Aaron Swartz Rememberance Day This Monday
In November the eight of 1986 Aaron Swartz was born. While his early childhood was like any other kid, he showed early spark of someone who would be very consequential to internet culture.
One of his first website to be recognized by the public is "The Info Network" a user generated encyclopedia, created at the age of 12 years old which won the ArsDigita Prize.
But later on he was accepted into Y Combinator's founder program on a startup called infogami. While infogami failed to get further funding, his contribution to the wider Y Combinator, got him in touch with another fellow co-founder to work together on this small but potentially important firm known as Reddit.
If you are from Reddit or Hackernews, you will be very familiar with how the next few years will go for Arron as well and so no further introduction will be needed. (But you can follow further in his wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz)
However what will be consequential to the wider public is his work as an tech activist fighting for the same rights and values that digital natives in the wider internet culture would fight for. Especially in the realms of copyright laws and the wider debate on digital access and freedom.
This includes writing Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, as well as filing a FOIA request to find out how Chelsea Mannings was treated after she was detained for her alleged role in the WikiLeaks leaks. In addition to to leaking PACER digital court records to improve public access, which had him investigated by the FBI for potential copyright infringements. And most importantly to rally the internet against Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
However it was tragically his efforts to push for open access to academic journals (much of which was publicly funded research) that may have costed him his life at 2008-12-13.
Eight years later, as we emerge from the global pandemic, it is about time we celebrate his life and reflect on his his short time with us. As well as reflecting on how his actions had inspired countless digital natives current and in the future to continuously push and fight for the right for information to be free and transparent.
204 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadTake the time to remember the kind of person he is.
Electron workshop is having a watch party for Americans today at Monday, November 8 at 1pm in Illionis, US.
https://venue.electronworkshop.com.au/b/dod-3rc-jhv-re0
For Aussies, the workshop is playing another session right now starting at 9pm Sydney time.
Let's remember how heavy handed the autocratic Obama administration was:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/01/08...
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma...
FYI that's just the link:
Plus archive.is prefix: Which is a page: https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-s...With link to article: https://archive.md/htHfA
He needed more support. More than we gave him.
It makes a huge difference when going through legal troubles if you have the right people around you, and I'm not taking just lawyers.
The Internet's Own Boy
https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaro...
The prosecution put a huge toll on him and he talks in his blog about his problems with mood and ulcerative colitis and his emotional and sensory issues.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-d...
What does this line mean? Aaron took his own life several years later than that. That seems like a date copied from a Creative Commons event on his Wikipedia page and an odd error to make for someone following the story.
So definitely a copy-paste error on the date.
I only ever met him in person once more, at CCC, but we were both working a little bit on an OLPC project. I had such respect for him.
Vaya con Dios, kid.
In more serious cases involving crimes against the state, hopeful, merciful outcomes have been found, as in the Chelsea Manning case: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning
I don’t think we should be glorifying a person who took his own life before facing justice.
I'd say his case was proof that the system didn't work. JSTOR dropped charges and urged for others to do the same yet that didn't go anywhere. It involve a credible threat of potentially up to $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison and restitution. A threat that would push anyone to to take the plea deal in the process avoiding reaching for actual justice. (And even that plea deal was ridiculous)
If that's how it's supposed to work then it's fucked.
>as in the Chelsea Manning case
Someone exposing crimes for moral reasons "only" sentenced to 35 years of maximum security. Was this attended as some misplaced sarcasm?
In fact, in the federal justice system, only 2% of defendants end up going to trial -- most end up accepting a plea deal (and we can guess how much bullying and threatening go into that). By analogy to your argument, 98% of defendants never "face justice". Or maybe better put, they never receive justice.
A source: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/06/11/only-2-of-f...
99.99% of people from Reddit will have never heard of Aaron (not 'Arron'). I think people mis-estimate what most people on that site are for - but it's not tech activism anymore, if it ever was, and they don't have any interest in who runs the site, much less who used to run the site.
