Aaron Swartz
I noticed a lot of comments on the suicide of young Aaron Swartz on my last post. It’s a tragedy when anyone takes their own life and I can’t really write about the issues surrounding the legal case he was involved in because I’m tired of dealing with the Mob– the idiots that send me emails saying “Why don’t you shove a nail in your ass” after we released our report on Ad Networks and Piracy. The problem with the copyleft is that they can’t imagine someone actually having to go to jail for stealing intellectual property. That was probably part of Aaron’s problem. It never occurred to him that breaking into a server was the equivalent of breaking into a house. He had a history of depression and wrote romantically about suicide in the comic book movies he loved. He seemed like a very generous soul. But he was clearly not ready to go to jail.
But the fact that I feel constrained to speak my mind about piracy because I am tired of the mob is sad. Last year I wrote about my friend David Fanning having his whole web enterprise destroyed by Lulzsec because his show Frontline reported on the darker side of Julian Assange’s sense of morality. I know for a fact that most musicians are scared to speak out about having their content exploited by criminals like Kim Dotcom, because they are afraid of the cyber mob. I don’t know how the hell we are going to have a civil conversation about IP with those of us who want to defend the artist’s right to get paid for their work, being under the threat of bodily harm (note that most of the most threatening comments have been taken down)?
Jon,
Thank you for posting this. The only way to counteract “the mob” is by more people talking about the other side of the story. Then we will be less afraid. Then maybe journalists who cover this scene will not self-censor out of fear of being shunned by aggregators.
As expected, the mob of misinformers will attack.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57565927-38/swartz-didnt-face-prison-until-feds-took-over-case-report-says/
There is little in the way of reasoned investigative journalism focused on this case. It is left to the issue police and the misdirection machine to shape the conversation.
@len
Systems theory, information theory, gossip, Second Law of Thermodynamics and Fourth Law of Robotics. http://www.theonion.com/2056-06-22/opinion/1/ The Answer is in there somewhere.
It’s a mob. Organized. And going after Ortiz. They demand progress. It’s time to demand rationality.
…and…
…are at odds with each other.
The ‘mob’ is feared because it is not organized and not rational.
A group of people organizing protest through petitions and demonstrations and writing campaigns to demand accountability is not a ‘mob’.
An irrational mob organized well to commit irrational acts is all too common.
They aren’t demanding accountability. They are demanding that Obama fire Ortiz because her staff prosecuted a case under existing law and the accused committed suicide. If DoJ is briefed on the case and it is determined that the State of Massachusetts acted within the legal framework within the norms of the professional actions taken, then the petitions and demonstrations stop? That is when we find out if it is mob rule or just well-organized noise.
I don’t think anyone is afraid.
But frankly as much as I respect you all, I don’t get what you mean. (1) Generalizing popularly from the anecdotal particular, from the singular to the general. We tried justifying that, to no avail. (2) We asked who were the powers involved, and got an enumeration of the four specific authorities involved, redundant subsidiaries of Power ipso facto. Then, (3) came the inquiry as to impersonal, structural and possibly therefore systemic logic devouring persons. And that’s what lays me low more than the the story of the lonely suicide of any confused and overmatched quasi-criminaloid ever could do.
It’s in JTM’s recitation of a kind of UN declaration of rights in the age of cyborgs. I mean, what is that? That text. Are we negotiating with robots? Is it therefore a turf treaty? Are we thereby lording over them, or trying to fetter them? Are we boasting, or are we afraid? That text is like a Poe story in that the more you read it the eerier and more discouraging–the more totally frightening–it gets.
I just don’t want len nor anyone to take this little text with its little commentary as anything like an intention to assail Systems Analysis, because I don’t think that anyone here is interested in our Culture’s shooting itself in the brain. Intentionally. But when I read, reread, close-read “The Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Fourth Law of Robotics”, it just creeps me out how the architectects of this bizarre assemblage of Archaism Scared in Pregnancy by Neologism might have thought (a) that anybody in the nerve centers of developed countries would take this weirdness seriously for very long; and (b) that the authors did that shit for pseudo-professional advancement, for stasis of status or for pay increase, pretending all along that they were not describing either themselves as the robots or as the robots’ bootlickers. Such brilliant boasting points, those shiny new robots scrubbing the suburban driveway next door. …The robot then into the home, as pop humans, like pup canines, are merely housed.
WSJ opines.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324581504578238692048200404.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read
Maybe it is just American paranoia, Hugo, the growing sense since 1947 that conspiracies are every where, things going on that we don’t know. The kids are hooked on the hero mythology that enables them to excuse themselves as long as it can be insanely profitable at the same time; thus, they are both enobled and well-off. Which is exactly the trap the Hippies fell into when they became the Yuppies. Unfortunately, they haven’t prepared themselves for the very real consequences of civil disobedience when the systems push back as they always have. A failure of education or a culture of technically enabled but not very bright technopoops?
