[dasht]

A focus on the prosecutor helps distract attention from the question of whether and how Swartz was mistreated by being made a (somewhat artificial) "tech celebrity" at a very young age only to become a kind of semi-outcast in some tech circles just a few years later.

[sociotech]

Bingo. I've been trying not to say petty things out of respect for recently departed people and his family, with whom I sympathize for this terrible, terrible thing.

But the radical loss of perspective here is just jarring, and the case is big enough now that it's hard to refrain from trying to put things into perspective. I am aware of the full history, having been a programmer with significant open-source and other contributions through the 90s and early 2000s. Aaron is being totally misremembered.

Of those who knew of him before his death - and he was not a "celebrity" or "famous" or considered "brilliant" or a "genius" by technologists - most knew him as a blogger. He was actually a very good writer, even from a young age. He wrote with clarity and purpose, and he had many interests. His technical output was not major. To pull a random name out of a hat, his contributions were less than someone like Craig McClanahan and far less than someone like Brian Behlendorf. Basically, Aaron got a chance with Y Combinator, which he parlayed into a merger with Reddit's parent company, mostly through personal connections. Aaron didn't get end up getting along with Alexis or Steve, who considered him immature, dramatic, and unreliable. Reddit was shortly rewritten entirely, and web.py was too buggy to make any further contribution to Reddit. Aaron was fired from Reddit's acquirer because he didn't bother doing anything after the payout. He then floated around, wrote a few minor libraries and some more interesting blog posts, and then became a very good activist worthy of deeper respect on that front. He wasn't actually a tech celebrity before his death. He didn't "invent RSS." He didn't singlehandedly "defeat SOPA." His work on RSS 1.0, a version of RSS that was never significant itself, was mostly of interest to the semantic-web people, who have themselves have never made much of an impact, although the work is interesting to some.

I didn't know Aaron personally, but I do think his volatile relationships with others and his desire to be famous within this community were a source of extreme anxiety for him, though probably more so in the past than recently. But his professional life was, perhaps understandably, extremely frustrating for reasons that had nothing to do with his criminal case.

That's not an attack. Most people don't make major technical contributions. But I wish people would see this case for what it is - a volatile activist who pulled a stunt that spiraled out of control.

[gruseom]

I've read many of your comments and am glad you've been posting them. They're well-written and well-reasoned, and I hope you stick around in the future and continue to speak your mind with the freedom that your current format seems to be providing. The combination of legal and technical expertise is valuable and rare.

That being said, your comments seem to me to pooh-pooh the impact of what the prosecutors/system did in this case as (a) standard practice and (b) not that big a deal. Most people here (well, I anyway) did not know much about this and, having learned it, feel that it is a big deal. This makes me wonder whether your senses have been dulled by taking too much of that standard practice for granted. Maybe the people here to whom this is new and disturbing are not the only ones experiencing "radical loss of perspective".

It's straightforward to explain why Aaron's story has had such an impact on this and similar communities: he is easy for many of us to identify with, so the shock has a personal effect. This isn't hypocritical, it's human nature: one takes in this kind of information through the emotional medium of a story one can identify with. There's no contradiction between that and learning that a great many less-advantaged people get treated far more abusively still – quite the opposite.

Setting aside the obviously dumb comments as a cost of doing business on a public forum such as this, I am also pretty sure that people here are not nearly as naive about Aaron's personal history as your critique and the GP's suggest. Taste enters into this.

[MichaelSalib]

Taste cuts both ways though. I'm seriously concerned about how younger people in the community might respond to the hagiography. I'm afraid that some might come to believe that the CFAA isn't a real law so there's no problem with breaking it or that suicide is the best way for activists to enact real change.

[gruseom]

That there's "no problem with breaking" the CFAA is the last conclusion anyone will draw from this tragedy.

[MichaelSalib]

I see a lot of people writing about how they change their MAC address all the time so what did Aaron do that was so wrong?

Granick writes in a well-read post about how Swartz didn't really break any laws -- everyone on MIT's network was legally entitled to download JSTOR as fast as they wanted to and apparently MIT had no right to keep anyone off its network.