Edit: how deliciously ironic, on a thread about Aaron Swartz, a comment questioning censorship is flagged.
>and in opposition to censorship and corporate control of government
I truly wonder what position he would have taken regarding covid/vaccine censorship. Or reddit's implicit authoritarian policy against criticism of LGB and especially T. He seems like an enough of an idealist to have been a free speech absolutist.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_Progress
That aside, the type of "censorship and corporate control of government" that was prevalent when Aaron Swartz found that organization had strong ties to the post-9/11 insanity that took over Western politics and media. It was a different situation than the ones that you are describing. I wouldn't make any assumptions about whether he would have judged them the same way.
Setting aside the question of whether this has actually happened like you say it has, the much broader critique I'd offer is that nobody who was defending free speech from the left in the 1970s [0] would be surprised that hate groups are allowed to operate under the cover of those protections. It used to be taken as a given on the left that free speech is so important that it is worth defending the right to the worst kinds of speech.
I see this a lot, recently -- this sentiment that yeah free speech is important, but you have to consider that nobody expected it to be used like this -- and that's wrong. Your liberal predecessors did know that it would be used like this and they explicitly and clear-headedly defended it, anyway.
[0] The ACLU defended literal Nazis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
This is a fairly contrarian line to take. How would you say that it hasn't?
> you have to consider that nobody expected it to be used like this
To me this seems a little bit of a naive take. Nobody is arguing that free speech should be curtailed - at least not in any legal sense. But as a principle it does compete against various other ones, such as decency and respect, not to mention security and business concerns.
It's the people arguing that free-speech as a right is absolute and overrides all else, and whatsmore outside of a purely legal setting (i.e. not just that the state can't prosecute you, but that it gives you the right to insult, and belittle people) that are missing the point.
Voltaire offered to defend the right of his opponents to express their thoughts, but did not volunteer to give them a platform, or even to listen.
> The ACLU defended literal Nazis
I don't see a conflict here. The state should be blind, after all it's important for democracy that Nazis and other dodgy straw men should see their side of the story aired, and thus buy in overall. It doesn't mean that society as a whole can't make judgements on the value of Nazism.
When the KKK marched in Washington in 1925, there were 30k participants and more than 100k others showed up to watch.
What I'm arguing is that we are not in fact experiencing unprecedented times that call for new restrictions. The left lived through that and maintained their commitment to defending free speech.
I'm sorry, I think we might be talking cross purposes here ...
I was talking about Aaron Swartz specific advocacy around digital free speech, which reddit embodied spiritually up until rather recently. Some of the community activity went very far down the rabbit hole indeed. I was speculating if Aaron Swartz might have experienced some kind of dissonance at that, though public discourse being what it is he might not have been able to express that ... but alas he did not live to see his views challenged thus.
Of course there are historical parallels to this, across history and many other aspects of society. I don't see how the need to continue this discussion is any less relevant today than it was then though.
One is that everything is national or global now, so if there is one Nazi anywhere, everybody hears about it and misleads people into thinking there are more of them than there are. This also feeds into trolls pretending to be Nazis because they see what a rise it gets out of people, thereby causing people to overestimate their number even more.
The second is that there is always a boogeyman. In the early 20th century it was anarchists. Then communists had a good long run. It became terrorists after 9/11. Now it's racists.
You can tell when this is happening because the proposals are to censor/incarcerate/kill some vile subhuman Enemy who cannot be reasoned with, with isolated instances being exaggerated excessively. Whereas if there were actual Nazis as a meaningful political force you would see e.g. serious attempts to re-institute segregation or have to fight hard to prevent Nazis from censoring you.
What I mean is that everyday "free speech" in the legal sense is already curtailed (and accepted to be so) by various other concerns.
When it is right wing suppressing speech or freedom, all is cool. When someone protests them, suddenly the protest itself is threat to free speech. The insuation is that free speech is less likely to be invoked to protect left or extreme left speech.
