But the revolution will be A/B tested, and maybe even A/B/C/D and E tested, too. In his working paper, Swartz described his new plan for the future of activism. Rather than form a political action group focused on one single issue or tactic, Swartz proposed that organizers should assemble groups of people supremely competent in certain relevant disciplines—investigators, activists, lawyers, lobbyists, policy experts, political strategists, journalists, and publicists—who could combine their efforts and advocate effectively for any issue, big or small. Swartz envisioned a flexible, intelligent, multifaceted task force that would learn from its mistakes and refine its tactics accordingly: a team of specialists that, cumulatively, worked as generalists.
The informal coalition that assembled to successfully protest SOPA and PIPA roughly conformed to Swartz’s vision of a polymathic activist committee. Their success, in a sense, served as a proof of concept. In the spring and summer of 2012, as the federal case against him continued, Swartz spent his time refining that concept further and mulling the best way to build an organization that did not disempower its members.
If Swartz’s model organization already existed, he hadn’t found it yet. He certainly hadn’t been impressed by most of the large systems he had encountered over the years. He had dropped out of high school and college, forced his own departure from Reddit, and left a string of half-finished projects and short-lived collaborations behind him. Since relocating to New York, he had worked briefly at Avaaz, even more briefly at the activist group Change.org, and most recently at the global IT consultancy ThoughtWorks, a job that he seemed to enjoy—but who could tell, really? Swartz’s restlessness had earned him a reputation. “Because he moved from thing to thing fairly rapidly, that actually ended up imposing a cost, so that people were wary about starting a really big project with him because they worried he wouldn’t stick around,” said Ben Wikler. “That was a reasonable concern to have.”2
But just as the advice of an escape artist can be useful in building better jails, Swartz’s estrangement from large organizations provided him with meaningful insight into their defects. He wasn’t, however, quite sure yet about the most efficacious way to fix them—not in a sustainable manner, at least. He searched everywhere for solutions. “He was reading all these management books,” said Wikler. “He was reading biographies of Sam Walton and all these people who built big organizations. He spent hours talking about management and how to make teams work.”3
Swartz sought out examples of particularly benevolent and well-managed institutions. “What organizations have the mission of doing the most good possible? So far I’ve found: @Avaaz, @Change, and @GiveWell. Any others?” he posted to Twitter on June 1, 2012.4 That same month, on his blog, Swartz bestowed effusive praise on Hollister Co., marveling at the chain clothier’s success at creating a distinct retail experience that was replicated seamlessly from store to store. Every Hollister outlet featured “the perfect music” and “the perfect scent” and “a perfect photograph for the wall.” Somehow, Hollister had built “five hundred stores of perfection,” he wrote. “(You may detest what they are perfect at, but that’s not my point. The point is that they have a vision and make it stick.) How do they do it?”5 Selling cheap clothes, saving the world: both required a vision, an organization, and the ability to imbue the latter with the former.
During the spring and summer of 2012, while Swartz was dreaming of the perfectly efficient organization, he remained mired in judicial and academic bureaucracies. His legal situation evoked one of M. C. Escher’s recursive drawings, characterized as it was by infinite repetition and the illusion of forward momentum. “I would ask him periodically what’s going on with the case,” Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman recalled.6 “And for a very long time the answer was ‘Nothing, because the government won’t turn over the documents that they’re supposed to turn over.’ ” MIT had been no more responsive than the prosecutors. Between May and August 2012, Swartz’s attorneys contacted the institute’s outside counsel thirteen separate times to request a meeting with MIT officials, in hopes of convincing them to issue a public statement that could be used on Swartz’s behalf. MIT officials did not respond.7
With official communications blocked, Swartz’s father decided once again to convene a meeting with MIT executives through informal channels. With the help of Media Lab director Joi Ito, Robert Swartz sent a letter to MIT’s president and chancellor on August 10, 2012. “We think there are both legal and non-legal issues that you are not aware of and urgently ask for a meeting,” he wrote. “The urgency of the meeting is due to the fact that the prosecutor has given us a deadline of Wednesday [August 15] to resolve the case or go to trial and we have a meeting Monday with the head of the criminal division that requires hard decisions.”8
The letter was an epistolary kowtow. But even though MIT’s president read the letter soon after it was sent, the school did not meet with Robert Swartz for another month. Aaron Swartz would have to face the August 15 deadline on his own.
