The Idealists

by Justin Peters

  * * *

  IN December 2001, when he was fifteen, Aaron Swartz went to his website and described an unusual dream: “Last night I had a dream of the way I want to live. I’m not sure it would appeal to other people, but I would certainly like it.” He had found himself in a “modernly-designed loft” surrounded by his friends from the Internet, all the hackers and programmers and network enthusiasts who had welcomed a precocious teenager into their ranks: “We were working together on a project that we thought would change the world. We were committed to it, and worked well as a team: we helped each other out with what needed to be done, and kept each other’s enthusiasm up.” Swartz did not explain what, exactly, they were working on, but the nature of the project seemed less important than the attitude with which they pursued it. “We learned all the time, both finding out the skills we needed to know ourselves, and teaching each other how to improve. While we knew there was a lot to be done, we focused on our one project with a single-minded determination, finishing it and solving all the problems that it raised.”

  When Swartz woke up, he was still in Highland Park, and still a lonely teenager. But the dream stayed with him. “If anyone wants to send me the money to make this dream a reality, let me know,” he concluded. “I already know the people and the project. The problem is we’re flung across several continents, and this is the kind of relationship that just doesn’t happen over the Internet.”50

  Swartz was wrong on that last point. The idealistic and collaborative organizational dynamic that he described was more likely to exist in a digital medium than in the real world. Agglomerative collaboration, in which individual talents are utilized in pursuit of a common goal, animates digital utopianism. It is the soul of the hacker ethic, the motivating ethos of the free software movement. As Swartz grew up, the Internet delivered both people and projects to him. From the Semantic Web message-board communities to the Creative Commons team, from Open Library to PACER to Demand Progress, all of the world-changing initiatives on which Swartz had worked had been digital. The Internet is both a conduit for idealistic fantasies and a tool that can be used to implement them. It is the real world that often creates resistance.

  Throughout Swartz’s life, most of his failures and dilemmas derived from his inability to port this dynamic over to a real-world setting. The institutions from which he fled, the shortcuts he took: these were all a result of the real world’s fundamental dissimilarity to the Internet. High school and college had been far too hierarchical. He left. Silicon Valley served up more of the same. Systems that were supposed to empower only disempowered. And there’s the rub. In the real world, most organizations don’t keep learning and improving—they set their parameters and stay within them. Real-world systems aren’t outcome focused, they’re systems focused.

  Swartz never stopped chasing his unusual dream, never became inured to its failure to materialize, and never lost faith in the ultimate plausibility of his vision. By the end of his life, he had realized that it would be up to him to make that dream come true. I MUST INVENT MY OWN SYSTEM OR BE ENSLAVED BY OTHER MEN’S, Michael Hart had posted on his wall in Urbana. Swartz spent his life trying to invent his own systems, ones that were modeled on and powered by the Internet.

  Swartz was no guileless technophile. To him, the Internet was not inherently miraculous, nor was digital technology inherently benign. After Apple cofounder Steve Jobs died in October 2011, Swartz drafted an essay depicting Apple as “a ruthless, authoritarian organization” that flouted labor standards and Jobs himself as a martinet who insisted on controlling every aspect of the user experience. His megalomania manifested in Apple’s portable music players: sterile white rectangles that could be neither opened nor modified by the end user. “Jobs couldn’t abide people opening things,” Swartz wrote. “ ‘That would just allow people to screw things up,’ he insisted.” Swartz saw things differently, and, indeed, devoted much of his life to the notion that the only way that the world ever improved was by allowing people to open things up. This notion—which he shared with Richard Stallman, Michael Hart, the young Noah Webster, and countless other idealists who preceded him—is Swartz’s legacy. It is also his challenge to the world he left behind.

  American intellectual-property statutes are rooted historically in their framers’ disdain for the demos, and a dictatorial notion of culture. These laws, which are today weighted wholly in favor of producers, support and sustain the “push marketing” model, in which art and scholarship are generated by the creative elite and dispensed to a grateful public. This model implies an inherent separation between creators and consumers, in which the two parties are brought together only at the point of sale.