I would say the other reason my views on freee speech have evolved because I now see “hate” as a virus of the mind and it is easily spread through the internet in the most deceitful and cunning ways, leading to destruction and violence toward the person or people it is directed at.
Freedom of speech is something that is good in and of itself. A situation in which the government ruled out some ideas from being discussed or developed is one I would find very unpleasant.
and yet we have libel laws, anti hate speech provisions, corporate secrecy laws and so on and so forth all of which prohibit me from saying things just because I feel like it.
But I don't think that's even the discussion any more. The discussion is whether you should be obligated to provide these reprehensible views with a platform, and to what degree it should be possible for us to tune them out altogether, as a matter of personal preference.
Reddit made a choice, perhaps commercially driven to apply a certain modicum of taste and decency to their platform, to complaints from "free speech advocates". Just what these people stand for, and to what degree it should be defended, is different from what voltaire was talking about.
Not sure what you meant by this paragraph.
> But I don't think that's even the discussion any more. The discussion is whether you should be obligated to provide these reprehensible views with a platform, and to what degree it should be possible for us to tune them out altogether, as a matter of personal preference.
I think both discussions are extremely important at this point in time. Personally, I don't think companies should be obligated to provide a platform for people with all kinds of ideas, but I think that they should nonetheless do so (because I think freedom of speech is a good thing). I am in favour of freedom of speech on social media, but not in favour of this being mandated by law (because it isn't contradictory to freedom of speech to have some spaces in which freedom of speech is not allowed).
>Reddit made a choice, perhaps commercially driven to apply a certain modicum of taste and decency to their platform, to complaints from "free speech advocates". Just what these people stand for, and to what degree it should be defended, is different from what voltaire was talking about.
I'm not sure what Voltaire was talking about, because I have not read Voltaire. But if one believes that freedom of speech is valuable in and of itself, or that it is valuable because it leads to the discovery of great truths, then one ought to be in favour of freedom of speech on Reddit.
I find it very hard to believe you're not familiar with the famous Voltaire quote about free speech.
> it is valuable because it leads to the discovery of great truths
You might say this, but it doesn't make it universally true.
You may not be aware of this, but in the US, "hate speech" is protected expression under the First Amendment to the Constitution.
I think it's the opposite and you reinforce their behaviors and thinking.
Paradox of tolerance.
I find it more likely that most of what you're labeling as hate is just a difference in opinion.
Just because you're not seeing these people on your daily social media doesn't mean they're not gathering elsewhere. It's mostly likely a place that doesn't have any alternative views as well.
How do you explain large hate groups that existed long before the internet was invented? White supremacy is barely even a threat now, it's such a small minority of people compared to what it was in the past.
Imagine Tim had built the Web the same way folks built Twitter. All our web pages would be would be hosted by a single company, accessed through an API that they defined and could change at whim. Web applications would be far weaker than they are today (since it would be hard to store anything interesting on TimCo’s servers) and powerful corporations would constantly be knocking people offline permanently for various terms-of-service violations (no trademark infringement! no hate speech!).
It is an argument about who set the bound of acceptable speech if you are more precise.
But that isn't what you mean anyway.
Hasn't it? A few hundred years ago you were talking about the right to speak unsavorily without being put in jail or worse.
In the last hundred years we have developed pervasive media and communications, and these days the discussion is to what degree the unsavory should be given a platform, granted air-time, provided with targeted advertising ... and perhaps more importantly the right to tune it all out if you want.
In the days of Voltaire if you didn't like what somebody was saying you could just walk the other way. These days they follow you round YouTube.
So I have my own justification for freedom of speech: because we can. Human freedom is important, so we should try to protect it from encroachment wherever possible. With most freedoms — freedom of motion, freedom of exchange, freedom of action — permitting them in full would cause some problems. People shouldn’t be free to walk into other people’s bedrooms, take all their stuff, and then punch the poor victims in the face. But hurling a bunch of epithets at the guy really isn’t so bad.
