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That presumed that the whole trial wasn’t the cause of the mental issues. I’m sure that facing an immoral DOJ out for blood caused him a lot of stress and depression (or triggered any latent issues).
It's rather well documented that Aaron had been thinking about suicide long before getting mixed up with the DOJ http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/341150
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That presumed that the whole trial wasn’t the cause of the mental issues. I’m sure that facing an immoral DOJ out for blood caused him a lot of stress and depression (or triggered any latent issues).
It's rather well documented that Aaron had been thinking about suicide long before getting mixed up with the DOJ http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/341150
To me the proximate cause 100% was the legal case against him - it inflamed any underlying issues and they just kept pressing. I could be wrong of course but I don’t think anyone will ever truly know what was happening in his head.
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I've often spoken with my more left-leaning friends about the need to try and find middle ground with my more right-leaning friends, and quickly. Donald Trump was an incompetent, by almost any measure you want to use. However, he shifted the Overton Window dramatically. When the Republican version of Barack Obama bursts onto the scene - someone eloquent, competent, and thoroughly able to move effectively in the polit…
If a sitting President can be deplatformed from the Internet, then wouldn't a Presidential Candidate be? Would said candidate be able to run a successful campaign without it?
How will they be able to deplatform that? Are you endorsing deplatforming anyone to the right of Joe Biden?
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Of course it had a role in his suicide, but no person who was not already very mentally ill would have ended their life in that situation. The narrative that prosecutors wanted to effectively ruin his life for his criminal offenses is just wrong.
They were threatening him with 50 years in jail and a million in fines or accepting an immoral (to him, and as a more broadly held belief of many) punishment with no opportunity to defend himself and the prospect of a lifelong record of serious crimes. How is that not an effort to ruin someone’s life?
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The overwhelming majority don't have any epistemic basis for what they believe and are just saying what they think is socially-acceptable to say.
Sounds like democracy probably isn’t a good choice then.
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Of course it had a role in his suicide, but no person who was not already very mentally ill would have ended their life in that situation. The narrative that prosecutors wanted to effectively ruin his life for his criminal offenses is just wrong.
They were threatening him with 50 years in jail and a million in fines or accepting an immoral (to him, and as a more broadly held belief of many) punishment with no opportunity to defend himself and the prospect of a lifelong record of serious crimes. How is that not an effort to ruin someone’s life?
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> He was not murdered, he suffered from severe mentally illness. Maybe having one of the most powerful governments use its might to crush someone and make an example does that to people? Normal people are scared of a manager, a college professor, or making a presentation; imagine how they'd feel if the U.S Government was on their case specifically .
He was not going to get crushed by the government, he was going to serve a 6 month sentence in a low security facility. This is the sort of sentence one might receive for stealing a car. Are those individuals “crushed” by the government?
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Nobody is defending plea deals here. Aaron was offered an excellent deal, regardless of how indefensible plea deals might be in general.
No, he was offered a bad deal. Copyright violations very rarely result in prison for first time offenders. He also did a mild case of hacking which together might have resulted in a short sentence. But if he had gone to court I doubt he would have got more than 4-6 months, which is the same thing as the plea deal.
Copyright violations rarely result in prison sentences, but copyright violators are rarely seeking to violate copyright on the same scale and with the same outspoken ideological justification as Swartz.
Although Aaron made enormous contributions to many different technologies, I often think of reddit when I think of Aaron. I often wonder how he would feel, not just about censorship there, but about the direction the entire Internet has taken in regards to censoring of content. I can't - and wouldn't - speak for him, but I would be supremely interested in his thoughts.
> censoring of content The supreme irony of this is that Aaron's role as a co-founder has long been censored from Reddit's founders page [0], despite agreements to the contrary [1]. More generally, Aaron had strong views on censorship [2]: > I think all censorship should be deplored. My position is that bits are not a bug – that we should create communications technologies that allow people to send whatever they like…
Something that always seems to be accepted without question in these conversations is that censoring violent language will reduce violent behaviour.
Are we sure this is the case? For example, if you believed the election was stolen and all the platforms which would allow you discuss this civilly have banned you and those who think like you - what do you do?
Sometimes I wonder if restricting peoples ability to express themselves freely (and also talking about them like they are scum for holding certain view points) might actually motative some number of people to make their voices heard through acts of violence.
I also dislike how I've been pushed on to what I'd consider extremist platforms in recent months because a few people I follow have been banned from platforms like Twitter and YouTube. I think I'm strong minded enough to resist the constant bombardment of anti-semitic and racist content I am now exposed to, but I suspect some people are likely to be radicalised by this.
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To your point though, I often wonder how Aaron would have felt about the internet today. I've seen many people's opinions on free speech change over the years (including my own). Tech platforms when they were the underdogs were overwhelming in favour of free speech - I know early on Reddit and Twitter explicitely expressed their support of freespeech. But in recent years they have become far more powerful and it would seem their opinion on what they will allow us to say has now changed. Ironically they've moved so far on this that if Twitter, Facebook or YouTube were started today they would probably be shut down because of how much extremist content they platform - I remember there was a time when Reddit was full of child porn and even allowed a subreddit dedicated to it to operate.
I guess we'll never know how Aaron would have felt about all of this, but I know if there was anyone would could have proposed a workable solution it would have been him. It's a great shame he's no longer around to contribute to the future of the internet in the same way he did the internet of the past.
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No, he was offered a bad deal. Copyright violations very rarely result in prison for first time offenders. He also did a mild case of hacking which together might have resulted in a short sentence. But if he had gone to court I doubt he would have got more than 4-6 months, which is the same thing as the plea deal.
It wasn't because of a copyright violation. It was because after he was booted off MIT's network for violating their TOS, he went out of his way to find another way to get back on their network by unauthorized means and resume the same activity he got kicked off for.