The Boy Who Could Change the World

by Aaron Swartz

  Americans spend $220 billion on prescription drugs, largely because of government-granted patents. Instead of handing that money to big drug companies, the government could spend far less (only a couple hundred million) funding researchers itself and making the resulting drug discoveries free to the public. College students spend $12 billion on textbooks alone. Again, the government could make free textbooks for one-thousandth that. And we spend $37 billion on music and movies. Why not create an “artistic freedom voucher” (vouchers—a conservative favorite!) that can only be spent on artists who place their work in the public domain?

  None of these would require outlawing the existing system—they could work side by side, simply forcing the existing drug, textbook, and movie companies to compete with this alternate idea. If their version works better, then fine, they’ll get the money. But if not, there’ll be no conservative nanny state to protect them.

  Similarly, the government could expand the Social Security program, allowing everyone to buy additional personal accounts from a system with amazingly low overhead (.5% versus the 20% of private funds) and a 70-year track record of success. Or it could try to improve our pitifully bad health care system by letting people buy into the government’s Medicare program, which again has amazingly low administrative costs (did you know that, on a per person basis, we spend 80% of what Britain spends on health care altogether simply on administration?) and serious bargaining power to push down prices. Again, why not let the private companies try their best to compete?

  The book itself also discusses bankruptcy laws, torts and takings, small businesses, and taxes. And it goes into far more detail on each of these subjects. And it’s all available for free on the Internet, so there’s no excuse for not reading it. It’s a fun read, the kind of book that turns the way you think about the economy upside-down.

  Political Entrepreneurs and Lunatics with Money

  http://crookedtimber.org/2009/05/01/politicalentrepreneurs-and-lunatics-with-money/

  May 1, 2009

  Age 22

  One of the interesting things about capitalism is that, if you have money, people seem to just magically appear to meet your needs. When it rains in New York City, vendors materialize to sell me an umbrella. When I was walking to the inauguration, the streets were lined with people selling hats and handwarmers. I certainly didn’t ask anyone to bring me a hat; I didn’t even realize I would want one, or I would have brought it myself—but people predicted that I would and brought it for me.

  The more money you have, the more crazy these desires can get. If you’re rich, people offer to launch you into space, build large buildings with your name on them, or set up lavish cemetery plots. Or, as Steven Teles demonstrates, push the law to be more to your liking.

  What’s striking about the rise of modern conservatism is that it was not, in large part, the creation of big business. Big business, all things considered, was pretty happy with the liberal consensus. They weren’t exactly itching to drown the government in the bathtub, especially when it did so much for them.

  Teles makes this clear with his brilliant first chapter* on the liberal legal network. “From the perspective of the early twenty-first century,” Teles notes, “it is perplexing why these wealthy, well-positioned, white men—presidents of the American Bar Association, leaders of the nation’s largest foundations—put their support behind a project to liberalize the legal profession.” You had groups as respectable as the Ford Foundation, the ABA, and the OEO supporting a project as activist as the Legal Services Program, which, Teles writes, “helped transform the administration, and ultimately the politics, of public aid” (32). Law schools started pro bono clinics, and the Ford Foundation funded a dozen legal activist groups. (Admittedly, the other major foundations refused to join in.)

  Actually the second—as with most academic books, the first chapter is theoretical background and the story doesn’t begin until after.

  Corporations did attempt to strike back—as Teles documents in a chapter called “Mistakes Made.” He quotes an influential report on these early attempts, complaining that they simply took money from a company and spent it fighting that same company’s legal battles, a law firm structured as a tax dodge. Afraid of alienating the shareholders of their corporate donors, they shied away from principled ideological stands and didn’t influence the larger political debate.

  But the real conservative movement was funded instead by wealthy extremists on the fringes of the business world. It was the creation of people like Richard Mellon Scaife, who inherited part of the vast Mellon fortune from his alcoholic mother. Joseph Coors inherited a brewing company, John M. Olin ran a relatively obscure chemical company, R. Randolph Richardson inherited the money his father made by selling Vicks to Procter and Gamble.* None of them can exactly be called Titans of Industry, or even titans of industry. Yet these are the men who bankrolled not just the conservative legal movement, but the conservative movement in general.

  Note how many of them directly inherited their fortunes. I’ll leave it to someone more inclined to psychological speculation to comment on the relationship between a conservative philosophy and strong support for the system that let your father make his millions.

  This fact is sometimes obscured by a document called the Powell Memo. Written by Lewis Powell, shortly before Nixon made him a Supreme Court Justice, it calls on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to defend “the free enterprise system” from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians” that would dare to criticize it.

  The Powell Memo kicks off most histories of the right-wing think tank, not because it was so clearly influential, but because it was so clear: “The national television networks should be monitored,” Powell wrote, “in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance.” What passionate critic of the free enterprise system could resist such a quote?*

  Kim Phillips-Fein’s excellent new history, Invisible Hands, is notable for how hard it works to put the Powell Memo in its proper context, noting how much was done before the memo was even written and casting a skeptical eye on claims of the memo’s influence.