Freedom of speech is one place where we can draw the line and say: all of this is acceptable. There’s no further logic to it than that; freedom of speech is not an instrumental value. Like all freedom, it’s fundamental, and the only reason we happen to single it out is because it’s more reasonable than all of the others.
Close readers will note that this theory doesn’t quite live up to my own goals. By laying freedom of speech’s provision on top of our reasonable ability to do so, I suggest that freedom of speech could be taken away if providing it became unreasonable. But I think this is the right choice: if people really, seriously started getting hurt because of freedom of speech, it seems right for people to take the privilege away. But, to be honest, I can’t even imagine how that might be possible. Words just don’t genuinely wound, they’re always mediated by our listening.
I do worry that people might try to stretch this justification — say that continued free speech might destroy the war effort, or the government, or civil society. But I have no problem destroying all of those. It’s only the destruction of actual people that I worry about.
What I'm speculating about is what he would have thought today, after the last 10 years and the maturation of reddit, facebook and co. Provided he hadn't spent that entire time incarcerated of course!
I don't think you believed the things he believed for the same reason he did, in part because the quality of this conversation is so spectacularly different from any conversation I ever had with him.
Except for Huffman (spez) who still works there and doesn't seem to care whatsoever.
For one example of many, they permanently banned an autistic live streamer for asking a question about how the Reddit Live algorithm works, claiming it was "harassment toward the admins." In reality, they've been brazenly and repeatedly lying to everyone about how the algorithm works for over a year, including selling ads based on grossly inflated viewership numbers -- and "grossly" is honestly a huge understatement. But folks who mention the algorithm in any negative context tend to get banned permanently, or at the very least censored from using certain words, such as algorithm, admin, mod and ban.
There is no conceivable way that spez is oblivious to all of this, so it's safe to assume that he put his stamp of approval on the behavior, either intentionally or by inaction.
I commented in that thread "this sub is probably not the place for these overtly political posts"...the mod responded to me by banning me for "advocating politics / agenda pushing"...its literally orwellian newspeak site.
Maybe I'm getting old but I don't understand this current generations fervor for censorship of things they disagree with. I've always slanted toward letting better speech battle "incorrect" assumptions. I don't see anything helpful about banning or censoring people and just see it leading to authoritarianism.
I trust no one to censor in a neutral way. It's inherently impossible.
>dark psychological strategy that hijacks our brains reward system.
This is fixed by personal responsibility and properly teaching children how to handle the information. It's really not that different than any other addictive tendency. The fix isn't just banning it.
Doesn't this happen in every movement? The movement shifts things far enough that people don't see the movement any more since they're more comfortable.
I mean I'm generalizing as much as you are here; "most people" and "most hackers" are weasel words (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Weasel_word).
What is productive is being a respectful evangelist for the ethos you want to inculcate in the next generation.
What's forgotten about enculturation of newcomers is that most of them have no strongly held beliefs about the new domain.
Which is an opportunity for education and pursuasion, with a little elbow grease and diplomatic effort.
Invention: Fuck the gov't, have fun buying all the drugs on earth!
Mass-adoption: We can lock JPEGS in a box you have to pay to unlock!
We know different old school hackers.
Theres
[edited]
I can remember the day, reading about Aaron's death. And the following days, reading up about his life. The investigation by MIT to see if they played any role in it. Led by Hal Abelson. Above song was playing whilst I read this submission, so I posted it because it felt appropriate. But I should have added some context..
The world needs Aaron Swartz now more than ever.
If there is anywhere that we can go from here, it is not to be done as a united civilization.
Fact is Aaron was an angsty teen with an axe to grind with the authorities . Reading Chomsky certainly didn’t help. Acting out childishly by spreading copy righted material, getting caught and whining about how all of this is so unfair…
Look, he was no genius. Genius does not invent reddit; it invents facebook and then proceeds to take over the world because actual, real, genius understands the rules of the game.
Aaron was smart enough to understand just how fucked things are but oh so very dumb to act out on his aggressive impulses. The very same impulses that later lead him to kill himself.
