The Idealists

by Justin Peters

  Another post encouraged readers to sign an online petition confirming that they “stand with Aaron Swartz and his lifetime of work on ethics in government and academics.”51 Within hours, fifteen thousand people had signed the petition, and Demand Progress had published another post expanding its criticisms of the case against Swartz: “Downloading data made available on a network is not ‘stealing.’ And he made copies of documents. He did not ‘take’ them. JSTOR still had the documents.”52

  By the end of the week, forty-five thousand people had signed the petition, and the indictment had been mentioned in the New York Times, the American Prospect, the Boston Globe, and other media outlets. Swartz was “an Internet folk hero,” said the Times.53 The charges against him amounted to using “a sledgehammer to drive a thumb tack,” a local copyright lawyer told the Boston Globe.54 “As the case proceeds, we remain hopeful that Aaron will be cleared of any wrongdoing,” said Segal, “and as has been proved over the last 24 hours, the more people learn about [the] case, the more sympathetic they become to Aaron’s cause.”55

  While Swartz may have won the sympathies of the public and the press, the US Attorney’s Office in Boston was unmoved by the display. After delivering the indictment, Heymann had refrained from sending the police to arrest Swartz, instead allowing him to come to the courthouse under his own power. Swartz repaid that kindness by starting what Heymann later characterized as a “wild Internet campaign.”56 As with COICA and PIPA, Swartz and his friends could start all the petitions they wanted, but the people in power weren’t obliged to listen. The New York Times might call Aaron Swartz a folk hero, but to the federal government, Swartz was still just a big hacker.

  Swartz’s indictment roughly coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the World Wide Web, which had been announced to the world on August 6, 1991. Rather than retain the rights to his invention, Tim Berners-Lee had ceded control to the public, and the public had become the source of its power. Now the Web encompassed everything from academic authors lobbying for open access to amateur pornographers uploading homemade smut to the website YouPorn. It was Project Gutenberg, and Eldritch Press, and a million tart gossip blogs, and a billion uninformed website comments. It was Tunisians and Egyptians using Twitter to coordinate protests during the Arab Spring; it was Tunisians and Egyptians using Facebook to waste time at work.

  Decentralized by design, the Web was a tool that rapidly animated and disseminated ideas good, bad, and between. That most people seemed only to use it for banter and ephemera was no demerit; the medium’s discursiveness was a sign of its strength. The Web had no presiding officer to direct debate and impose decorum. The Web belonged to its users.

  Yet, since its beginnings, government and industry consistently acted as if the Web were a hierarchical system to control and subdue, from which deviant perspectives could definitively be excommunicated. COICA and PIPA were products of the same reactionary mentality that had produced the NET Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and other such statutes: a mentality that reflexively discouraged ideas, behaviors, and interactions that it neither recognized nor understood. “I, personally, do not think the world at large really, sincerely wants to provide literacy and education from anyone to The Third World, in spite of all lip service to the contrary,” a morose Michael Hart wrote to friends in July 2011.57 He died of a heart attack two months later, at sixty-four, with the electronic renaissance he had predicted decades earlier as near and as distant as ever.

  In a December 2010 Scientific American article titled “Long Live the Web,” Berners-Lee warned that while the Web had “evolved into a powerful, ubiquitous tool because it was built on egalitarian principles,” malign forces were actively working to erode those principles. “Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights. Why should you care? Because the Web is yours.”58

  * * *

  ON October 26, 2011, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas introduced into the House of Representatives the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, an industrial-strength (and industry-approved) version of PIPA. Although it was framed as another weapon in the war against overseas content pirates, SOPA was so broadly constructed that it could theoretically have been used to inhibit innocuous online activity in the name of copyright protection. “SOPA would undermine all of the best parts of the Internet, forcing sites that relied on user-generated content to police that material before it ever even made it online,” David Segal observed. “Foreign sites would have to prevent certain content from being uploaded or risk being blocked from American view. Domestic sites would have to scrub out any links to such blocked sites.”59