As the date approached, Swartz evinced public calm, posting on Twitter about the US presidential campaign and his favorite podcast-listening tools, and blogging about the flaws of “scientism”: the bias that only scientific methods have validity. “If you’re struggling with a decision, we’re taught to approach it more ‘scientifically,’ by systematically enumerating pros and cons and trying to weight and balance them,” Swartz wrote on August 10. “Well, studies have shown that this sort of explicit approach repeatable [sic] leads to worse decisions than just going with your gut.”9
In private, though, Swartz was thinking hard about whether to resolve his case via plea bargain or proceed to trial. He kept his own counsel. “I didn’t know the details of the deal, I didn’t have the context, and it was really hard because I didn’t know what was going on with him,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman remembered. “I knew that there was a plea deal, but he just sort of shut me out.”10
Swartz ultimately rejected the deal, and, later, he and Stinebrickner-Kauffman quarreled over his willful mutism. “I was, like, ‘You can’t shut me out of this because it’s too important for me,’ ” Stinebrickner-Kauffman recalled. She was right—and Swartz knew it. As he matured, Swartz began to realize that “Aaron stands alone” was a suboptimal life strategy, one that bred isolation and pain both for himself and for his loved ones. He’d come to see that he didn’t have to operate like the ineffective systems he so despised, in which bad habits calcified and soon became the norm. He could choose to refine his tactics and learn from his mistakes. He could choose to elevate, even as his surrounding circumstances kept trying to drag him down. His own life was the one system he could control.
Three days after the August 15 deadline expired, Swartz launched a blog series titled Raw Nerve, as in “you’ve struck a.” The series covered a relevant topic: daily life, and how to get better at it. “After all, in my day job, I’m constantly looking for ways to learn and grow—reading the latest books and articles about the field, talking to other people with similar jobs and hearing what’s worked for them,” he announced in the first entry. “Why aren’t I doing the same thing for life?”11
While Swartz had always experimented with life-hacking strategies—“I had some time to kill this morning so I decided to work on improving my eyesight,” he had blogged as an aspiring fifteen-year-old homeopath12—Raw Nerve was his most ambitious attempt yet at articulating and systematizing this type of advice. Full of pithy life lessons drawn from sociological research papers, the Raw Nerve posts evoke the writings of Malcolm Gladwell; Swartz even based one post on the same study that Gladwell used as the basis for his 2008 book Outliers. But Raw Nerve also transcended pop-science superficiality, and for one basic reason: Swartz clearly intended its motivational homilies, first and foremost, for his own benefit.
One of the self-improvement strategies that Swartz articulated was to believe you can change: deny your own immutability, refuse to accept that the future is dictated by the past.13 S
wartz had always been awkward, secretive, and self-reliant, but there was no reason to treat those traits as if they were a terminal condition. He gradually opened up to Stinebrickner-Kauffman and stopped excluding her from his deliberations.
Another strategy was to take a step back: choose to view life from a broader perspective rather than getting stuck in daily minutiae. Acknowledging the bigger picture could be an empowering choice. “I feel more in control of my life, more able to cope with my problems. I feel like I’m charting my own destiny, instead of following some track,” he wrote. “I feel like I’m growing as a person.”14
Perhaps the most difficult lesson of Raw Nerve was that life requires us to lean into the pain: refuse to shirk difficult, uncomfortable tasks and situations.15 In late summer 2012, Swartz confronted one of his biggest bogeymen: asking other people for help. He had been fighting the charges with his own money, and it was running out. His friend Bettina Neuefeind—an attorney who was married to Lawrence Lessig—set up a legal defense fund. Swartz himself started soliciting contributions from wealthy friends and acquaintances. That August, Jeffrey Mayersohn, owner of the independent Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, received an e-mail from Swartz asking for a donation. Mayersohn agreed to donate to the fund and offered to organize more fund-raising events. Swartz accepted Mayersohn’s contribution, but declined the offer of further help. “It was hard enough for me to make this simple ask of you,” he replied, according to Mayersohn.16
Asking outsiders for help was still a torturous task, but Swartz had faced his fear, rather than run from it, and that was a significant development for a man with such a strong flight reflex. No one could change all of their bad habits at once, but incremental changes accumulate, and forced habits can be unlearned. “Next time you start feeling that feeling, that sense of pain from deep in your head that tells you to avoid a subject—ignore it,” Swartz wrote.17 The world might never stop trying to hurt you, but you were allowed to set your own threshold for pain.
* * *
ON September 12, 2012, the US Attorney’s Office in Boston filed a new indictment against Aaron Swartz. Federal criminal indictments cannot be amended once they are filed, so if a prosecutor wants to add new charges, he must file a superseding indictment, which replaces the old one. New information or new developments in a case commonly account for superseding indictments. But the only thing that had changed since the first indictment came down was that Swartz had shown himself willing to vigorously contest the charges.
This superseding indictment, like many sequels, doubled down on the elements that had made its predecessor such a hit. It increased the number of felony charges against Swartz from four to thirteen, and the maximum number of years he faced in prison from thirty-five to ninety-five. As an acquaintance of Swartz’s, Seth Finkelstein, put it on his blog: “as I’ve said before—they don’t like him. They really don’t like him.”18 If that point hadn’t been made clear before, the superseding indictment left little doubt.
In the first indictment Swartz had been charged with one count each of wire fraud (maximum prison sentence: twenty years), computer fraud (maximum prison sentence: five years), theft of information from a computer (maximum prison sentence: five years), and recklessly damaging a computer (maximum prison sentence: five years). The superseding indictment now charged him with one count of recklessly damaging a computer (maximum prison sentence: five years), two counts of wire fraud (maximum prison sentence: forty years), five counts of computer fraud (maximum prison sentence: twenty-five years), and five counts of unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer (maximum prison sentence: twenty-five years). All but the wire-fraud charges were brought under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The government manufactured these new counts by treating the downloading incidents in September, October, November, December, and January separately—a seemingly gratuitous prosecutorial tactic that reeked of menace and intimidation: “You want to have a trial? Fine, let’s have a trial.”