There's a pervasive social norm that says 'if you can use tech to get something, then doing so is legal'; lots of people find the CFAA normatively absurd, in the same way that we might find a law against eating asparagus on sundays absurd. You see that in all the defenses that start from the premise that not only is Swartz innocent but that there's no conceivable crime he could have committed.

[koide]

> apparently MIT had no right to keep anyone off its network.

What? How could some institution not have a right to keep somebody else off its own network? That makes no sense at all. Don't forget both JSTOR and MIT (after JSTOR contacted them) tried to block Swartz's massive downloads.

[sociotech]

"This makes me wonder whether your senses have been dulled by taking too much of that standard practice for granted." Yes, that is totally fair. I have been thinking hard recently about the role of gradual change vs. radical change.

I agree about "taste" too. I'd never have said anything, but there comes a point in the popularization of a case where truth starts to be important.

[dasht]

It's very harsh but I find fault with some of the adults who made him a "celebrity" in the first place. Here's a link to the (yes, harsh) piece I wrote about that.

It's significant, in my view, that Swartz "came to fame" right as the first "dot com" bubble was cresting. Hype was ridiculously excessive, back then. Looking back at what his celebrity "friends" were saying about him back then, it's painfully obvious that even back then his achievements (which were quite respectable) were greatly exaggerated and that the story he was a new prodigy was a myth self-servingly spread by a few powerful people trading in on the caché of having access to him. To the young boy.

It's horrifying to me, at least, to contemplate what that roller coaster ride did to his sense of self and his own understanding of his identity.

http://www.basiscraft.com/misc/2013/01/using-aaron-swartz.ht...

[sociotech]

I just read this linked article and think it is excellent and very thoughtful. It is much more human than any of Lessig or Doctorow's self-serving comments, and it fits with my recollection of the history.

I mean, people are right that all of this is separate from calls for plea-bargaining reform. I'm all for that. I'm not sure this kind of offense is the worst example of the lot, but I'm all for it. (Decades for drug possession is worse. Life imprisonment, [in facilities that are not at all, shall we say, minimum-security] for child-porn traded on IRC is probably worse, at least when it doesn't make child abuse more likely.) But it should all be reformed. That's a big task, of course, but that doesn't mean people shouldn't try.

I don't even mind if people use this case to help with that. But it's easy to grow weary of all the manipulation and distortion and hypocrisy by the people that your link discusses.

[michaelochurch]

Yes, when you're young people make all sorts of hype about your minor accomplishments.

Isn't that what VC-istan and acq-hire welfare checks are for, though? To make phony celebrities then tear them down? With a few notable and impressive exceptions, that whole machine stopped doing technology some time ago. Most of these "startups" (at least in NYC, which may be a different scene) are hare-brained marketing experiments and treat engineers poorly.

[homosaur]

Isn't that what the entirety of US pop culture is for? We lionize young people for small accomplishments constantly only to tear them down when they cannot meet our expectations from Lindsay Lohan to now Manti T'eo... It seems to be a larger problem of this celebrity driven bullcrap. Remember when Valleywag was a thing?

[paulsutter]

Since you're so blasé about plea bargaining, maybe you can help us out with this one:

Why was it necessary for Aaron to plead guilty to 13 felonies in order to get a short sentence? If it were me, I'd be more concerned by the 13 felonies than the time, and I get the impression he was too.

How does it work? Do the prosecutors get to count it as 13 kills, which buffs up their own record as badass prosecutors? Can you explain the logic that pleading guilty to _more_ felonies than would be convicted at trial should lead to a shorter sentence?

You're really just changing the subject here. The issue isn't whether or not Aaron was a superman. We're shocked and offended by the plea bargaining process (even more surprised that its commonplace, forgive our naiveté) and the draconian vagueness of the CFAA (for example, what does "unauthorized" mean?)

[Vivtek]

Nicely put. I was more aware (marginally) of his political activism and vaguely knew something of his past (I do really like his writing about web.py - and now that I'm reading it, all of his writing).

It seems to me he was driven by the need to score a coup, and move fast. To be the hero who liberated an entire database, instead of a contributor to a slower process that would have slipped past their defenses - which as I've said elsewhere, really would have gotten us something, instead of the nothing we have now.