  Swartz and his allies found the bill abhorrent. But, like its predecessors, SOPA also seemed likely to pass. By November 2011, SOPA and PIPA had won the support of many groups: the Motion Picture Association of America, the US Chamber of Commerce, several major labor unions, the publisher Reed Elsevier, and many others. No significant public resistance or congressional opposition had emerged. Though certain tech companies, notably Google, had contributed money to anti-SOPA lobbying efforts, they were late to the game; in his book The Fight over Digital Rights, Bill D. Herman noted that, through mid-November 2011, proponents of SOPA and PIPA outspent the bill’s opponents by a six-to-one margin.60

  On November 16, 2011, the House Judiciary Committee held hearings on SOPA. Six witnesses were called to testify; the first was Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante. “Congress has updated the Copyright Act many times in the past two hundred years, including the enforcement provisions, but as we all know, this work is never finished. Infringers today are sophisticated and they are bold,” Pallante said. “This is not a problem that we can accept.”61

  The other witnesses’ testimonies were of much the same tenor, with the exception of Katherine Oyama, from Google, who warned that, if SOPA became law, “countless websites of all kinds, commercial, social, personal, could be shuttered or put out of business, based on allegations that may or may not be valid, and the resulting cloud of legal uncertainty would threaten new investment, entrepreneurship, and innovation.”62

  The committee members peppered Oyama with a line of combative questions indicating their frustration at the perceived extent of the online piracy problem, and at Google’s perceived reluctance to stop it. “You get page after page of free Grinches,” groused the Texas congressman Ted Poe, describing the results of a Seussian Google search gone horribly, piratically wrong.63 Poe spoke for many in the room when he refused to characterize online copyright infringers as bad actors: “They are not bad actors, they are thieves. And this legislation is trying to get a grip on this.”64

  In his Safra Center paper on the workings of Congress, Swartz had written of the process by which representatives become alienated from the interests and opinions of their constituents, and how experts and lobbyists insulate legislators from the prevailing winds. The arrival of SOPA and the continued existence of PIPA seemed evidence enough that dissenting voices still hadn’t been heard. Swartz and his cohorts would need to try different tactics.

  Earlier that year, Swartz’s old friends Tiffiniy Cheng and Holmes Wilson had founded an organization called Fight for the Future, dedicated to raising opposition to SOPA and PIPA. With characteristic élan, they had cooked up an idea they called Internet Censorship Day, which would take place on the date of the House Judiciary Committee hearing. On Internet Censorship Day, webmasters would “censor” their own websites by replacing their logos or home pages with a banner reading “Stop Censorship,” or a larger graphic that featured an ominous message: “WEBSITE BLOCKED.”

  “Pursuant to HR 3261 (SOPA) this website has been blocked to persons in the United States,” the latter graphic read. �
�Sound scary? Today, Congress holds a hearing on a bill that would create America’s first system for internet censorship.”65 Both images then linked to a form through which Web users could contact Congress and ask their representatives to “reject the Internet Blacklist Bills.”

  Swartz built the contact-Congress tool for Fight for the Future and helped spread the word about Internet Censorship Day. The tool launched on November 16, with hundreds of websites—including popular sites such as Reddit, 4chan, and Tumblr—blacking themselves out and encouraging stymied Web users to contact Congress and complain. According to Fight for the Future’s own estimates, the form that Swartz built generated approximately 1 million e-mails to Congress on November 16. Legislators’ telephones rang constantly that day. Yet, in the end, only a few legislators changed their positions on SOPA and PIPA. “INTERNET, YOU ARE AMAZING,” Cheng and Wilson wrote on the Internet Censorship Day website. “But SOPA’s still alive. Prepare for Round 2.”66

  Swartz, who had relocated to New York from Cambridge, was working with the global activist organization Avaaz and assisting Ben Wikler with the development of a new podcast, to be called The Flaming Sword of Justice, about progressive politics and political activism. “When he first moved to New York, he hated it,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman recalled. She was in New York that November, too, cohabiting with Swartz in a sublet on the Upper West Side to see what domestic life together might be like.

