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The boy who could change the world

The unique man Aaron Swartz is most notable in The Boy Who Could Change the World.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Aaron Swartz:
The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz

The New Press, 2015

Aaron Swartz grew up as much on the Internet as in his hometown of Chicago. Already in his early teens, he made a name for himself as a gifted programmer, and during his far too short life, he helped shape RSS (Really Simple Syndication, also called "living bookmarks"), Reddit and Wikimedia. However, Swartz was not content with just coding software. He was passionate about what he did to benefit most people. For Swartz, the value of technology lay first and foremost in its ability to create a better and more democratic world.

Uncompromising systematist. One of the first stories we get a glimpse of from Swartz's life is when he challenged Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales, who had claimed that although Wikipedia had thousands of contributors, it was a hard core of a few hundred that accounted for most of the content. Swartz created a program that counted how much text each contributor contributed, instead of just counting the number of edits from each user. And the result showed exactly the opposite: Most of the content on Wikipedia is written by users who only contribute a few times in their respective fields. Wales' "hard core" works primarily as editorial staff. This, Swartz said, had important implications for how Wikipedia should be managed. While many editors wanted to have more control over the site, Swartz argued that the only right thing was to better accommodate the many who contributed only one or two articles.

Truth Quest. At the age of 19, Swartz filed for election in the Wikimedia Foundation, knowing that it was a mildly poor election campaign strategy to argue for reducing the influence of his own constituency. Swartz lost the election, but did not compromise on what he thought was right and true. This willingness to seek the truth, to evaluate, analyze and find better solutions is evident throughout Swartz's texts. The Boy Who Could Change the World leaves no doubt that Aaron Swartz was a genius of the extremely rare. No matter what topic he addresses, the reasoning is sophisticated. Where thinking appears unfinished, it is often because of the open and searching attitude that underlies it. Many of the texts are from his blog, a place where he thought aloud with other, embroidered ideas, and gathered what he had learned. Swartz was aware of his intellectual advantage, but was no elitist. On the contrary, he had great faith in man and in the wisdom that can come from a flat structured collaboration with many participants – such as Wikipedia. If you do not get the results you want, it is not the people, but the system that is wrong, according to Swartz 'thinking.

System Critic. The collection of Swartz's texts is inspiring reading, and provides surprising and system-critical perspectives on everything from computer programming to the school system, politics and the media. One of the longer texts is about how US laws are made, and how the many gatekeepers in the system mean that good proposals usually have no chance. Swartz does not define his own policy, but David Segal, who has written one of the introductions in the book, describes his thoughts as "libertarian socialist". Among the ideas he explores and enthusiastically shares with readers are both Noam Chomsky's propaganda model and the idea of ​​the school system as a way of disciplining people to become obedient workers under capitalism. The chapter on media also contains a sharp analysis of the way the right – wing think tanks work to dominate the truth that is told through the mass media.

In Swartz 'texts there is a seldom sharp understanding of society, but at the same time also the naivete children have before they learn all the unwritten rules.

Activism. Not surprisingly, there was a natural transition from programming to activism for Swartz. Among other things, he designed the forerunner of SecureDrop, the secure alert system used by many large media houses today, and was central to the campaign that ensured the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). He used his technical skills to make millions of US court documents available online, and was active in the movement to make academic research free and accessible to all. The latter was the background for the indictment that was to lead to his suicide in January 2013, only 26 years old. According to the indictment, Swartz had used the access he had through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to download large amounts of scientific articles from JSTOR, a database of scientific journals. The prosecution assumed that the intention was to publish these for free online, as Swartz had done with the court documents. Swartz himself compared the case against him with Kafkas process. He read the book the same year as the indictment was issued, and comments that the book describes the case against him to the letter.

The boy and the emperor. In Swartz 'texts there is a rarely sharp understanding of society, but at the same time also the naivete children have before they learn all the unwritten rules, things that should not be said out loud. Or maybe it was not naivety – rather a complete and uncompromising rejection of the norms that stop us from pointing out what is wrong? Well-behaved adults know that it is not "permissible" to state that a performance of Bachs The well-tempered piano is cruelly boring, or that the classical audience seems unable to critically evaluate the performance. One "can not" say that magazines are there to give people the feeling of being part of a cool gang they do not belong to. Or that initiatives for openness and transparency in politics only seem demoralizing as long as most people have no real opportunity to stop corrupt practices. Swartz often appears as the child in Hans Christian Andersen's story, who points out that the emperor does not wear clothes. The adults know that this should not be said out loud, but no one can deny that it is true.
Swartz expected better, both from himself and others. But those in power who are willing to give up power are seldom commensurate, and insisting on telling the truth can often have devastating consequences in adult life. Perhaps this discovery contributed to the pessimistic shift in mood we find in some of Scwartz's latest texts. In the summer of 2012, half a year before suicide, he wrote: “Whenever geeks turn their eyes to politics, they always have the same reaction: There's so much inefficiency! And they naturally propose the obvious ideas for reducing it – for example: If only it was easier for citizens to read bills, citizens with relevant expertise could assist Congress by sharing their hard-earned wisdom! The fact is, Congress is not interested in availing itself of your wisdom any more than the sausagemaker needs your help tidying the floor. »

A tragedy. Unable to read The Boy Who Could Change the World and remain untouched by the human tragedy that unfolded. All Aaron Swartz wanted to do was use his skill at pressing to successfully stifle the game. He evaluated and corrected himself, expecting others to both want and be willing to do the same. He was wrong. What awful world do we really live in, where there was no room for such a person?

Tori Aarseth
Tori Aarseth
Aarseth is a political scientist and a regular journalist at Ny Tid.

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