[liberationtech] Remember Aaron Swartz

[Catherine Fitzpatrick]

 Shava,
I realize that these hacker myths die very hard. And that it is far easier to imagine that I am a close-minded, prejudiced and cruel witch, basing my beliefs on "propaganda" or "translations" from the MSM (what, he wrote in Russian? But I read Russian!) than to accept that Swartz was an imperfect being with delusions of grandeur, led to his doom by various software cult myths propagated by his elders. 
Of course, if the government sponsored the research (I mentioned that), it wouldn't entitle *you* to theft, nor would its status "in the public domain". Crime is crime. But I don't base my judgements on this "propaganda," but, you know, what Swartz wrote himself. And there he invoked the idea of smashing the machine because he thought that was how he could achieve change. *He* is the one seizing power breaking into a server closet and gaining illegal access to a computer system and grabbing files with a "keep grabbing" script. Who elected him or even acclaimed him? The geeks who run the servers at MIT weren't impressed. 
Here's what he wrote, which wasn't "The research I'm collecting is government-sponsored research, all in the public donain, behind a service's firewall and this material should be freely available."
Instead, he actually wrote this, in his "Guerilla Manifesto", making characterizations that hardly all would concede, especially when that "private theft" is not required, as the files are available to children whose very expensive tuitions are paid by their wealthy parents or by the taxpayer:
"It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access."
He didn't claim what he did *wasn't* a crime; he had at least enough self-awareness (more than his fans) to know it should be called "civil disobedience" and indeed guerilla warfare. (By the way, they aren't the same thing, and its useful to distinguish the two if you want a just society.) At least accord him the same terms he used himself, even if he himself didn't have the courage of his convictions to do the time for his crime and wanted it then somehow to be erased in an act of benevolence. 
Someone arrogating power to himself to decide matters of property and economics that others have legally and rightfully arranged differently is indeed a "guerilla," and even an authoritarian one. One can reply to his arrogant manifesto with the simple question, "What do you mean 'we,' white man?" Who died and made him king?
Let's not pretend he's a mild-mannered reporter interested in knowledge for knowledge's sake. Let's not pretend this is altruism and anyone who criticizes it is malevolent. I think even you, Shava, would not want to live in a society run on the principles of the Guerilla Manifesto where a few get to decide for the many *by force* and by "the propaganda of the deed".
It's also not true that "they" ("the Man") somehow conceded that all scholarly material should be free and made it so. If JStor released 4 million files to undermine Swartz's unilateral use of force, that doesn't mean all academic files are now free. They aren't. Nor are they required to be.
More could have been achieved by an op-ed piece showing actual knowledge that was locked up and urging it be released than stealing it by force. This was the tactic some leftists took when a promising treatment for cystic fibrosis was just found. Of course, it never seems to be the real scientists and researchers actually doing this work who make this complaint, because usually they are in communities that have access to these files for free; it's hackers who don't, and their claims aren't tested but accepted by the gullible.
Also, I wonder if you have mixed up your foundational myths. Julian Assange once worked under an NSA grant at his university, did you know that? And his research was going to be made classified. Research that he charmingly called the "Rubberhose," about making passwords so encrypted that they couldn't even be beaten out of a person by a putative policeman. We have his claim on this story, and no other perspective; the source is a former DARPA employee, however, so it sounds plausible. He made his lifetime's work to be vengeance against the NSA,and for some reason began with Hillary Clinton and the Obama State Department, the way the Russians later did, in this vendetta. 

Richard Stillman had a similar grievance, remember? And Mitch Kapor didn't like it that other people's software was proprietary and for sale, after he made his first millions himself on proprietary software. I don't wish to live in a society created by people with such grudges, willing to use force to gain their revenge for them.

Catherine Fitzpatrick
 
    On Sunday, November 10, 2019, 11:41:25 PM EST, Shava Nerad <shava23 at gmail.com> wrote:  
 
 Catherine!  It's been a while.
If you knew what was involved in Aaron's research, rather than absorbing the propaganda of the US Attorney's office and translations from MSM, you'd understand that the research Aaron was collecting was government sponsored research, all of it in the public domain, that was locked behind a service's firewall.  And that they did not fight the idea that this material should be freely available, later on, and it is now through their own web and subscription portals.
You ended up stigmatizing someone unjustly with incomplete information.  You object when others do that, but you see how easy it is to fall into the same trap yourself.
Sometimes compassion, rather than judgmentalism, is a better path.  It leaves you open to learning, rather than snapping your mind shut when something comes into your sphere of influence that fits your cognitive biases.
yrs,SN

Shava Neradshava23 at gmail.comhttps://patreon.com/shava23

On Sun, Nov 10, 2019 at 4:20 PM later <notabot at espiv.net> wrote:

  
I have never gotten involved here, not least because there are no like-minded people.
 
Thank you, Catherine, for taking time to write. Not that your liberal lenses at the world seem any less distorted and oppressive, just differently distorted and oppressive than those of techie libertarians, but at least you share your blind spots and half-completed claims trying to engage in an argument, and I respect that attempt. I wish there were more dialogue across our fault lines, and I am the first to admit my intolerance towards liberals and libertarians alike...
 
@Catherine: I'd like to ask you to think/imagine real people in this world, body after body, who cannot become "a member of a university".
 
 

 
 On 11/10/19 5:27 PM, Catherine Fitzpatrick wrote:
  
  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 our elections 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 the Internet 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. The sort 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 the ACLU 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 or society 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.)  -- 
 Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major commercial search engine. Violations of list guidelines will get  you moderated: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/lt. Unsubscribe, change to digest mode, or change password by emailing lt-owner at lists.liberationtech.org.  
  
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