  “I think partly he felt he needed to make a clean break because of the indictment. He wanted to get away from Cambridge,” she said. But he couldn’t escape altogether. The terms of Swartz’s bail required him to report in person to the court in Boston once every two weeks, so every other Monday Swartz boarded an early-morning bus and traveled to Massachusetts to demonstrate that he hadn’t fled.

  As best he could, Swartz continued his work on behalf of the stop-SOPA coalition, trying to entice new allies to the cause. “I remember at one point during this period, I helped organize a meeting of start-ups in New York, trying to encourage everyone to get involved in doing their part,” Swartz later related. “And I tried a trick that I heard Bill Clinton used to fund his foundation, the Clinton Global Initiative. I turned to every start-up founder in the room in turn and said, ‘What are you going to do?’—and they all wanted to one-up each other.”67

  Cheng and Wilson decided to follow up on the relative success of Internet Censorship Day with another, bigger Internet blackout, which they scheduled for January 18, 2012, six days before the Senate was scheduled to vote on SOPA and PIPA. As before, participating websites would replace their logos or home pages with a stop-SOPA message and a tool that would help visitors contact Congress.

  This time around, many of America’s most popular websites joined in. Longtime champions of open culture such as Wikipedia, WordPress, Craigslist, and Reddit turned their sites entirely black. Some commercial giants—Pinterest, Google, Amazon, eBay—shut down as well, along with approximately 115,000 others by Fight for the Future’s count, their participation serving to illustrate the “darkening effect” that SOPA and PIPA would have on the Internet at large. “The Internet Archive is already blacklisted in China—let’s prevent the United States from establishing its own blacklist system,” wrote Brewster Kahle.68 “If you like what we do, oppose SOPA and PIPA,” Project Gutenberg said on its Facebook page.

  The unexpected inaccessibility of some of their favorite websites caused lots of people—including many members of Congress—to take notice of SOPA and PIPA for perhaps the first time. Millions of people reached out to Congress to register their opposition to the bills, via e-mail and over the telephone, and legislators scrambled to assure their constituents that their concerns had been registered. “#NJ: I hear your concerns re: #PIPA loud & clear & share in these concerns. I’m working to ensure critical changes are made to the bill,” New Jersey senator Bob Menendez posted on Twitter.69 “Thanks for all the calls, emails, and tweets. I will be opposing #SOPA and #PIPA. We can’t endanger an open internet,” tweeted Oregon senator Jeff Merkley.70 “Freedom of speech is an inalienable right granted to each and every American, and the Internet has become the primary tool with which we utilize this right,” Illinois senator Mark Kirk said in a press release. “This extreme measure stifles First Amendment rights and Internet innovation. I stand with those who stand for freedom and oppose PROTECT IP, S.968, in its current form.”71

  The bills were tabled two days later, on January 20. “I welcome [this] announcement because of the bill’s overreach,” wrote Representative Ted Poe, whose heart grew three sizes that day.72 (Not every former supporter had been flipped. In a press release, Senator Patrick Leahy warned, “The day will come when the Senators who forced this move will look back and realize they made a knee-jerk reaction to a monumental problem.”)73 It was just about nine years to the day since the Supreme Court had ruled against Eric Eldred in Eldred v. Ashcroft. “If we cannot overturn it in the courts, then we shall overturn it in the legislatures,” the sixteen-year-old Swartz had predicted at the time. The Copyright Term Extension Act still survived as the law of the land. But SOPA and PIPA had been strangled in the cradle. For once, the legislatures had stood down.