  This mind-set conflicts with the way that people experience culture today. Internet users can easily opt to choose their own cultural adventures, and the creator of any given piece of content cannot effectively dictate the terms of its use. The value of authorial copyright has been diminished in the digital era, and just as nineteenth-century British authors responded to American reprinting practices by crying piracy and seeking legislative redress, contemporary culture-merchants use the language of morality to justify existing laws and lobby for new ones. But property holders are but one party to the social contract that is supposed to govern our polity, and their interests are not the only ones that matter. There is a middle ground between functionally eternal copyright and wholesale anarcho-syndicalism.

  Intellectual-property policies are mutable social relationships among consumers, producers, and the state, and emerging societies, such as antebellum America or contemporary China, can find great national benefit in laws that promote the speedy circulation of knowledge and culture. (“It is only by the enlightening and education of the people, that we can expect our institutions to hold together,” American legislators who opposed international copyright told Captain Marryat in 1837.) As Lisa Rein indicated in 2002, the Internet itself resembles an emerging, albeit stateless, society. Its users are responsible for its welfare, and its welfare is inherently important, because the Internet is the apotheosis of the cultural brain. The library of the future is here, and the value that we get out of it directly correlates with the value we put into it. We can choose to feed the cultural brain, or we can choose to starve it. The salient point is that it is a choice, and it is ours to make.

  The Internet is increasingly choked with various closed systems that see their users as little more than sentient credit cards: not just the restricted-access databases that Swartz decried, but with smartphone applications and social networking services that circumscribe the digital commons. The copyright term extensions that were granted by Congress in 1998 will begin to expire in 2018. Soon after that, if history is any guide, the general copyright statute will be due for revision. Soon after that, if history is any guide, copyright stakeholders will gather in private to draft a statute that protects and advances their financial interests. Information wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free. Today, with the developed world linked by digital networks that have not entirely fulfilled their transformative promise, Stewart Brand’s paradox seems more relevant and more frustrating than ever.

  Aaron Swartz spent his life caught in this paradox, and while he didn’t quite succeed in disentangling it, he at least called attention to the fact that it exists. Three years on, the story of his life and death serves as a necessary reminder that there is a fundamental disconnect between our laws and our habits, between the way we are supposed to conduct ourselves online and the way we actually do. But the gap between the real and the ideal can be bridged only if we make the active choice to extend ourselves. We can amend bad laws. We can promote better modes of culture. We can choose to create systems that can be opened without breaking; that tolerate deviance without collapsing; that regard the unfamiliar not as a threat, but as an opportunity.

  When he lived in Massachusetts, Swartz regularly competed in the MIT Mystery Hunt.51 Exactly one week after Swartz died, on the day the 2
013 Mystery Hunt began, his old team hosted a memorial event in the lobby of the MIT Media Lab. A large banner was spread out on a table, on which friends and admirers inscribed personalized messages: funny memories, words of condolence. Near the end of the night, a slender boy in a plain sweatshirt who looked too young to be there came over to the table. He uncapped a marker. He wrote, simply, “We will continue.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to thank Josh Levin for putting me on this story in the first place, and for his aid and friendship over the years. Thanks to Jonathan L. Fischer, David Plotz, John Swansburg, Julia Turner, and everyone at Slate for their patience and support. I’m grateful to Paul Whitlatch for acquiring the book, Brant Rumble for nurturing it, and Colin Harrison for seeing it home. Steve Boldt, Katrina Diaz, Kate Lloyd, and Elisa Rivlin provided invaluable guidance during the prepublication process. Jeff Greggs is a fine editor and a good friend. Thanks to my literary agent, Todd Shuster, for his wise counsel. Thanks to the University of Illinois Archives and its staffers, especially Cara Bertram. Thanks to all of my former colleagues at the Columbia Journalism Review. Thanks to Dean from Delta because I promised I would thank him in this space; I only wish I remembered his surname. I bet Jonathan Eck would get a kick out of seeing his name in a book. Many of my friends and colleagues offered their support while this book was under construction, but I am particularly grateful to Kelly Buttermore, Phil Campbell, Matt Demblowski, Noah Doyle, Sam Eifling, Mike Hoyt, Lauren Kirchner, Daniel Luzer, Matt B. Weir, and Joshua Young. I would like to thank my sister, Molly Peters. I would like to thank my parents, Randall and Janet Peters. Most of all, I would like to thank Alexa Mills, who knows why.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  © MOLLY PETERS

