[liberationtech] Remember Aaron Swartz

[Catherine Fitzpatrick]

 I rarely get involved in debates here because there are no like-minded people, except some who lurk.
A founding coder of Diaspora committed suicide, too. If Diaspora were viable, we'd all be there now, but it isn't, so we're not. It was "given to the community" which is geek-speek for saying"unpaid open source zealots got tired of working on it". Maybe that's why you can't find it anywhere.
I'd invite you to contemplate more deeply how the nihilistic, extreme culture of the hacker in fact led us to the abusiveness of Twitter, Facebook, Google and others and even the exposure of ourelections to Russian GRU agents.
It's not unrelated. The profound disdain for private property is intimately related to the rampant lack of privacy now, like it or not. You didn't want to see democratically elected politicians regulate theInternet through SOPA or CISPA; so you got the Russians to regulate your Internet for you. 
If you don't like the fact that academic publishers charge money to cover costs -- and no, your research grant or the university's grants don't "already cover these costs", then don't buy them.There are workarounds. One of the most obvious workaround is to be a member of that university with a library card in that university -- then you get the publications for free! In fact, Swartz could have taken out publications for free with an MIT card if he were truly interested in finding some journal for his research. But he didn't do that, because he wasn't about that.
He wanted to commit a raucous "propaganda of the deed" by making it big and criminal to "make a point". Except, rarely does extremism bring that desired effect. 
You can get friends to get you publications; you can join Academia.org and get many of those you need for free, and for their low subscription fee get others. Pay walls are not the crippling effect on scholarship imagined.In fact, I never hear techies complain about the real crippling effect, which is the high cost of textbooks, even e-books, in the hundreds of dollars. And really, the high cost of education in general, caused by all sorts of things, including the addition of numerous officials who now have to watch for Title IX, gender, transgender, etc. issues. And it's ok to question these costs and these programs and these methods and still support the rights of LGBT and other minorities.
The reason the academic journals were targeted is that they enabled activists to choose a hated target -- imagined greedy middlemen gouging poor students and professors -- that wasn't the academic world per se, but was part of their hypothetical "The Man" and "Neo-Liberalism" and blah blah. These campaigns aren't about academic freedom. They are about technocommunist partisans' movements against capitalism. Thesort of capitalism that enables Stanford, where this list is homed, to exist and thrive. If you want to have a radical hackers' movement espousing communism, that's fine, but don't pretend it's about academic freedom.
Prosecutors overreach all the time. The plea-bargaining system creates all kinds of abuses and the bail system is broken. But you can tackle those problems without committing crime -- all sorts of groups from theACLU to local committees, churches, synagogues, etc. which I and many others support are helping refugees do this all the time. They don't break and enter into server rooms and paralyze networks and steal files to do this.
If someone is "neurologically atypical," which is meant as a badge of pride like "indigo children," to overcome real or imagined prejudice, that doesn't mean if they commit suicide, that the government orsociety or evil capitalists or anything of the sort has killed them. They are responsible for their own actions.
I'm going to continue to use Facebook because there is nothing as good, whatever its faults. People and groups in poor countries, like Ukraine or Belarus or Turkemenistan, which I follow, use Facebook as a kind of free web site -- institutions like the parliament or the military even of countries like Ukraine have Facebook pages instead of paying money to maintain websites. They do this also to avoid censorship in their homelands.Of course Facebook is where you keep up with relatives because the imagined privacy tradeoffs are absolutely nothing like being hacked and doxed by Anonymous and other criminals, something I've experienced personally many times because they don't like my criticism, they are totalitarians. It's not the NSA that exposed people's privacy when they legitimately gathered data; it's Glenn Greenwald who put up the photos and information of girlfriends of the Taliban and their children. And so on.
I think few of you ever have to test your beliefs in the real world and see how they sound to ordinary people. You could try it at Thanksgiving with your relatives whom you think are morons because they voted for Trump. Most often they did that because of disgust at campus political correctness and extremist techie views imposed on us all now. But you'd like to pretend it's only because they're racists. You can go on pretending that and insist on splitting the Democrats into more and more fine-tuned sectarian grouplets in which you will feel you have at last achieved political correctness. But then we'll get Trump again. Thanks!
Catherine Fitzpatrick


