The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz (2013)

> The irrationalities of power fascinated him, but he found the irrationalities of activism exasperating. Most activists, in his experience, would launch big campaigns about big issues and do things that they guessed would be beneficial, like running television ads or sending out direct mail, but they never did the work to figure out whether what they were doing was actually changing policy.

This is the frustrating thing about any activism: it moves slowly. For someone who cannot finish projects, or needs immediate feedback, it appears to be constant failure. However, activist movements are less like drag racers (the cars ;) and more like xenon ion thrusters that NASA tested a few years back: they spew out tiny ions that individually barely move the satellite, but slowly, over time, the sheer number of the small exhalations translate to colossal speeds. The activists seem to be mired in failure, but they are slowly moving the needle.

I wonder if as he got older he would have learned discipline to stick with longer-lead feedback loops. Or maybe not, perhaps his brain wasn't wired that way.

It's sad how the system punishes smart altruists. If you're smart, you'd better be evil or the system will destroy you.

I don't agree that "the system" punished a smart altruist.

As this article makes clear, Swartz did something he knew to be illegal. This was not his first brush with mass copyright violation. He was then prosecuted for his crimes. IMO, the charges were vastly disproportionate, but you expose yourself to prosecutorial overreach when you (knowingly) commit crimes.

This appears to have been a trend with Swartz. He seems to have had something of a God complex. And thus, for him, the ends justified the means, because he was right and they were wrong.

He does not even appear to have been especially ethical or rational. For example, Reddit sells to Condé Nast. A condition of the sale was that he would work out of Condé Nast's SF offices. He took the money, but then rejected the terms post hoc and disappeared. When he was tracked down and it was clear that he'd simply flown the coup, he was justifiably fired. All of which he, and his enablers, viewed as a great injustice! They don't seem to entertain giving back the money though...

He was a human, with all the attendant frailties and blindspots. He was not murdered. He was a person who struggled with mental illness, like so many of us. He committed suicide.

His suicide is tragic. He was clearly a bright and dynamic person. But he also seems to have been pretty misguided, and his darker tendencies appear to have been rationalized, justified, and enabled by his family. That to me, is the greater tragedy. It didn't have to be like this.

> It is commonly assumed that the debate over what Swartz did, and, more generally, the debate over whether information does or does not want to be free, is between hacker culture and copyright culture, young people and old people, but this is not true. On the Hacker News site in the fall of 2012, many commenters disagreed with what he’d done, and argued with his supporters on the site that in a nation ruled by laws it was not O.K. for one person to just go and break a law he felt was unjust.

Or, possibly, Hacker News doesn't represent hacker culture, but finance-adjacent right-wing techbro culture, which knows perfectly well which side of the copyright issue its bread is buttered on.