  Justin Peters is a correspondent for Slate and a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review. His essay on Peter Fleming’s book Brazilian Adventure was anthologized in Second Read: Writers Look Back at Classic Works of Reportage. He divides his time between Boston and New York.

  MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT

  SimonandSchuster.com

  authors.simonandschuster.com/Justin-Peters

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Scribner eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Scribner and Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: THE BAD THING

  Parts of this chapter previously appeared, in slightly different format, in Justin Peters, “The Idealist,” Slate, February 7, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/02/aaron_swartz_he_wanted_to_save_the_world_why_couldn_t_he_save_himself.html. Reprinted with permission.

  1 Interview with Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, January 2013.

  2 Quinn Norton, “Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation,” Atlantic, March 3, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/03/life-inside-the-aaron-swartz-investigation/273654/.

  3 Abelson et al., Report to the President, 39 (hereafter referred to as MIT Report). Accounts of this first plea offer differ. The US Attorney’s Office told the MIT panel that Swartz was offered a three-month prison sentence; Swartz’s former attorney, Andrew Good, said that the government offered him a thirteen-month sentence.

  4 Norton, “Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation.”

  5 Aaron Swartz, “HOWTO: Lose weight,” Raw Thought, March 1, 2010, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/loseweight.

  6 Danny O’Brien, “Teenager in a Million,” Sunday Times, April 29, 2001, http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/teenagerInAMillion.

  7 For the Reddit sale price, see Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, “How Alexis Ohanian Built a Front Page of the Internet,” Inc., May 30, 2012, http://www.inc.com/magazine/201206/christine-lagorio/alexis-ohanian-reddit-how-i-did-it.html.

  8 Norton, “Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation.”

  9 Aaron Swartz, “Copyright Terrorism,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, May 22, 2002, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000277.

  10 Aaron Swartz, “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” Archive.org, https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt.

  11 US Attorney’s Office, District of Massachusetts, “Alleged Hacker Charged with Stealing Over Four Million Documents from MIT Network,” news release, July 19, 2011, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Alleged_Hacker_Charged_with_Stealing_Over_Four_Million_Documents_from_MIT_Network.

  12 John Summers and George Scialabba, “John Summers and George Scialabba: Statement in Support of Aaron Swartz,” Guernica, July 23, 2011, https://www.guernicamag.com/daily/john_summers_and_george_sciala/.

  13 Stinebrickner-Kauffman, interview.

  14 Aaron Swartz, “Neurosis #9,” Raw Thought, February 7, 2007, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/imposition.

  15 Aaron Swartz, “Think Bigger: A Generalist Manifesto,” Raw Thought, December 14, 2006, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/thinkbigger.

  16 Aaron Swartz, “How to Save the World, Part 1,” Raw Thought, July 28, 2011, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/save1.

  17 Aaron Swartz, “2010 Review of Books,” Raw Thought, January 3, 2011, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2010.

  18 Seth David Schoen, “How I Knew Aaron,” Remember Aaron Swartz, last modified January 16, 2013, http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/memories/How-I-Knew-Aaron.html.

  19 Aaron Swartz, “Dave Winer said . . . ,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, June 28, 2003, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000988.

  20 Aaron Swartz, “Bits are not a bug,” Not a Bug, http://bits.are.notabug.com/.

  21 Aaron Swartz, “In Offense of Classical Music,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, June 20, 2006, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/classicalmusic.

