To the extent possible under law, Cory Doctorow has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to “RIP, Aaron Swartz.”
Update: Go read Lessig:
“He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the
source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would
Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a
decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get
proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have
the power of the United States government behind you.”
My friend Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, Jan 11. He was
26. I got woken up with the news about an hour ago. I’m still digesting
it – I suspect I’ll be digesting it for a long time – but I thought it
was important to put something public up so that we could talk about
it. Aaron was a public guy.
I met Aaron when he was 14 or 15. He was working on XML stuff (he
co-wrote the RSS specification when he was 14) and came to San Francisco
often, and would stay with Lisa Rein, a friend of mine who was also an
XML person and who took care of him and assured his parents he had adult
supervision. In so many ways, he was an adult, even then, with a kind
of intense, fast intellect that really made me feel like he was part and
parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where
your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are.
But he was also unmistakably a kid then, too. He would only eat white
food. We’d go to a Chinese restaurant and he’d order steamed rice. I
suggested that he might be a supertaster and told him how to check it
out, and he did, and decided that he was. We had a good talk about the
stomach problems he faced and about how he would need to be careful
because supertasters have a tendency to avoid “bitter” vegetables and
end up deficient in fibre and vitamins. He immediately researched the
hell out of the subject, figured out a strategy for eating better, and
sorted it. The next time I saw him (in Chicago, where he lived – he
took the El a long way from the suburbs to sit down and chat with me
about distributed hash caching), he had a whole program in place.
I introduced him to Larry Lessig, and he was active in the original
Creative Commons technical team, and became very involved in
technology-freedom issues. Aaron had powerful, deeply felt ideals, but
he was also always an impressionable young man, someone who often found
himself moved by new passions. He always seemed somehow in search of
mentors, and none of those mentors ever seemed to match the impossible
standards he held them (and himself) to.
This was cause for real pain and distress for Aaron, and it was the
root of his really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public
denunciations of his friends and mentors. And it’s a testament to
Aaron’s intellect, heart, and friendship that he was always forgiven for
this. Many of us “grown ups” in Aaron’s life have, over the years, sat
down to talk about this, and about our protective feelings for him, and
to check in with one another and make sure that no one was too stung by
Aaron’s disappointment in us. I think we all knew that, whatever the
disappointment that Aaron expressed about us, it also reflected a
disappointment in himself and the world.
Aaron accomplished some incredible things in his life. He was one of
the early builders of Reddit (someone always turns up to point out that
he was technically not a co-founder, but he was close enough as makes
no damn), got bought by Wired/Conde Nast, engineered his own dismissal
and got cashed out, and then became a full-time, uncompromising,
reckless and delightful shit-disturber.
The post-Reddit era in Aaron’s life was really his coming of age.
His stunts were breathtaking. At one point, he singlehandedly liberated
20 percent of US law. PACER, the system that gives Americans access to
their own (public domain) case-law, charged a fee for each such access.
After activists built RECAP (which allowed its users to put any caselaw
they paid for into a free/public repository), Aaron spent a small
fortune fetching a titanic amount of data and putting it into the public
domain. The feds hated this. They smeared him, the FBI investigated
him, and for a while, it looked like he’d be on the pointy end of some
bad legal stuff, but he escaped it all, and emerged triumphant.
He also founded a group called DemandProgress,
which used his technological savvy, money and passion to leverage
victories in huge public policy fights. DemandProgress’s work was one of
the decisive factors in last year’s victory over SOPA/PIPA, and that
was only the start of his ambition.
I wrote to Aaron for help with Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother
to get his ideas on a next-generation electioneering tool that could be
used by committed, passionate candidates who didn’t want to end up
beholden to monied interests and power-brokers. Here’s what he wrote
back:
First he decides to take over the whole California Senate, so he
can do things at scale. He finds a friend in each Senate district to run
and plugs them into a web app he’s made for managing their campaigns.
It has a database of all the local reporters, so there’s lots of local
coverage for each of their campaign announcements.
Then it’s just a vote-finding machine. First it goes through your
contacts list (via Facebook, twitter, IM, email, etc.) and lets you go
down the list and try to recruit everyone to be a supporter. Every
supporter is then asked to do the same thing with their contacts list.
Once it’s done people you know, it has you go after local activists who
are likely to be supportive. Once all those people are recruited, it
does donors (grabbing the local campaign donor records). And then it
moves on to voters and people you could register to vote. All the while,
it’s doing massive A/B testing to optimize talking points for all these
things. So as more calls are made and more supporters are recruited, it
just keeps getting better and better at figuring out what will persuade
people to volunteer. Plus the whole thing is built into a larger
game/karma/points thing that makes it utterly addictive, with you always
trying to stay one step ahead of your friends.