Ironically his suicide accomplished far more than his technical know how could ever hope to achieve.
p.s. aaron was no hero. You dont ever want to be him and you certainly dont want your children to be him. His ideals were pure and correct, but he could not accept we’re living in a world filled with trash humans. Should’ve played the game correctly imho.
Breaking immoral laws is a sign of being a hero, not a criminal. Unfortunately the monied interests were more powerful than a brilliant kid, so we have to live in a world without Aaron Swartz but with rich idiots in charge of scientific publishing.
Mental illness needs to be destigmatized, and access to treatment is imperative. Aaron’s death was a tragedy, and the government was engaged in serious prosecutorial overreach.
But, Rosa Parks? Seriously now? Aaron was engaged in a puerile “hack” that spun out of control when the school and feds got involved.
The hagiography around this poor guy is nauseating sometimes.
You know who’s to blame for scientific publishing? Fucking academia. The web was built to allow research papers to be shared. Seriously - it’s fucking purpose built for that very task.
There are no resources involved in scientific publishing besides the time of the authors and reviewers, none of whom are employed by the publishers.
So why do we have any academic publishers at all, over 30 years after the web was invented? Surely we could have solved the problems with organizing peer review, etc by now. The answer is: academia wants it to be this way. Researchers want to publish in prestige journals. The cred from prestige journals is integral to the academic career path in enough disciplines that the system is allowed to self perpetuate.
Publish(-in-prestiguous-journals)-or-perish is real, and the for-profit journal system is a parasite profiting from it. Ultimately the fundamental cause of this is the application of capitalist and for-profit systems to scientific research - but good luck speaking out against that.
This is an unsupported declarative statement, and I view the evidence as pointing in the opposite direction. For-profit publishers are filling a “need” that is entirely due to the culture and economics of academia.
A good portion of the economics has nothing whatsoever to do with private enterprise, and instead involves academic career paths and grant applications, often to non-profit or government grantors.
Imagine that all of academia elects, tomorrow, to jettison for-profit publishers and self-organize around open access. Would that change the fundamental economics in a meaningful way? The money to pay researchers is not coming from publishers.
They are filling a need they created and maintain themselves. Publishers with extremely deep pockets bought out prestigious non-profit journals [1], turning an inelastic market (originating from the value of peer-reviewed journals in a pre-Internet era) into an oligopoly that continued to raise prices as much as possible. No extra need was filled by the takeover, no value was provided, only more profit was extracted because it was economically possible. Now, this profit is used to fund the continued existence of this need, by lobbying against any effort to remove this need. It makes perfect sense economically, but is plainly detrimental to society and is at a stage that makes any gradual change very difficult.
> Imagine that all of academia elects, tomorrow, to jettison for-profit publishers and self-organize around open access.
This sort of thought experiment is meaningless as any kind of proof because it doesn't consider the complexity of the human element. Academic researchers aren't perfectly rational units independent from any other system, like the simple fact of having to pay rent to live and that rent being available from this month's paycheck, and that paycheck being dependent on continued employment whose loss would likely take months to resolve. You're only demonstrating that if we lived in some abstract, perfect world, some problems would solve themselves. But in that same abstract, perfect world that problem likely wouldn't even manifest in the first place. So what are you really proving?
[1] - https://phys.org/news/2015-06-companies-academic-publishing....
The work of curating a journal for various metrics (subject matter, standards of peer review, impact etc.) is crucial to the everyday working of science. This doesn't mean that a few for profit corporations should get to extract profit from it, but it also doesn't mean that academia should give up the whole idea and just read all of scihub or arxiv to make up their own minds.
Politics also has an interest in protecting such established venues the same way as it works for the press.
Aaron Swartz committed a crime. Yes, the law was immoral and wrong, but it was a law. Swartz believed that his internet status and his MIT association would shield him from the consequences of his action, and he killed himself when he realized he was going to be treated like a nobody and subjected to the same sorts of prosecutorial pressure that affects thousands of Americans every day.