  But the quotes have disguised the fact that Powell’s suggestions didn’t exactly come to pass. It wasn’t the Chamber of Commerce or major businesses that took on these tasks, but a network of independent, ideologically based think tanks. And these think tanks weren’t founded by eminent Men of Business, but by a new class of people—a group we might call political entrepreneurs.

  Dan Burt was a little-known Massachusetts lawyer when he took over the Capital Legal Foundation and turned it into one of the first effective conservative-movement law firms. Henry Manne was merely a legal scholar when he began pitching Pierre Goodrich (millionaire stockpicker) on building a new right-wing law school. Lee Liberman Otis was just a law student when she started pitching Scaife and others on the need for the Federalist Society.†

  For an example in another field, see my previous piece on Roger Bate, whose Africans Fighting Malaria spends its time trying to claim environmentalists kill African babies. Bate tried to start the organization by hitting up his friends at Philip Morris, but in the end could only get the money from a California mining magnate. (Interestingly, many find this hard to believe and argue that Philip Morris must have been the real funder.)

  The field even has its serial entrepreneurs. Paul Weyrich was the press secretary for a Republican senator when he met Joseph Coors. Over the next few decades, Weyrich used Coors’ money to start the Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, Moral Majority, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and various other groups that haunt any history of modern conservatism’s rise.

  Just like the vendors at the inauguration, political entrepreneurs sought out people with money and tried to sell them something they didn’t even know they wanted. (Manne to Goodrich: “The Augean stables were cleaned by diverting a stream of water through
them. . . . One law school dedicated to propositions like those you propound . . . would do more to discipline all the other[s] than anything I can think of.” Note how Manne claims to promote the ideas “you propound.”) Nonprofits are small enough and rich people are wealthy enough that it only takes a handful of lunatics with money to fund a whole forest of think tanks.

  And yet, there must be crazy lefty billionaires too. So why do most lefty think tanks rarely go any farther than the Clintonite consensus? (To take a story in the news recently, conservatives have had some fun pointing out the Center for American Progress, like Obama, is in favor of sending more troops to Afghanistan.) It’s easy to understand why big corporations wouldn’t want to push left-wing ideas, but it’s harder to understand why there aren’t any brazen rich people who do.

  Which leads me to suspect the limiting factor isn’t the funders, but the entrepreneurs. The average lefty wants to do stuff, not hobnob with rich people and manage a staff. They’re not particularly cut out for organizational work nor do they hang around with the kind of people who are. If they do hang out with entrepreneurs, they’re more likely to be the kind who start small, hip technology companies, which just makes them wonder why they’re not making millions doing that instead of wasting time on this political bullshit. (One friend recently left lefty activism to make Firefox plug-ins.)

  As a good institutionalist, I’m a bit uncomfortable proposing what basically amounts to a cultural explanation for this phenomenon, but while it’s less intellectually satisfying it’s at least more politically optimistic. If one of the things holding the left back is a lack of political entrepreneurs, then all we need to do is make more.

  Now I just need to find some lunatics with money.

  Full disclosure: Aaron Swartz recently co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, making him something of a political entrepreneur himself. Before that he was one of those lame tech start-up entrepreneurs, founding reddit.com. This piece is written entirely in his personal capacity, of course.

  People who didn’t know Aaron remember him for his tireless work on behalf of a variety of public causes. They usually don’t realize that this work went together with a myriad of private kindnesses. I got to know Aaron as an extraordinarily intelligent commentator on Crooked Timber, an academic blog that I contribute to. At first I didn’t know about the other great things that he had done; he didn’t talk about them unless he was pressed. He just wanted to get involved in conversations with other people who were interested in political inquiry and social justice the way he was.

  He also wanted to help. When we had major technical difficulties because our audience was outpacing the capacities of the server space we had leased, he suggested, without any fuss, that he would be very happy to take over our technical responsibilities and provide us all the facilities we needed. He privately helped many other people in equally unfussy ways. Rick Perlstein, the political historian of the rise of the right, is now famous. Before he was well known, Aaron came across his work, realized that he didn’t have a website, and offered to make one for him. Rick was a bit nonplussed to receive so generous an offer from a complete stranger, but he quickly realized that Aaron was for real. They became good friends.

  We asked Aaron to guest-blog for us for seminars, but we also just published his work when he had something to say and asked us if we were interested (we said yes, and for good reason). He brought many worlds together. His activism went hand in hand with a deep commitment to the intellect and to figuring out the world through argument. This could discomfit other activists, since it meant that he often changed his mind. He had the profound intellectual curiosity of a first-rate scholar, without the self-importance that usually accompanies it. If he could be accused of arrogance (and some people did so accuse him), it was a curiously egoless form. He simply expected other people to live up to the same exacting standards that he imposed upon himself. But he could also take a joke. When the New York Times ran a story on him with an accompanying photo that portrayed him brooding and backlit behind the screen of his MacBook, I teased him about it, and he was clearly delighted to be teased.