The Department of Justice counsels US attorneys against filing unnecessary charges against defendants, in the interests of expediency and justice. “The bringing of unnecessary charges not only complicates and prolongs trials, it constitutes an excessive—and potentially unfair—exercise of power,” notes the United States Attorneys’ Manual, which advises federal prosecutors on best practices.19 The US Attorney’s Office in Boston held no press conference to explain its decision to bring these new charges, but on his website the day after the superseding indictment was announced, Swartz, quoting the philosopher Bertrand Russell, offered an oblique theory on the prosecutors’ motives: “Since power over human beings is shown in making them do what they would rather not do, the man who is actuated by love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure.”20
The same day that the superseding indictment was filed, Swartz’s father finally met with MIT’s chancellor and general counsel. But he left that meeting feeling as stymied as ever. “First, [Robert Swartz] wanted MIT to make a public statement. This, the Chancellor and General Counsel explained, MIT would not do,” a report noted of the meeting.21 Confront reality was one of the life strategies Swartz had articulated in Raw Nerve. The reality of his legal situation at the time was that the tactics he had deployed thus far had been ineffective. The government was still intent on jailing him; MIT was still intent on ignoring him. When Swartz had first been indicted, he’d responded by starting an online petition. This time—A/B testing, etc.—Swartz hired a new lawyer.
At the end of October 2012, Swartz discharged Martin Weinberg and retained Elliot Peters, a partner at the boutique San Francisco firm Keker & Van Nest, as his lead counsel. (Weinberg had taken over the case from Swartz’s first attorney, Andrew Good, in November 2011.) As the case consumed more and more of his time, Swartz had ceased posting to his blog. After concluding the Raw Nerve series on September 25, he wrote only two more entries all year: an essay about the movie Looper on October 8, and another on the film The Dark Knight on November 1.22 The Dark Knight is a superhero film in which Batman, the villainous Joker, and district attorney Harvey Dent vie for the soul of Gotham City. Each character offers a different strategy for saving the city from organized crime and political corruption. Batman embraces masked vigilantism. Harvey Dent has scores of gangsters arrested on spurious charges. “The Joker had by far the most interesting plan,” wrote Swartz: “he hoped to out-corrupt the corrupters, to take their place and give the city ‘a better class of criminal.’ ”
In his essay, Swartz strongly supported the Joker’s policy platform. Although the Joker presents himself to the world as a deranged and murderous clown, Swartz claimed that the Joker is actually “homo economicus,” a supremely rational actor, the character who best understands both the problems facing Gotham City and the best solutions to those problems. Batman might have had better gear and Harvey Dent might have had the public’s sympathy—but the Joker understood game theory, the best weapon of all.
Though the Joker’s methods—such as burning large piles of money and blowing up hospitals—might have been controversial, the logic behind them was sound. “And the crazy thing is that it works!” Swartz enthused. Not only did the Joker end up ridding the city of organized crime, he convinced Gotham’s residents to reevaluate their world and their roles in it. “The movie concludes by emphasizing that Batman must become the villain,” Swartz wrote, “but as usual it never stops to notice that the Joker is actually the hero.”23
* * *
ELLIOT Peters’s counsel led to a shift in Swartz’s legal strategy. Swartz’s previous attorney, Martin Weinberg, had focused on the potential privacy violations in the packet capture and sought to suppress evidence the government had gathered by means of allegedly improper searches. Peters continued to argue for these motions, but prosecutors’ responses revealed their disdain for this line of argument. “Apparently without a trace of irony,” they wrote in November 2012, “Swartz argues that MIT and law enforcemen
t violated his rights to privacy as he hid his computers and hard drives in MIT’s locked wiring closet, used pseudonyms to avoid identification, hard-wired his computers to MIT’s network switch to avoid detection, siphoned off JSTOR’s copyrighted documents, kept reconfiguring his computer to circumvent MIT’s and JSTOR’s efforts to keep him off their networks, and relocated the evidence to MIT’s student center.”
So Peters opened up a new front for Swartz’s defense. He began to argue that the “unauthorized access” charges were misapplied. Swartz hired an expert witness, a computer security consultant named Alex Stamos, who contended that MIT’s computer network was so open that Swartz’s access in no way could have been construed as unauthorized. Stamos later noted in a blog post that “in my 12 years of professional security work I have never seen a network this open,” and that JSTOR had “lacked even the most basic controls to prevent what they might consider abusive behavior.”24 Stamos claimed that it would have been easy for MIT to limit guest access to JSTOR, and that its failure to implement such security measures even after Swartz’s downloads were detected could only be construed as tacit authorization of his presence.25
The Idealists Page 26