He was no hero, and it's frankly ridiculous and demeaning to the memory of Rosa Parks and what she went through to use her life story to prop him up. The US Civil Rights movement is one where people took actions that they KNEW were illegal partly because they knew how bad the optics would be. Famous Civl Rights leaders used the after-release press conferences as pulpits to preach their sermons of racial equality.
Following your logic, then the real heroes are actually the cowards?
Yeah people erase his flaws a bit, yes it's a bit annoying, but he actually tried to do something positive in his life instead of trying to get rich at any costs like that "genius" of Zuckerberg (genius for what?).
So people remember him, I doubt most people will care when Zuckerberg will die, he just didn't do anything to deserve it, your money doesn't make you a good person.
One of the things about having ridiculous amounts of wealth is that it affords you to make a ridiculous number of bets. You only have to hit on a few to be remembered as a genius.
Just ask Tommy Edison.
The wording may be harsh (not what I think, just attempting to guess) but I believe there is truth in it; although the idea of allowing free access to academic journals is laudable, the way he went about it was naive/wrong in my opinion and impulsive as you say.
Finally and most importantly on this site specifically it should be down voted because it is flagrantly anti intellectual to resign to the status quo and to tell people to not be disruptive and to basically "play the game" and go work for Facebook or whatever.
What's a person who has those views even doing on this site? Just go outside and play golf with the governor of Missouri or whatever.
SciHub itself may be similar but there are some important differences, e.g., the creator is not a citizen or resident of the US where this would be prosecuted (I think she lives in Russia, which only "recently" ruled to block the site, but I'm unsure she'd face any criminal charges) and the way they source the paywalled articles/journals is less easy for the authorities to circumvent.
In addition, (some) universities and other institutions are slowly moving towards open access journals and other measures; not at an ideal pace, I agree, but certainly done on a better foundation to ensure publishers don't just bury people with lawsuits and so on.
The open access movement is precisely what I meant with the snail pace activity. I'm doubtful it would happen in even present degree without the activism.
(and if someone is reading this who is mentally in a bad place right now, please seek out some help: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/)
That's a common misconception, largely due to the ridiculous way the DoJ writes its press releases.
Each Federal crime carries a range of possible prison time. What you actually get depends on a large number of factors, such as how much damage you caused, whether or not your crime was a drug crime, past criminal history, and many others.
When the DoJ writes press releases they just add up for each charge the maximum that it is theoretically possible for someone to get from the crime if they hit all the factors that push for longer sentences and none of the factors that push for shorter sentences.
So when they arrest you for crime X and write their press release, they don't actually tell what you, the first time offender who committed a mild instance of the crime with no aggravating factors and several mitigating factors is facing. No. They tell what the Voldemort or Moriarty or Hitler of whatever activity you were doing would face for crime X.
It is even worse, because they actually even exaggerate what Voldemort or Moriarty or Hitler would actually face, too! If a person is charged with multiple crimes from the same underlying act, say crimes X, Y, and Z, and is convicted of all of them the crimes are grouped together into one for sentencing, with the sentence for the group being the sentence you would have received for whichever for X, Y, or Z you would have gotten the longest sentence for if that was the only one you were convicted on.
Here's a good article on this in general: "Crime: Whale Sushi. Sentence: ELEVENTY MILLION YEARS." [1]
Here's a couple articles specifically on the Swartz charging.
This one covers the charges themselves: "The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz (Part 1: The Law)" [2]
This one covers the prosecution, including a look at probably sentencing: "The Criminal Charges Against Aaron Swartz (Part 2: Prosecutorial Discretion)" [3]
[1] https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[3] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...
He was painted into a corner with seemingly no way out.
People who are suicidal frequently have intractable problems and are frequently treated like they are merely crazy. The best way to help people who are suicidal is to not be dismissive of their very real problems and, of possible, actually be helpful. But as a baseline, don't act like it's all in their head. That actively makes it harder to solve intractable personal problems.
