Aaron Swartz, Asking For Help, 119 Days Ago

My first thought on hearing about his death was thinking of the picture of the boycotters singing together in the Montgomery jail. We don't have songs of solidarity any more. Instead it's months of indictments and pre-trial proceedings and motions and legal fees, all over things we didn't even see happen in the first place, in a snarky community that will tear people down at least 50% of the time. I can't really think of a less effective resistance strategy.

It's also mostly fueled by indifference and self-interest, not activism. Most file sharers just don't care that they are breaking the law; they want to do what they want to do. If these laws are to ever change we're going to need to start downloading and sharing on the Capital Steps, or get arrested for printing free books for poor kids. We are going to need to be prepared to go to jail ahead of time, before they decide to come after us. That way people like Aaron who don't have the support network and preparation aren't the only ones facing this.

Unfortunately, in my experience the existing activist networks are not the place to start. The anarchists just want to relive the 70's, labor is watching their power dwindle and is focused myopically on the little that remains, poverty campaigners are burned out from fighting years of losing battles and the Occupy, anti-globalization and professional activists seem perfectly happy to march just to be doing anything at all. Many people can agree on the problems, but few people can agree on the solutions (much less small, concrete steps to get there) and so they don't accomplish anything. In intellectual "property" rights laws, however, I think we have a well-defined problem where direct action could be effective.

> As I stated, it does by lessening strict gender roles.

But that's also true of looking at gender equality from the male perspective, yet whenever someone attempts that the old MRA strawman stereotypes get thrown around.

I believe the phrase "man up" has more to do with the differences between boys and men vs women and men. It's synonymous with grow up.

Now your defending the Prosecutor that a Harvard Law Professor called out as a bully? The Prosecutor knew that it would destroy his life but she didn't care. After all stealing publicly funded academic papers is a big crime.

edw519 deserves to be witch hunted at least on HN. I find it appalling his insensitive comment is at the top still.

I find your logic extending to all crimes. You should write a essay defending James Holmes while you are at at.

Sorry but your a piece of sh*t

Allow me to make a confession:

I didn't think much of Aaron Swartz while he was alive. Most of his writings seemed self-absorbed to me. I had difficulty understanding how someone with his politics could be a mac fanboy. People I think highly of (Chris Webber, John Sullivan) thought highly of him so I was induced to give him some benefit of the doubt on those grounds, but I certainly couldn't understand what they saw in him.

I assumed he was a millionaire with enormous resources that he was using to thumb his nose at powerful people. I felt that if I had the resources (I assumed that) Aaron had, I would use them differently.

I saw the thread about Aaron's campaign fund and I didn't post, but I did read it.

And I read Edward's comment and I agreed with it.

I knew very little about Aaron's case. But the way that fund was being put together seemed underhanded to me, like he wanted to take people's money without really acknowledging it. Is he a millionaire or not? I wondered, and if not, why doesn't he come out with it and explain what happened?

Of course now I know of the existence, from Lawence Lessig, of the bizarre Kafkaesque muzzle the judge had on Aaron, but how could anyone who wasn't very closely familiar with Aaron and his case know about that?

There's a sort of sick serendipity in this for me. Just last week I read Kafka's The Trial. The word "Kafkaesque" keeps getting thrown around but it's stunning---stupefying to me, how many parallels there are between that book and Aaron's case.

In Kafka, after the protagonist is arrested he's immediately released. The police even escort him to work and tell him to go about his life. At first he thinks that's an great thing that he wasn't hauled off in custody, but as the trial grinds on he comes to realize that being forced to live every day as the facsimile of a free man being required to do what free men are inclined to do while carrying the additional burden of dealing with his trial, is itself torture.

If anyone remembers the bruhaha around Dmitry Sklyarov, or before that DVD John or Kevin Mitnick knows that this community rallies around men sitting in jail while the authorities try to come up with a crime to charge them with. There's no doubt in my mind that if the prosecution had hauled Aaron off to jail "for downloading some PDFs" the reaction would have been swift and boisterous.

I've learned a great deal about this country's "justice" system over the past two days, and mostly I've learned about the special sort of hell it put Aaron in, and I've come to realize that I was complicit in its work through my ignorance and indifference.

And all I can say about that is I feel a little bit sick. And that it won't ever happen again.