[obrero]

The US taxpayer and government funds public research, and the results are given as private profit to publishers. Swartz downloads papers en masse, something he may have had a murky right to do as an MIT fellow. This results in MIT, JStor, and the US government persecuting him. The New Yorker and Larissa Macfarquhar don't look for the darker side of all of this in the government persecutions and taxpayer money for public research privatized by corporations, but in Swartz himself. Conde Nast is just another big corporation (watch the nth generation heir of it in a piece more illuminating than this one - "Born Rich") coming to the defense of another big corporation in the slimy way someone like Larissa Macfarquhar specializes in, although its the New Yorker it's middle-brown, and in a slimy quote subtle unquote way. No articles on the darker side of other big publisher corporations for sure.

[apsec112]

How does the article "come to the defense of another big corporation"? Which corporation is it coming to the defense of? JSTOR is owned by Ithaka Harbors, a non-profit organization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaka_Harbors), and MIT is a non-profit educational institution. In any case, the article didn't seem very sympathetic to them.

[krick]

I wouldn't word it like that, but I think obrero definitely has a point. I mean, all this storytelling is pretty disgusting. Enjoy the read, look how pompous, how grandiloquent this is! Look at all this tragedy! And I mean not only the writer herself — the quote of the girlfriend, which serves as an epigraph is already too much.

And it's not just that I'm not a big fan of newyorker's style (even though I'm not), the whole read is composed in a very specific way. It isn't biographical, not documentary, it's more of an essay, purpose of which is not to tell Aaron's story as such, but the writer's story, with it's own premise and morale.

So what is this story all about? The suicide. And the whole Aaron's life is shown as a prelude to it. The suicide is the point, and the whole life is "an explanation" for it: story, which, we are given to understand, was likely to end with a suicide sooner or later. As the writer eloquently calls it — "the darker side".

It's easy to convey that, because it's a social norm to view a suicide as a tragedy, regardless of circumstances. But let us be cynical just for a minute and look at what happened: some guy was fighting for his ideals; the party he was fighting against was something way bigger than him, a mere mortal; he lost; he died. Suicide never was a big deal, apparently not for Aaron, anyway. What was a big deal for him: his war for the social justice. And, let's face it, there're plenty of other guys who end their lives with suicide, newyorker doesn't write about them. So, as a matter of fact, the suicide isn't a big deal for a newyorker as well, even though MacFarquhar won't admit it, maybe even to herself.

Yet it's made to look as if it is precisely what is the big deal and it's socially acceptable to display it that way. What the story really was about — the fight, and those on the other side of it — that we won't be thinking of, we won't discuss it, we won't remember it. Instead, it will be all about "a darker side" and a tragedy.

Regardless of whether what Aaron did or was doing was right or wrong, regardless of if he was a hero or just a fool — I think it's a pity. To take the most insignificant part of the story, and to make it The Story, because it's so easy to do that.