    On Sunday, November 10, 2019, 03:19:02 PM EST, Rand Strauss <rand at peoplecount.org> wrote:  
 
 
> you have a disgusting mentality… 

Let’s please have no name-calling here, or pretend people have a "mentality", much less that one can deduce it.  Let’s keep the conversation constructive and curb our impulses to insult each other, even to highlight contrasting views.
We have the institutions we have, and they have advantages and disadvantages.  When the academic publishing groups began, they added a lot of value- there was no internet. They were expensive because publishing was expensive because distribution was inefficient. Alternatives are emerging.
Aaron Swartz was one of many non-neurotypical people who were born long before the term was coined.  Back then, one was either fit to stand trial, or unfit, sane or crazy. Today, we know that there are many spectra of cognitive abilities and tolerances. Many more people are capable of standing trial, of thriving in schools, of contributing in many ways to society if accommodations are made.  Aaron had both genius and short-sightedness.
Clearly Aaron missed the many compelling perspectives that showed he was valued and needed and, after a time at least, could find a community in which he could thrive. And he continues to have a lot of company in this regard.  Suicide, as well as near-suicide, suicidal thoughts and depression are all too common, especially in America.  Humanity has made some incredible strides in understanding and treating these phenomena, but there are still huge holes in distribution.
Many, many prosecutors have been guilty of overreach, filling America’s prisons with all sorts of people who should never have been there, or should have had much shorter sentences.  These prosecutors reflect a large fraction of society that reacts to small crimes with name-calling, labelling a whole person as a criminal, especially if they have a cognitive difference, seem to oppose an establishment norm, or if their skin is darkened by pigments. This extends to our schools as well, with the rallying cry of "zero tolerance."
What are we going to do about it?
Except, humanity also seems to be weak when it comes to "we", and "doing."  
For instance, I have a list of dozens of web-based political-reform efforts (sites).  While all but mine, and perhaps another, seem unlikely to make a real difference, there’s no group maintaining the list, much less embellishing it, much less publishing it, much less (to my knowledge) studying the phenomena to see what’s promising and what’s missing (much less working on mine...)

> We created it, and it still exists. It's called Diaspora*. 

You didn’t even say how to find it ( https://diasporafoundation.org/ ), much less how to participate on this list through it.  Is there a LiberationTech pod?  I spent 5 minutes looking around it- it seems almost impenetrable…
Does MeWe.com satisfy your anti-facebook requirements?   We could make a group there, such as:  https://mewe.com/join/liberationtech.  To augment, certainly not to replace, this forum.
Every single one of us, and every single one of "them" is every day doing what we think and feel is appropriate given our thoughts, feelings and judgements of our abilities, needs, wants and opportunities in the world.  We’re swept up by inspirations, whether of Aarons willingness to oppose the the paywalls around knowledge or the prosecutor’s willingness to defend society’s rules about property and order.  Meanwhile, Trump has further institutionalized chaos and stupidity, CO2 levels are averaging about 406, and the new normal is ever-worsening climate change catastrophe.  While we have many partial answer, we clearly have a long way to go.
'Best wishes as we approach Thanksgiving.-r

On Nov 10, 2019, at 8:11 AM, Yosem Companys <ycompanys at gmail.com> wrote:

In fact, the masses ✊🏻✊🏽✊🏿 would like to see an Anti-Facebook - with the potential for limitless friends, more efficient algorithms and no distortion of information. We can all collectively usher in a more beautiful digital 💻 world, free of Facebook's limitations and unjust ♠️ social media practices  #️⃣

But people need to use such alternate, community friendly solutions if they are to dethrone Facebook. And that requires public awareness. And that requires mass-scale earned media or expensive marketing/advertising. (In the absence of collective action, the only other solution is turning these networks into public utilities.)-- 
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