  22 Aaron Swartz, “The Anti-Suit Movement,” Raw Thought, March 16, 2010, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/antisuit.

  23 Interview with Wes Felter, February 2013.

  24 Aaron Swartz, “Eat and Code,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, August 2, 2005, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/eatandcode.

  25 Interview with Ben Wikler, January 2013.

  26 Stinebrickner-Kauffman, interview.

  27 Ibid.

  28 Interview with Nathan Woodhull, February 2013.

  29 Stinebrickner-Kauffman, interview.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Ibid.

  32 Brand, Media Lab, 202. Brand first used this phrase at a computing conference in 1984.

  33 Ibid.

  34 Rob Kling and Roberta Lamb, “Analyzing Alternate Visions of Electronic Publishing and Digital Libraries,” in Scholarly Publishing, eds. Peek and Newby, 27.

  1. NOAH WEBSTER AND THE MOVEMENT FOR COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA

  1 Movable type had existed in Asia for four hundred years prior.

  2 Blagden, Stationers’ Company, 19.

  3 Birrell, Seven Lectures, 22–23.

  4 William Patry, “England and the Statute of Anne,” Copyright Law and Practice, http://digital-law-online.info/patry/patry2.html.

  5 Birrell, Seven Lectures, 94.

  6 John L. Brooke, “Print and Politics,” in Gross and Kelley, Extensive Republic, 180.

  7 In 1671, Sir William Berkeley, the longtime colonial governor of Virginia, spoke for many when he wrote, “I thank God we have no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them; and libels against the best government. God keep us from both!”

  8 Webster to William Leete Stone, December 21, 1837, in Webster, Letters, 511.

  9 Ford, Notes, 1:16–31.

  10 Kendall, Forgotten Founding Father, 50.

  11 Ford, Notes, 1:38.

  12 He eventually studied law on his own and in 1781 was admitted to the Connecticut bar.

  13 Noah Webster, “Introduction to ‘Blue-Back Speller,’ in A
utobiographies of Noah Webster, 75.

  14 Webster to Joel Barlow, November 12, 1807, in Ford, Notes, 2:31.

  15 Webster to John Canfield, January 6, 1783, in Ford, Notes, 1:58.

  16 Micklethwait, Noah Webster and the American Dictionary, 4.

  17 Scudder, Noah Webster, 152.

  18 Tim Cassedy, “ ‘A Dictionary Which We Do Not Want’: Defining America Against Noah Webster, 1783–1810,” William and Mary Quarterly 71, no. 2 (April 2014): 229.

  19 Noah Webster, “On the Education of Youth in America,” in Collection of Essays, 24.

  20 Charvat, Profession of Authorship, 18–34.

  21 Charvat, Literary Publishing, 42.

  22 Wolcott to Noah Webster, September 19, 1807, in Ford, Notes, 2:27.

  23 James N. Green, “The Rise of Book Publishing,” in Gross and Kelley, Extensive Republic, 78.

  24 Letter from Joel Barlow to the Continental Congress, January 10, 1783, in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450–1900), eds. L. Bently and M. Kretschmer, https://www.copyrighthistory.org.

  25 Patry, Moral Panics, 192.

  26 Williams, “Significance of the Printed Word,” 43.

  27 Noah Webster, “Origin of the Copy-Right Laws in the United States,” in Webster, Collection of Papers, 173.

  28 Ibid., 174.

  29 It is unclear how much credit, if any, Webster deserves for the Connecticut law; as David Micklethwait has demonstrated, Connecticut was already considering a statewide copyright law by the time the state legislature received Webster’s appeal.

  30 Noah Webster, “Memoir,” in Autobiographies of Noah Webster, 143.

  31 Noah Webster, “Diary,” in Autobiographies of Noah Webster, 222.

  32 Smith, Colonial Days, 284.

  33 Ford, Notes, 1:103.