  A few days later, Swartz appeared on Ben Wikler’s podcast, The Flaming Sword of Justice, to discuss the significance of the SOPA and PIPA victories. “It was so incredibly inspiring,” Swartz told Wikler. “People often think, like, ‘Oh, I sign these petitions,’ you know, ‘I don’t really know what effect they’re having, does anyone listen to them?’ This makes it really clear. People are listening, and when we all speak up, we can totally change the debate. We shifted the entire landscape of this issue.”74

  Even if this sentiment was overstated, Swartz and his allies deserve significant credit for their work. Not only did they organize the blackouts and protests and galvanize public opposition to the bills, they also encouraged ordinary Internet users to think about the political implications of the medium. As Holmes Wilson put it later, “Demand Progress was the first organization to build campaigns that connected those bills to entire new audiences of people who cared about tech policy just because of how much they lived on the Internet, and not because of any previous kind of commitment to the ideals of liberty online.”75

  Swartz made a similar point during his interview with Wikler, in an attempt to articulate the broader meaning of the SOPA and PIPA protest movement: “You know, [Motion Picture Association of America chairman] Chris Dodd gave a nice interview to the New York Times where he kind of explained his whole evil master plan for sneaking this bill through before anybody noticing, and he said, he was so upset, you know, it was, like, ‘Those meddling kids, they stopped us! This isn’t supposed to happen!’ He said, ‘In my 40 [sic] years in the Senate I’ve never seen anything like this. This is, like, the Arab Spring has come to the Internet.’ And I think that’s what it is. These people are running scared, and we need to continue the fight.”76

  That spring, Stinebrickner-Kauffman and Swartz moved in together for good. Swartz used the time he had previously been spending on SOPA and PIPA to explore a variety of new interests. In conjunction with the photographer Taryn Simon, he developed an art project called Image Atlas, which gathered and juxtaposed the top image-search results for common search terms—such as love or freedom—from fifty-seven countries around the world; the piece was eventually exhibited on the website of the New Museum. He had started unraveling David Foster Wallace’s notoriously dense novel Infinite Jest. “He spent, like, entire weekends where he was mostly working on this plot summary of Infinite Jest,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman recalled. “He loved taking complex narratives and distilling their essences.”77

  In May 2012, Swartz traveled to Washington, DC, to speak at the annual Freedom to Connect conference. There, he distilled the complex narrative of the stop-SOPA movement into a compelling drama. Swartz warned the crowd of democracy activists that it was too early to celebrate, that similar legislation would recrudesce in the future
:

  Sure, it will have yet another name, and maybe a different excuse, and probably do its damage in a different way. But make no mistake: The enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared. The fire in those politicians’ eyes hasn’t been put out. There are a lot of people, a lot of powerful people, who want to clamp down on the Internet. And to be honest, there aren’t a whole lot who have a vested interest in protecting it from all of that.78

  Back when he blogged about Kafka’s The Trial, Swartz cited its lesson that there’s no beating a bureaucracy through official channels, that unexpected stratagems are the only way to get what you want in such a setting. Swartz observed that K., Kafka’s protagonist, “takes the lesson to heart and decides to stop fighting the system and just live his life without asking for permission.” Swartz had come to the same conclusion and had lived that way for a while, too. Engaging with bureaucracies on their own terms gets you nowhere—the best course is to disregard their rules and follow a different path.

  But left unmentioned in Swartz’s post was how The Trial ends. K. is visited by two pale, silent gentlemen, clad in black, who join his arms and march him out of his house, through the town, and to a desolate quarry. “Was he alone?” K. wonders. “Was it everyone? Would anyone help? Were there objections that had been forgotten?” Then the two government agents unsheathe a butcher’s knife, grab K. by the throat, and stab him through the heart.

  10

  HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD

  On July 28, 2011, a week and a half after being indicted, Aaron Swartz posted to his website a working draft of a document modestly titled “How to Save the World, Part 1.”1 The post, which he shared with only a few friends, synthesized many of his insights into the ways in which the Internet could be used to organize and catalyze meaningful social change. It was an optimistic theme, all things considered. At the time, for all the talk about how online activism could help save the world, Swartz had little firsthand evidence that such an outcome was possible. He had posted the “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” online, and the orthodox open access community had recoiled from it. Despite Swartz’s best efforts to rally opposition to PIPA, the bill had passed unanimously in the Senate Judiciary Committee and, as of July 2011, looked as if it would soon become law. He had worked to help elect progressive Democrats during the 2010 midterm elections; the Democrats ended up losing control of the US House of Representatives.