable policies, the blame belongs to a vestigial middleman.

  When a university professor finishes a research project, she typically records her results in an academic paper, which she submits for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. (“Peer review” is an academic quality-assurance measure in which the author’s work is scrutinized by other scholars in the author’s field.) These journals—the reputable ones, at least—operate via volunteers, with authors, editors, and peer reviewers all working for free. Nobody gets paid, or expects to get paid, except the publisher. In exchange for the publisher’s services, which include coordinating the publication and peer-review processes, formatting, and distribution, the author concedes the copyright to her article in perpetuity. It’s a simple trade: the academic publisher assumes the financial risk of preparing and distributing an esoteric work for which there’s a limited audience and in exchange retains all the profits that might come from its sale.

  In commercial trade publishing, publishers realize profit by selling a book for a relatively low price to a wide audience. Since no wide audience exists for academic papers, academic publishers realize profit by selling them at high prices to the few entities who can’t do without them—libraries and scholars, mostly—which renders these papers functionally inaccessible to the casual or impoverished user.

  Today, several multinational publishing conglomerates, such as the Anglo-Dutch company Reed Elsevier, dominate the academic-journal business. Tens of thousands of scholarly journals exist, and since the 1970s their subscription prices have risen at a rate higher than the rate of inflation, leading to what librarians have dubbed the “serials pricing crisis.” These journals are expensive, especially in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields—yearly subscriptions to specialized STEM journals can cost more than $10,00018—but academic libraries are, more or less, compelled to subscribe. Every professor thinks that his field of study is the most important and expects to find his specialization’s academic journal on the library’s shelves. Thus, many academic libraries wind up spending the bulk of their yearly acquisitions budgets on journal subscriptions.

  That’s assuming that a library has a meaningful acquisitions budget at all. Many of them do not—or, at least, don’t have much of one. This plight is especially common in poor, underdeveloped countries, where librarians have enough trouble keeping their computers on, let alone keeping up with the latest research in a thousand microdisciplines. The result is an ever-widening gap between rich institutions and poor ones: wealthy Western universities can keep their libraries current with all the latest research; less fortunate schools simply go without.

  The open access movement emerged in the early 1990s, when librarians and researchers realized that the Internet had the potential to transform academic publishing and possibly solve the serials pricing crisis by shifting the balance of power away from publishers and back to scholars. Online content distribution could reduce the physical production costs that publishers cited to justify their journals’ high prices. Publishers could let underresourced clients access proprietary material online and incur no direct financial loss by doing so. Academics might even choose to eliminate the middleman and simply publish their research online, for free. “In the old, Faustian days, the reluctant choice was to accept the Faustian pact (of allowing access to a work only to paid ticket-holders) because that was the only way to reach an audience AT ALL,” the open access pioneer Stevan Harnad wrote in 1994. “But now that there is another option, it’s time to rethink all of this.”19

  The first significant academic open access project, arXiv, began in 1991, when the physicist
Paul Ginsparg created an online repository for preprints of research papers in his field. Before publishing their articles in an actual scholarly journal, academic authors will circulate drafts among their colleagues worldwide, soliciting comments, critiques, and suggestions. ArXiv streamlined that often inefficient process. By uploading their preprints to the archive, authors could request and receive feedback much, much faster than ever before. There was a side benefit for readers who couldn’t access those finalized articles in a scholarly journal: the preprint drafts remained on arXiv in perpetuity, free for all to access.

  Ginsparg’s growing preprint archive augured great changes in the academic-publishing world. “Starting 10 years ago, we no longer needed publishers to turn our drafts into something that had a polished superficial appearance,” Ginsparg wrote in 1994. “Starting more recently, we no longer need them for their distribution network—we have something much better.”20

  In 2002, the movement formally promulgated its principles in a document called the Budapest Declaration, which, like the unwritten Robert Ludlum novel of the same name, is a thrilling tale of international intrigue and one-world politics. The authors argued that easing access to scholarly journals would “accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.”21

  Two similar documents followed the Budapest Declaration: the Bethesda Statement, in June 2003, and the Berlin Declaration, in October 2003. All three emphasized the immense public benefit of easing access to scholarly research and exhorted publishers to embrace open access policies. But the large academic publishers had no immediate incentive to change their business models; in fact, doing so would diminish the value of their copyrights and reduce their profit margins. Lacking consistent pressure from stakeholders around the world, they would never change their business practices. For them, the system worked.