Meanwhile GIS software that knows where every voter is is
calculating the optimal places to hold events around the district. The
press database is blasting them out – and the press is coming, because
they’re actually fun. Instead of sober speeches about random words,
they’re much more like standup or the Daily Show – full of great, witty
soundbites that work perfectly in an evening newscast or a newspaper
story. And because they’re so entertaining and always a little
different, they bring quite a following; they become events. And a big
part of all of them getting the people there to pull out their
smartphones and actually do some recruiting in the app, getting more
people hooked on the game.
He doesn’t talk like a politician – he knows you’re sick of
politicians spouting lies and politicians complaining about politicians
spouting lies and the whole damn thing. He admits up front you don’t
trust a word he says – and you shouldn’t! But here’s the difference:
he’s not in the pocket of the big corporations. And you know how you can
tell? Because each week he brings out a new whistleblower to tell a
story about how a big corporation has mistreated its workers or the
environment or its customers – just the kind of thing the current
corruption in Sacramento is trying to cover up and that only he is going
to fix.
For his TV ads, his volunteer base all take a stab at making an ad
for him and the program automatically A/B tests them by asking people in
the district to review a new TV show. The ads are then inserted into
the commercial breaks and at the end of the show, when you ask the user
how they liked it, you also sneak in some political questions. Web ads
are tested by getting people to click on ads for a free personality test
and then giving them a personality test with your political ad along
the side and asking them some political questions. (Ever see ads for a
free personality test? That’s what they really are. Everybody turns out
to have the personality of a sparkle fish, which is nice and pleasant
except when it meets someone it doesn’t like, …) Since it’s random,
whichever group scores closest to you on the political questions must be
most affected by the ad. Then they’re bought at what research shows to
be the optimal time before the election, with careful selection of
television show to maximize the appropriate voter demographics based on
Nielsen data.
anyway, i could go on, but i should actually take a break and do some of this… hope you’re well
This was so perfect that I basically ran it verbatim in the book.
Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical
skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he could have
revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still
yet do so.
Somewhere in there, Aaron’s recklessness put him right in harm’s way. Aaron snuck into MIT
and planted a laptop in a utility closet, used it to download a lot of
journal articles (many in the public domain), and then snuck in and
retrieved it. This sort of thing is pretty par for the course around
MIT, and though Aaron wasn’t an MIT student, he was a fixture in the
Cambridge hacker scene, and associated with Harvard, and generally part
of that gang, and Aaron hadn’t done anything with the articles (yet), so
it seemed likely that it would just fizzle out.
Instead, they threw the book at him. Even though MIT and JSTOR (the
journal publisher) backed down, the prosecution kept on. I heard lots of
theories: the feds who’d tried unsuccessfully to nail him for the
PACER/RECAP stunt had a serious hate-on for him; the feds were chasing
down all the Cambridge hackers who had any connection to Bradley Manning
in the hopes of turning one of them, and other, less credible theories.
A couple of lawyers close to the case told me that they thought Aaron
would go to jail.
This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed
himself because he was worried about doing time. That might be so.
Imprisonment is one of my most visceral terrors, and it’s at least
credible that fear of losing his liberty, of being subjected to violence
(and perhaps sexual violence) in prison, was what drove Aaron to take
this step.
But Aaron was also a person who’d had problems with depression for
many years. He’d written about the subject publicly, and talked about it
with his friends.
I don’t know if it’s productive to speculate about that, but here’s a
thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you’ll think
about, too. I don’t know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of
us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of
the day or night. I don’t know if he understood that wherever he was,
there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on
a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.
Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn’t
solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved
forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his
friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally
his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was
sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it.
Depression strikes so many of us. I’ve struggled with it, been so
low I couldn’t see the sky, and found my way back again, though I never
thought I would. Talking to people, doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,
seeking out a counsellor or a Samaritan – all of these have a chance of
bringing you back from those depths. Where there’s life, there’s hope.
Living people can change things, dead people cannot.
I’m so sorry for Aaron, and sorry about Aaron. My sincere
condolences to his parents, whom I never met, but who loved their
brilliant, magnificently weird son and made sure he always had
chaperonage when he went abroad on his adventures. My condolences to his
friends, especially Quinn and Lisa, and the ones I know and the ones I
don’t, and to his comrades at DemandProgress. To the world: we have all
lost someone today who had more work to do, and who made the world a
better place when he did it.