I'd be curious to know why he deserves to be attacked for his technical know-how. Also I am curious to know why you think committing a crime out of conviction is inherently immoral. If we equate laws with morals we will never improve our ethical understanding of the world.
It is exactly the people willing to commit crime with the goal of improving our moral compass that should be celebrated as heroes.
If we would all "play ball" then we would be stuck without voting rights in a feudal system of kings and peasants.
Finally, if genius invents Facebook let's pray we ran out of geniuses.
Of course all these nasty civil rights movements were just emotional impulses that could not control themselves.
Of course there is an unchangeable game subjected to the rules of power and you understand that and we should build a cult of personality around you instead? No thank you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_Progress
paulgraham 40 points 14 years ago
Aaron's not wrong to call himself one of the founders. The company behind Reddit was a merger of two startups, one that made Reddit and one that made Infogami, and in that situation the founders of both startups are considered founders of the combined company.
https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_co...
previously:
2006 - https://web.archive.org/web/20070823200504/http://startupsto...
2007 - https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_co...
2007 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20219
2010 - https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/d2njs/til_th...
2011 - https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/reddit-co-founder-...
2011 - https://archive.md/IRuu8
2020 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24677419
2020 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24713422
2021 - https://www.redditinc.com/#section-4
> ...
> 2020 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24677419
Did you link the same discussion twice on purpose?
This comment is very unfair
The feds and those in power ruined his life. Our legal system ruined his life. Our society ruined his life.
This line of thinking is like "don't even attempt to change the status quo."
Well you can, but not on your own. There's a few people that try to shoulder the whole burden.
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001189
https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown
• https://web.archive.org/web/20060417192840/http://diveintoma...
• https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/16/the-rise-and-demise-of-...
The prosecutors, Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz, used their discretion to play hardball and this in no small part played a role in his decision to take his own life.
On the plus side, however, it appears their abuses of power more or less ended their careers. Heymann has not updated his LinkedIn in almost a decade and Ortiz’s ambitions to become governor of Massachusetts were squashed.
Preventing crimes of a system require that system's individuals to set aside apathy and create ongoing consequences for perpetrators as an example to those who would do similarly.
Sometimes those consequences are just keeping a name and memory alive, and linking it with those at fault.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz#Prosecution_of_...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Heymann#Aaron_Swartz
It is normal in highly technical cases for prosecutors to throw "experts" and jargon at the judge and jury - which without contravening testimony from a defense witness, it generally accepted.
This effectively turns the justice system on its head - placing the burden of proof and the heavy cost of defense on the accused.
Let me give some words that might help from cases I've worked on (not limited to hacking cases)...
Rule 1. Shut the F up. Transparency is not your friend. I have seen cases where sysadmins have told the truth about the tech, and then had charges of obstruction levied against them, because someone who had no knowledge of the tech in the accounting dept contradicted something they said. For example, provide exactly what's legally required by court order or your lawyer's advice - only in the exact time range requested and only the fields requested. Answer only the question you are asked, and as succinctly as possible. Make sure that any answers you give are either in writing or with the presence of a lawyer. I have also seen investigators claim someone provided contradictory information, just because the investigators themselves misunderstood the answer.
Rule 2. There are no "routine" investigations. Get a lawyer. Do not treat any interaction with authorities lightly. If they are talking to you or your company, they are not your friends. Make sure your lawyer pressures them to define and limit the scope and time period of any investigations to only exactly what's needed for whatever they're investigating. Do not assume that just because they're investigating one of your clients, that you have no legal liability.
Rule 3. Do not run a company like an infinite data retention store. Old files/records/databases/etc are a legal liability, because prosecutors can and WILL misrepresent data in court to try to pressure you. Hold data for legally required period, and then delete it permanently. Limit access within the company to only the data that people need to do their jobs. Transparency is not your friend.
Rule 4. Being innocent does not absolve you of legal liability. Being innocent does not keep you out of court. Disgruntled customers can make things up or misunderstand. Disgruntled employees can make stuff up or misunderstand facts. You competitors in the market can make things up or misunderstand. All of these people can and will testify against you in court, and prosecutors can and DO construct cases based on misinformation.