  It’s hard to face up to what we’ve lost. He wasn’t just an activist, or a programmer, or an intellectual. He was a builder of bridges between many different people from many different worlds. Only after he died did I begin to realize how many people he corresponded with. When I write now, it is often in an imaginary dialogue with him, where I imagine his impatience with this or that plodding sentence, too far removed from the real concerns of real people. That imaginary dialogue is no substitute for the real thing. He was smarter than I am, and always capable of surprising me. I miss him very much.

  —Henry Farrell

  MEDIA

  Like Aaron, I go around a lot and talk to people about stuff that I think is of burning importance: questions about whether the Internet will be a tool for unimaginable surveillance, control, and censorship, or whether it will be a tool for unprecedented democratic deliberation, collective action, creativity, and self-expression.

  When it’s over, inevitably someone will ask me how I think it’ll all turn out. After all, I’m a science fiction writer. Isn’t that a bit like being a futurist?

  But being a science fiction writer is nothing like a futurist. Or shouldn’t be, anyway. A science fiction writer who believes he can predict the future is like a drug peddler who starts sampling the product—it never ends well. The point of science fiction is to talk about the present—to build a counterfactual world that illustrates some important fact about the present that is so vast and diffuse that it’s hard to put your finger on.

  When you go to the doctor with a sore throat, she’ll swab it and touch the swab to a petri dish that goes into a cupboard for a day or two. When she gets it out again, the stuff that was on the swab will have multiplied into something that is visible with a conventional microscope, ready for diagnosis. Science fiction writers do that to whole societies. We pluck a single technological fact out of the world around us, and we build a world in a bottle where that fact is the totalizing truth. Through a process of fiction, we take the reader on a tour of this thought experiment that gives him the power to intuit the way technology is flexing our reality, making the invisible visible.

  The important fact about the petri dish with your throat gunk on it is that it is not an accurate model of your body. It’s an incredibly simplified model of it, inaccurate in a specific and useful way. So it is with science fiction—its value is not in prediction but in description, in making the invisible visible.

  Who wants to be a predictor, anyway? If the world was predictable, it would be foreordained, and what we do wouldn’t matter. A world on rails is one in which everything we do is futile. Why, if you saw what Dante did to the fortune-tellers in Inferno, you’d—

  So then they say, “Fine, fine, you’re not a predictor. But what about optimism? Are you optimistic about the future or pessimistic?”

  And that’s when I really start to channel my inner Aaron. Because that’s exactly the wrong sort of question to ask. Of course I’m pessimistic about what would happen if the forces of reaction triumph and the Net is irreversibly used to wire up a system of totalitarian control that combines Orwell (surveillance) with Huxley (ubiquitous corporate messaging) and Kafka (guilt by Big Data algorithm).

  But so what? The fact that I’m still doing something tells you the answer to the optimism/pessimism question. If I didn’t think there was any hope of salvaging things, I wouldn’t be out there kicking at the walls and shouting from the hilltops. Is that optimism?

  I don’t know. Call it hope instead.

  And on second thought, even if I was convinced that nothing I did mattered, I’d still be out there. Because this world is people I love—my wife, my daughter, other family members, friends, some of you reading these words. And just as I wouldn’t stop treading water if I was trying to keep my daughter afloat in an open sea, not until my last breath was gone and my legs
wouldn’t kick another stroke, even if I knew it wouldn’t make a difference, I’d still keep kicking. If I weren’t capable of another stroke, I’d still keep advocating for Net freedom even if I knew my efforts wouldn’t make a difference.

  Don’t ask yourself whether the future will be good or bad. Don’t ask yourself whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. Ask what you can do to make the world better. Live as though these are the first days of a better nation. Never give up.

  —Cory Doctorow

  The Book That Changed My Life

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

  May 15, 2006

  Age 19

  Two years ago this summer I read a book that changed the entire way I see the world. I had been researching various topics—law, politics, the media—and become more and more convinced that something was seriously wrong. Politicians, I was shocked to discover, weren’t actually doing what the people wanted. And the media, my research found, didn’t really care much about that, preferring to focus on such things as posters and polls.

  As I thought about this more, its implications struck me as larger and larger. But I still had no bigger picture to fit them in. The media was simply doing a bad job, leading people to be confused. We just had to pressure them to do better and democracy would be restored.

  Then, one night, I watched the film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (I think it had come up in my Netflix queue). First off, it’s simply an amazingly good film. I’ve watched it several times now and each time I’m utterly entranced. It’s undoubtedly the best documentary I’ve seen, weaving together all sorts of clever tricks to enlighten and entertain.