I think that need was due to his need to recapitulate his early acclaim when he was 14. And in retrospect, that really sucks.

[koide]

What I don't understand is his rush. He could have gone for stealth mode: get a few laptops, program them to download at (largish) random intervals. Leave them operating a year or two. Check up on them every once in a while.

He wouldn't have been caught, at all.

[Vivtek]

I totally get it. I don't know how you originally got into programming, but imagine you were good at it during your early teens, like many of us, and like Aaron. Now imagine that when you met the outside world, people other than your parents were amazed at your ability - imagine you wangled your way onto a W3C committee at 14. Now imagine that by sheer blind following of the next interesting thing, and talking to the next interesting person, you wangled your way into Y Combinator and into the Reddit sale. You're damn good at programming, but it turns out that being great at writing and programming doesn't translate at all into being good at business.

When I was 14, I assumed that I was going to program computers and get rich, much like Gates or Jobs. Aaron got a hell of a lot further down that adolescent trajectory than I did - I had all kinds of intermediate small failures along the way to soften the blow when it turned out I wasn't good at business. Now, ten years later, I've learned to be better at business.

Aaron bounced off, apparently really hard. He longed for those days when - just by talking and thinking and coding - he was taken as a surprising genius by people he'd never met. He wanted to walk in and surprise people with the fait accompli, cut right to the chase of being admired.

Or so I imagine. Because I know that at his age I thought exactly that way. I even have depressive tendencies - never been bothered by suicidal ideation, but then I never failed so badly as he did after the Reddit sale, and I could certainly see that happening to me in that case.

I may very well be projecting. But essentially, when I look at this, I just think, there but for the grace of early failure and family commitments go I.

[kh1411]

Wow I really think you are projecting! You assume his life was a failure after Reddit ("I never failed as badly as he did after the Reddit sale").

I review his life, and it appears to me he started to find his true passions after reddit, and it wasn't about making $, or finding the next big .com, but rather achieving reforms in the areas where his passion(s) took him.

Sadly his final action ends his life but doubtful it ends his legacy. Because of his fame (regardless of any controversy surrounding it), so many are now more aware of needing to step up and "demand progress".

Edit: to fix hanging sentence

[michaelochurch]

I think the sign that the VC-istan technology world is terminally fucked is that we even have "celebrities" in the first place.

Aaron Swartz may not have been a technological heavyweight. Nor am I. Nor are 99.x percent of the people reading this. That's not so bad. What is bad is that there's so much complete nonsense in our so-called "scene" that no one seems to give a rat's ass about actual technology anymore. It's poorly understood, not rewarded, and the arena is so full of bike-shedding narcissists it's impossible not to get enraged.

Also, -1 for mentioning Brian Behlendorf. I looked him up on Wikipedia and he works for the World Economic Forum, which is more commonly known for Davos Fascism.

[btilly]

Irony.

In the same post you complain that no one seems to give a rat's ass about actual technology anymore and then you downvote someone for bringing up Brian Behlendorf as someone who has contributed to actual technology.

In fact Brian definitely has made a lot of technical contributions to open source, and the fact that you don't like one organization that Brian Behlendorf's is associated with does not change that. Perhaps if YOU "gave a rat's ass about actual technology", you could understand respecting Brian for that EVEN THOUGH you disagree with him on other topics.

(If you really want to stretch yourself, you might consider that when the same person is important in organizations as diverse as Apache, Mozilla, Burning Man and the World Economic Forum, that perhaps the last organization has goals you are unaware of that might in critical ways differ from the actions of the world leaders who they have to engage in order to have any change of achieving their real goals. That might be a stretch for you. It doesn't fit nicely on a propaganda placard. But it is worth thinking about regardless.)

[dasil003]

Plenty of people still care about technology, it's just that "the scene" has become big enough for celebrities to emerge. This is part and parcel of the type of individualist capitalist society that enables a place like SV to emerge in the first place. The fact that there's a lot of noise drowning out the real technologists is nothing more than validation that technology is in fact relevant.