Rule 5. Do not engage criticisms on social media. You have a near-zero chance of convincing the mob of anything. Anything said publicly can and will be used against you in court. Also remember that legal liability extends to civil suits. Unhappy clients, employees, competitors, partners, will all use any information they can get to try to bias the court against you. I've seen cases where partners used social media content to claim grounds to break contracts without penalty.
In summary, as a company, STFU.
http://www.aaronsw.com/
Interesting, that he introduced himself in the third person.
I wonder what made him take this approach?
Third person intros are very common on personal websites, especially for folks who often give talks, invited lectures, or are written about in the press.
If your personal website starts with a short intro written in 3rd person then the person introducing your talk/lecture will, 9/10 times, simply read out your own description of yourself. Reporters will summarize the key points when introducing you in a story. Assuming the person speaking/writing about you is favorable or neutral, you control exactly how you're framed.
If you write the intro in first person or have an overly pithy description, then they'll sort of make their own intro which could go well or not so well ;-)
Aaron Swartz was also a Progressive (having co-founded "Demand Progress") and a Keynesian (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/keynes) who believed in taxing the rich in the service of a functioning economy, I wonder what he would have thought about all the bullshit coming from Paul Graham these days in his vitriolic defense of the status quo. He couldn't be very happy to hear Graham saying we don't need to tax and spend on infrastructure to get us out of the climate mess.
The idea is to be countercyclical. Cut spending and increase taxes during a boom, cut taxes and increase spending during a bust. Keeps inflation during boom and deflation during a bust from being too high. The idea is to keep the boom from burning itself out (prevent leading to a crash) and to shorten the depth and duration of a bust (and eliminate them if possible).
Keynes did point out that poor people are more likely to spend money they receive than the rich, so if you’re trying to get out of a demand-caused bust, dollar per dollar, redistributing to the poor is more effective. During a bust, the rich especially have a liquidity preference so they’ll hoard cash instead of spending it.
The first is that inflation isn't the demon it was historically made out to be. Hyperinflation is bad, but some stable and predictable <10% annual rate of inflation mainly hurts people hoarding cash, which is a dumb thing to do in general. But if you have a moderate rate of inflation and just stop accumulating new debt during a boom, the old debt gets devalued over time, and then it's always "better" to only pay the interest now and pay the principal tomorrow (i.e. never).
The second, specific to the US at this particular point in history, is that the dollar is such a strong reserve currency that the government can create trillions of dollars out of nothing and still not get hyperinflation. The risk of this is that you go too far and people stop using it as the reserve currency, but apparently that risk isn't worth the trillions of dollars in "free money" you get by discounting it.
If the other big central banks around the world print money at similar rates, the US dollar will remain the reserve currency. The pandemic was global.
If the US were to enter a recession alone (which would be strange), and then chose to print lots of money, that's when its reserve currency status might be threatened.
I don't worry about stimulating demand when bubbles collapse. The viable parts of the economy get to pay lower prices for everything. That stimulates ORGANIC recovery and growth and avoids re-inflating the bubble in the fake parts of the economy that will only re-collapse again.
Delaying the collapse of unsustainable pricing and investment in non-viable sectors only makes their collapse bigger and more wasteful.
Ya sure? So, if the economy produces oodles of luxury goods, but nobody gets to live in luxury by using them, because they're all put in storage -- "it's all about production, not consumption, dontchaknow?" ... How does this production lead to prosperity?
Production and consumption go hand in hand.
No wonder the government was going so hard after him...
It's an insult to the man to assert that he would have taken a position without thinking about its consequences, which is what you are doing when you say, "He couldn't be very happy to hear Graham saying we don't need to tax and spend on infrastructure to get us out of the climate mess."
Do you have a link to some examples of that? I don't remember pg being remotely vitriolic about anything in his recent writing, but I haven't followed closely, am not on Twitter etc.