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.
> I don't agree that "the system" punished a smart altruist.
>
> As this article makes clear, Swartz did something he knew to be illegal.
Depending on the laws, sometimes an altruist must do things that are illegal.
In the extreme case, consider that when authoritarian regimes round up ethnic or religious minorities, they invariably make non-cooperation with their attrocities illegal.
Laws should align with altruistic ideals, but it's a grave error to assume they always do.
I think it's a big deal that the charges were disproportionate in this case.
Maybe what he did was illegal on paper, but it was not unethical.
Disturbingly, there seems to be increasingly many things in our modern society which are ethical yet illegal. You'd think that in those cases, authorities should be more lenient; that they would have a sense of what is right and wrong from the perspective of the average citizen. The fact that they seem to be particularly more aggressive in those cases is what I find disturbing and why I'm saying that altruism is being punished.
In many countries, the concept of right and wrong is increasingly being decided from the perspective of a tiny minority. We appear to be reverting to a society of lords and serfs. The government's moral compass is increasingly based on the elites' perspective.
I don't agree that what he did was ethical. For me, and I think many people, it is clear that what he lied and stole. The works that he stole fall under clearly defined and well established copyright laws and which have licenses to which Swartz would have had to agree. He knew all of this and stole them anyway. He knew exactly what he was doing. This is why he hid his laptop and concealed his face when retrieving that laptop.
In terms of how this IP is copyrighted and distributed, that should be corrected at the funding level. The U.S. government (and other funding sources) should forbid publication and distribution via publications that do not make the information freely available for any science which they fund. But... we live in society of laws. You don't get to just decide which you like and thus will follow.
> right and wrong is increasingly being decided from the perspective of a tiny minority
I'm not sure I agree with you. I suspect your point might be motivated by a worldview (i.e. an ideology), as a opposed to be borne by evidence.
But I could definitely be wrong. To that end, point me to a law that is 1) written from the perspective of a tiny minority of elites and 2) forbids something that most people would consider ethical. By this I mean, not your outsider opinion on the law, but rather, real evidence that it is written to serve the elites and that the forbidden activities are considered perfectly ethical by the majority of people.
> we live in society of laws. You don't get to just decide which you like and thus will follow.
Tell that to Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Thoreau, and the many benefactors of mankind who have seen a law was wrong, and refused to obey it! And all those that admire their courage and efforts.
The legal system destroys people. It's what they do. The noticeable difference here is how much other people care and how much the person had to lose. How well would you bounce back from a felony conviction and jail time? There was some random teenaged idiot where I grew up that did some stupid miscief to the wrong category of property, and ended up committing suicide too.
Altruism isn’t a fantasy like Robin Hood, there’s a way to do it correctly; it’s why Aaron was interested in policy. Dumb altruists are in a worst position, and giving out free information from the internet doesn’t affect libgen. Aaron was a dumb altruist in the way he didn’t just listen about how to download JSTOR articles.
This is such an insightful observation. I think to the critical thinker its clear capitalism doesn't allow dissent past a certain point. Sure, you can be an altruist in small way that don't threaten the status quo like giving to charity or volunteering, but when you go against the under-pinnings of our system, namely intellectual property laws, then you're going to be defeated. We also saw this with Lawrence Lessig who is now an entirely unknown person but before was a Kardashian-level celeb on the internet due to his criticisms of copyright and patents.
So there's no place for a smart and motivated altruist in capitalism, because capitalism's oppression is what this person will fight and capitalism is usually the better fighter.
Smart altruists do become evil to be successful because of this, think of how many left-leaning idealistic early silicon valley types and their ethos was entirely shed to become, functionally, the same as any MBA or Chicago school economist and now, not capitalism's critic, but its driver and the wielder of the hammer that crushes people like Swartz or Lessig. Let's remember Steve Jobs, who is beloved and seen bizarrely as a "hippie" threatened Blackberry with his questionable patent portfolio over email because of "poaching." Poaching in this context being people leave jobs for better ones, but Steve felt a feudal-like ownership of his workers and used the corrupt mechanisms of capitalism to control them and suppress wages.
I'm sure there are other examples, but 'hippie turned ruthless capitalist' is pretty much the story of the boomer generation, who quickly figured out that they can get defeated by the system on some level, or they themselves become the oppressors. They chose to become the oppressors. The same is true of millennial idealism when its thrown out the window when you have an IPO looming, Facebook being the most obvious millennial led company that is about as evil as you can be for a webpage and app.
The problem with right-leaning entrepreneurship spaces like HN is that there's no class consciousness and no real capitalism critiques. So Swatz was killed by the "government" not the capitalism that government serves. Or like this article says he was a depressed immature weirdo, so this was unavoidable. Neither of that is true. He became a valid threat to capitalism and the hammer fell on him. If not via this prosecutor (who enforces laws written by the oligarchy) then by something else (see Jobs using civil suits as a defacto government himself). He could have been sued for damages for all the PDFs he "stole," for example, if the wealthy couldn't wield the DOJ to their liking.
I can't think of any high profile idealists, IP critics, or capitalist critics in online spaces today. The system took down Lessig, Swatz, Doctorow, etc pretty easily. Swatz, of course is dead, but the others are now marginalized characters no one cares about and copyright and patent reform an entirely dead political horse. Instead the pendulum has shifted to an outright worship of billionaires, to the point of putting one in the presidency and filling the cabinet with them, on top of questionable Elon and Bezos worship, which seemingly gets stronger by the day.
No one seems to talk about this, but the late 90s and early 2000's financial and IP idealism was entirely crushed by the system. Today's smart altruists saw this and I imagine they are going to pick the Steve Jobs path, not the Swartz path going forward. They don't want to get destroyed either.
Source: someone who is older and witnessed all this in real time and is heartbroken over how everything turned out
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.