The Boy Who Could Change the World

by Aaron Swartz

  Aaron Swartz (1986–2013) was an American computer programmer, a writer, a political organizer, and an Internet hacktivist. He was involved in the development of RSS, Creative Commons, web.py, and Reddit. He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 and founded the online group Demand Progress. He is survived by his parents and two brothers, who live in Chicago.

  Lawrence Lessig is Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He was the director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and a founding board member of Creative Commons. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  © 2015 by Sean B. Palmer

  Introduction © 2015 by Lawrence Lessig

  All other part introductions and postscript © the individual contributors

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  Excerpt from Aaron Swartz’s A Programmable Web: An Unfinished Work © 2013 Morgan & Claypool Publishers. Used with permission.

  Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

  Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2015

  Distributed by Perseus Distribution

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Swartz, Aaron, 1986-2013.

  The boy who could change the world : the writings of Aaron Swartz / Aaron Swartz ; with an introduction by Lawrence Lessig ; part introductions by Benjamin Mako Hill, Seth Schoen, David Auerbach, David Segal, Cory Doctorow, James Grimmelmann, and Astra Taylor ; postscript by Henry Farrell.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-62097-076-8 (e-book) 1.Internet—Social aspects. 2.Internet—Political aspects. 3.Intellectual property. 4.Copyright. 5.Computers--Social aspects. 6.Computer architecture. 7.Swartz, Aaron, 1986-2013—Political and social views. 8.Political culture--United States. 9.Popular culture—United States.I. Title.

  HM851.S97 2015

  302.23’1—dc23

  2015008414

  The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.

  www.thenewpress.com

  Book design and composition by Bookbright Media

  This book was set in Aries and Gill Sans

  Printed in the United States of America

  10987654321

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Lawrence Lessig

  Free Culture

  Introduction by Benjamin Mako Hill and Seth Schoen

  Counterpoint: Downloading Isn’t Stealing

  UTI Interview with Aaron Swartz

  Jefferson: Nature Wants to Be Free

  Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

  The Fruits of Mass Collaboration

  The Techniques of Mass Collaboration: A Third Way Out

  Wikimedia at the Crossroads

  Who Writes Wikipedia?

  Who Runs Wikipedia?

  Making More Wikipedians

  Making More Wikipedias

  Code, and Other Laws of Wikipedia

  False Outliers

  (The Dandy Warhols) Come Down

  Up with Facts: Finding the Truth in WikiCourt

  Welcome, Watchdog.net

  A Database of Folly

  When is Transparency Useful?

  How We Stopped SOPA

  Computers

  Introduction by David Auerbach

  Excerpt: A Programmable Web

  Privacy, Accuracy, Security: Pick Two

  Fixing Compulsory Licensing

  Postel’s Law Has No Exceptions

  Squaring the Triangle: Secure, Decentralized, Human-Readable Names

  Release Late, Release Rarely

  Bake, Don’t Fry

  Building Baked Sites

  A Brief History of Ajax

  djb

  A Non-Programmer’s Apology

  Politics

  Introduction by David Segal

  How Congress Works

  Keynes, Explained Briefly

  Toward a Larger Left

  Professional Politicians Beware!

  The Attraction of the Center

  The Conservative Nanny State

  Political Entrepreneurs and Lunatics with Money

  Postscript by Henry Farrell

  Media

  Introduction by Cory Doctorow

  The Book That Changed My Life

  The Invention of Objectivity

  Shifting the Terms of Debate: How Big Business Covered Up Global Warming

  Making Noise: How Right-wing Think Tanks Get the Word Out

  Endorsing Racism: The Story of The Bell Curve

  Spreading Lies: How Think Tanks Ignore the Facts

  Saving Business: The Origins of Right-wing Think Tanks

  Hurting Seniors: The Attack on Social Security

  Fighting Back: Responses to the Mainstream Media

  What Journalists Don’t: Lessons from the Times

  Rachel Carson: Mass Murderer?

  Is Undercover Over? Disguise Seen as Deceit by Timid Journalists

  Books and Culture

  Introduction by James Grimmelmann

  Recommended Books

  Guest Review by Aaron Swartz: Chris Hayes’ The Twilight of the Elites

  Freakonomics

  The Immorality of Freakonomics

  In Offense of Classical Music

  A Unified Theory of Magazines

  On Intellectual Dishonesty

  The Smalltalk Question

  Unschool

  Introduction by Astra Taylor

  School

  Welcome to Unschooling

  School Rules

  The Writings of John Holt

  Apprentice Education

  Intellectual Diversity at Stanford

  David Horowitz on Academic Freedom

  What It Means to Be an Intellectual

  Getting It Wrong

  Epilogue

  Legacy

  Contributor Bios

  INTRODUCTION

  It is a fair question whether it’s fair to any of us to gather in one place the writings of a person’s life. Writing reflects thinking. Thinking evolves. Who we were at nineteen does not reflect who we were at twenty-five, or who we would have been at fifty. Learning looks like inconsistency. Changes seem unjustified, since they’re rarely even acknowledged.

