{"id":126037,"date":"2014-06-25T17:38:30","date_gmt":"2014-06-25T17:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=126037"},"modified":"2014-06-25T20:13:32","modified_gmt":"2014-06-25T20:13:32","slug":"internets-boy-government-destroyed-aaron-swartz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/sicence-technology\/internets-boy-government-destroyed-aaron-swartz\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Internet\u2019s Own Boy\u201d: How the Government Destroyed Aaron Swartz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Brian Knappenberger\u2019s Kickstarter-funded documentary\u00a0\u201cThe Internet\u2019s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0which\u00a0premiered at Sundance<\/a>\u00a0barely a year after the legendaryhacker, programmer and information activist<\/a>\u00a0took his own life in January 2013, feels like the beginning of a conversation about Swartz and his legacy rather than the final word. This week it will be released in theaters, arriving in the middle of an evolving debate about what the Internet is, whose interests it serves and how best to manage it, now that the techno-utopian dreams that sounded so great in Wired magazine circa 1996 have begun to ring distinctly hollow.<\/p>\n

What surprised me when I wrote about \u201cThe Internet\u2019s Own Boy\u201d from Sundance was the snarky, dismissive and downright hostile tone struck by at least a few commenters. There was a certain dark symmetry to it, I thought at the time: A tragic story about the downfall, destruction and death of an Internet idealist calls up all of the medium\u2019s most distasteful qualities, including its unique ability to transform all discourse into binary and ill-considered nastiness, and its empowerment of the chorus of belittlers and begrudgers collectively known as trolls.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, I think the symbolism ran even deeper. Aaron Swartz\u2019s life and career exemplified a central conflict within Internet culture, and one whose ramifications make many denizens of the Web highly uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

For many of its pioneers, loyalists and self-professed deep thinkers, the Internet was conceived as a digital demi-paradise, a zone of total freedom and democracy. But when it comes to specifics things get a bit dicey. Paradise for whom, exactly, and what do we mean by democracy?<\/p>\n

In one enduringly popular version of this fantasy, the Internet is the ultimate libertarian free market, a zone of perfect entrepreneurial capitalism untrammeled by any government, any regulation or any taxation. As a teenage programming prodigy with an unusually deep understanding of the Internet\u2019s underlying architecture, Swartz certainly participated in the private-sector, junior-millionaire version of the Internet. He founded his first software company following his freshman year at Stanford, and became a partner in the development of Reddit in 2006, which was sold to Cond\u00c3\u00a9 Nast later that year.<\/p>\n

That libertarian vision of the Internet \u2014 and of society too, for that matter \u2014 rests on an unacknowledged contradiction, in that some form of state power or authority is presumably required to enforce private property rights, including copyrights, patents and other forms of intellectual property.<\/p>\n

Indeed, this is one of the principal contradictions embedded within our current form of capitalism, as the Marxist scholar\u00a0David Harvey notes:<\/a>\u00a0Those who claim to venerate private property above all else actually depend on an increasingly militarized and autocratic state. And from the beginning of Swartz\u2019s career he also partook of the alternate vision of the Internet, the one with a more anarchistic or anarcho-socialist character. When he was 15 years old he participated in the launch of\u00a0Creative Commons,<\/a>\u00a0the immensely important content-sharing nonprofit, and at age 17 he helped design\u00a0Markdown,<\/a>\u00a0an open-source, newbie-friendly markup format that remains in widespread use.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brian Knappenberger\u2019s Kickstarter-funded documentary\u00a0\u201cThe Internet\u2019s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,\u201d\u00a0which\u00a0premiered at Sundance\u00a0barely a year after the legendaryhacker, programmer and information activist\u00a0took his own life in January 2013, feels like the beginning of a conversation about Swartz and his legacy rather than the final word. This week it will be released in theaters, arriving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,17,13,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-126037","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news","7":"category-politics","8":"category-sicence-technology","9":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=126037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/126037\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=126037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=126037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=126037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}