  I’m sure Aaron Swartz in particular would have felt this as unfairness. When he was a student at Stanford, he attended a reception at the Stanford Law School, where I was then teaching. After introducing him to some friends, I recounted to them a recent post from his blog.

  Afterward, Aaron was upset with me. “That was private,” he said.

  “But you posted it on your blog,” I replied, a bit puzzled by the objection.

  “Yes,” he responded, “on my blog, for the people who read my blog. Not for the random student at the Stanford Law School.”

  But Aaron has left us no choice. We have a right to understand the extraordinary influence that this boy had, by understanding his words and thus his thought. And one way to do that is through his words. They are incomplete. They are sometimes inconsistent, as one essay struggles against anothe
r. But as I’ve read the collection gathered here, I recognize the soul who speaks through these writings. I remember these steps, and have learned more as I’ve walked through them again. There is a reason for us to reflect on these bits from an incomplete life. They teach us something. And they inspire.

  From a very young age, Aaron felt a freedom that most of us never really know: the freedom to simply do what you believe is right. That’s not to say that most of us live life in the wrong. But most of us have a way of avoiding the confrontations between right and wrong. We learn early on how to fudge the facts, how to dodge the uncomfortable.

  Aaron never quite learned that. Or if he did, he got rid of it when he was young. It isn’t as though he was that guy preaching in the corner to the unwilling listener. He wasn’t. He spoke through questions, not commands. He inspired by giving others a sense of the best they could be. And he often was super-quiet as he worked out what or whom to believe. A quiet kid among strangers. A deep blue pool, hiding a volcano.

  But he was not quiet in his endless writings. And these writings capture well a mind in constant reflection: often aware of his advantage, always working through the politics of a society too mixed in its own advantages, and working endlessly to understand how best to understand and persuade.

  In the essays collected here, you can watch a boy working on many problems at the same time. Like the CPU in a computer, different bits are in the foreground at different times. But every theme collected here was being worked on, if differently, at every point in the adult period (from about fourteen on) of this twenty-six-year-old’s life.

  He was constantly working on Aaron Swartz: on who that was, and how he was constrained. He was constantly working on technology: on how to make it work, and how to make it work better for people. He was constantly working on access: to culture, and particularly access to knowledge especially; to—the stuff that was supposed to be free. He was increasingly working in political philosophy: on how to know what was right, because he certainly had his views of right. He was especially working on progressive politics: the best ways to talk about issues from surveillance to Social Security, how to rally a public. And he read voraciously, fiction as well as nonfiction, reporting at the end of each year on the hundreds of books he had read that year, with a short review of each. And tragically, he was working on what he believed he had to do, the law notwithstanding. He rallied others to cross what he believed to be an unjust line. He crossed it himself.

  No one should confuse these writings with revealed truth. Aaron had learned more than many ever will. He had worked out more than most. But there’s an incompleteness here, which I know he saw, but which he imagined in the years ahead he would fill out. His technical skills had tripped him into financial freedom; he loved the range to think and act that that freedom gave him, because it gave him the chance to dig deeper, over time. And if there is one thing that I think terrified him the most about the prosecution that brought about the end of his life, it was the slow recognition that even if he had won his case against the government (which his lawyers at the end believed he would), he would be left without that freedom anymore. His fortune wasted, he would have been forced back into a world where he could no longer afford to live a life devoted exclusively to what he believed was right.

  In the end, a work like this can only ever be a picture of a life incomplete. Few of us will ever come close to the influence this boy had. That’s a puzzle to many. He was never on The Colbert Report or The Daily Show; NBC Nightly News never once covered the thoughts of Aaron Swartz.

  Yet his influence weaved itself through the lives of an incredible number of very different souls. He found us, and, wound us up, and set us on the path that he, and maybe we, thought best. There are scores still left in his command. There is an endless amount that we must finish. For this writer, and thinker, and activist, and hacker, and dear friend, we will.

  —Lawrence Lessig

  FREE CULTURE

  Aaron Swartz’s life was shaped by an ethical belief that information should be shared freely and openly. Driven by this principle, Aaron worked extensively as a leader in the “free culture” movement, which is where we met him and worked closely with him for nearly a decade. From his earliest writings, included at the beginning of this section, Aaron was transfixed by the fact that a piece of knowledge, unlike a piece of physical property, can be shared by large groups of people without making anybody poorer. For Aaron, the clear implication of this fact was that it was unethical to deprive people of information by creating artificial scarcity in knowledge, culture, or information.

  His early writing highlights the diversity of ways in which Aaron approached free culture advocacy. In some situations, he tried to work creatively within the system to reform copyright laws that limited free sharing. For example, Aaron’s early writing about compulsory license schemes and his work with Creative Commons reflect attempts to address the injustice caused by “unfree” culture. We met Aaron through the 2003 Supreme Court oral argument in Eldred v. Ashcroft. At the time, Aaron was outraged that Congress had given in to industry pressures to make copyright last even longer, and he was thrilled to meet other activists working to limit copyright. With the loss in the Eldred case and other legal changes that increased the scope and power of copyright, Aaron was frustrated by the lack of progress in the free culture movement and increasingly adopted a more transgressive approach.

  For example, in 2009 Aaron helped lead a project to download and publish public records about court cases that the federal courts charged substantial sums to access through the PACER system. This project spurred a criminal investigation, although he was never charged in the matter. The government’s criminal case against him in the last two years of his life charged that Aaron had similarly downloaded a large number of academic journal articles with the aim of making these articles widely available to the public, regardless of whether they could afford to pay for access. In making its case about Aaron’s motives, the government relied on Aaron’s long history of writing about issues of free culture and open access and showed a particular interest in “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” published in this section, which called for the liberation of academic knowledge that was locked up by commercial publishers.

  In other work, Aaron’s commitment to free culture led him to build and design systems to allow its collaborative production. In particular, he was inspired by the free software movement and its demonstration that commitment to an ethic of information sharing could, in practice, open the door to widespread collaboration with enormously valuable results, such as the GNU/Linux operating system and Wikipedia. In fact, Aaron created his own early predecessor to Wikipedia, called The Info Network, and wrote several essays describing other ideas for mass collaboration around other types of free cultural artifacts. Aaron’s start-up Infogami—which merged with Reddit in 2005—was another such platform for collaboration and information sharing. After Aaron’s own collaborative encyclopedia failed to gain traction, he became an early and active participant in Wikipedia. This section includes a series of essays that Aaron wrote in 2006 as part of his campaign to be elected a director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia.

  Aaron was committed to free culture in part because he believed that freely shareable knowledge could transform society for the better. In his earlier writings, he expressed a sense that the mere availability of factual data could be empowering. In 2008, Aaron founded Watchdog.net, an organization that attempted to promote increased government transparency by making government data more widely available. Over time, however, Aaron became skeptical of the power of mere transparency, and he began highlighting the need for activism and journalism. This led to his later focus on politics.

  Toward the end of his life, Aaron tried to explicitly distance himself from free culture in order to focus on broader issues of in justice, arguing that copyright issues were merely symptomatic of larger problems of power and corruption and could not
usefully be dealt with without addressing these larger political problems. Even in these efforts, however, Aaron repeatedly returned to free culture activism. In the speech that closes this section, Aaron describes being called back into the world of free culture to lead the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a proposed U.S. law designed to restrict the Internet in ways that would cut back on the kind of information sharing that Aaron supported. He calls on his listeners to believe that their personal engagement in activism for information freedom is urgently needed and that they can become the “hero of their own story.”

  —Benjamin Mako Hill and Seth Schoen

  Counterpoint: Downloading Isn’t Stealing

  http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001112

  January 8, 2004

  Age 17

  The New York Times Upfront asked me to contribute a short piece to a point/counterpoint they were having on downloading. (I would defend downloading, of course.) I thought I managed to write a pretty good piece, especially for its size and audience, in a couple days. But then I found out my piece was cut because the Times had decided not to tell kids to break the law. So, from the graveyard, here it is.

  Stealing is wrong. But downloading isn’t stealing. If I shoplift an album from my local record store, no one else can buy it. But when I download a song, no one loses it and another person gets it. There’s no ethical problem.

  Music companies blame a fifteen percent drop in sales since 2000 on downloading.* But over the same period, there was a recession, a price hike, a 25% cut in new releases,† and a lack of popular new artists. Factoring all that in, maybe downloading increases sales. And 90% of the catalog of the major labels isn’t for sale anymore.* The Internet is the only way to hear this music.

  This is from the RIAA’s own chart [Dead link—points to year-end marketing data from RIAA for 2002—Ed.]. In 1999, they sold 938.9M CDs, in 2002 they sold 803.3M. (938.9-803.3) ÷ 938.9 =.14 (so it’s really closer to 14%, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say 15%).

  It depends on how you count. The RIAA says they released 38,900 new releases in 1999. According to SoundScan the RIAA released 31,734 new releases in 2001, leading to an 18% drop. This isn’t really fair, since we’re using RIAA numbers for 1999 and SoundScan numbers for 2001, and SoundScan probably doesn’t count as many albums as the RIAA does. However, the RIAA said in early 2003 that they released 27,000 new albums the previous year. Apparently embarrassed by this information, they’ve since removed it from their website. But if you use their numbers, you get a 31% drop. I’ve split the difference and called it a 25% cut. But I could change this to 30% or 20% if you wanted; I don’t think it would change the argument.