Also known as accountability for the decisions she made, and one, among others, of the consequences.
Why should they? Just because something is legal doesn’t make it right. That’s rather the point – I personally support demonstrations against law used a cudgel for the purpose of glorifying prosecutors using their discretion to advance their political careers.
Being given a vote every so often does not oblige a citizen to quietly accept every injustice individuals with an office commit, neither through poor law making or inconsiderate decisions taken.
Lusting for blood, fen? That is vigilantism. We can go over all the published particulars but so far they seem to be coming from one side only. There is far too much of that kind of “high tech lynching” going on already. You seem to have a problem with democracy in action when it doesn’t suit your interpretation of events to which you are not a witness.
Before recommending a sentence, it’s good to have all the facts. I want to know what is in the briefing to the DoJ.
On the other hand, it is an interesting question: at what point does a civil rights movement become a lynch mob?
My point in this thread has been that to some it seems, I think erroneously, to include if they do it over computer networks.
Which is the claim that doing it over computer networks makes it a victimless crime.
Specious at best.
I make no such claim.
I am objecting to the conflating of any undesirable thing done online with all other undesirable things done online.
I feel such lazy thought processes are as foolishly undifferentiating as any prejudice or bigotry that lumps a class together thoughtlessly.
It leads to poor decisions, bad laws and stifling restrictions on individual freedoms.
Len, we needn’t rerun the link on Aaron, nor claim that in running the AP wire the WSJ thereby opined. The Journal offers no opinion. I’ve been a member of AP for years, and can read the attractive and forgotten wires for myself. And you republished a story I’d read repeatedly and expressly so. If you feel the young man was surreptitiously offed then say so. I’m all ears, and I agree that such things have happened frequently. Also I agree with your diagnosis of Hippiemania becoming Yuppiemonia. I’d add only that Cowardice, Vanity and Greed exacerbated, after the Turn of 1973 brought, not by any means and end of the IndoChinese bloodletting but and end to the U.S. Draft and the eligibility of 18 year-olds to vote. The Yuppie Sperm and the Hippie Egg met 40 years ago this month. Only a few good eggs like you remain from then. I’ve been so encouraged in seeing really earnest, aware young eggs coming along, and thank God that our system, our Complex, hasn’t killed off more of them mortally or spiritually. Clearly you feel the same way. I don’t really relish seeing public education drawn into it, but won’t dodge the charge. I feel that we’re child-protectors and benefactors at heart, a bit too high on power and money to remember it . Educational Yuppies if you like. Mea culpa on that front.
It’s the first time I’ve seen that article, Hugo. It was posted as part of the continuous drumbeat of people who believe if they can bring down Ortiz somehow they will vindicate Aaron. It’s just another high tech silly valley lynching because one of theirs did something they can’t fathom and they can’t admit how involved they are in.
Try this: the precipice we are on. On one side, the tragic sad death of a true believer who was willing to take the risks, lost his fortune and faced humiliation. On the far other side, the Kim Dotcomm, Russian mafia and Mexican drug lords who hide behind the copyleft movement ripping off culture as cynically as anyone can. In the middle are people trying to figure out a way to have this marvelous technology and not put the movie makers, musicians and others into a permanent underclass. What has changed and it goes unnoticed in all the fever are the stakeholders like Jon Taplin and T-Bone Burnett trying to have a civil conversation about IP. I don’t think they should be ignored while the fevered keep pursuing a “we will force you” campaign. It doesn’t have to go down like that. If everyone really wants to honor Aaron and make a difference, it’s time for the stakeholders to meet and work this out. It can be done. It has to be or otherwise like the movements of the 60s that eventually turned into psychopathy as the extremes dominated them just as they are now dominating our politics, our government, our lives. We don’t have to go down that road. Part of fixing the economy, a small part (and it really is small) is to stop the IP bleeding.
Otherwise, let me take a lead on jon’s next post where once again the south is filled with militaristic rednecks and he and Alex believe if they can put their favorite whipping boys front and center, everyone won’t notice they are using the same dumb as rocks tactics as the republicans who whip on the “liberals”. What a crock of shit. Really guys, are you that stupid?
Down the road from me is the factory that makes the boosters that put the satellites in orbit that keep those round apple whizzies on the air. Across the street is the company that makes most of the components for the digital backbones. There is a lot more than MIC work here and elsewhere. So get a clue: if any of you really want to turn this economy around, you better get to work doing something besides slagging on the rest of the United States. We are.
@len
Thanks, I guess, for the “Dutch uncle” advice.
I’m just a no-count off in an end-of-life corner, but it seems to me that it’s all local — and personal. We got interest groups, including your own, contending for the rights or wisdom or propriety of whatever it is they benefit from. It’s complicated. There’s energy and resources available, and it sure seems to me as a fading participant that there’s no central “rightness,” toward which all that is happening is moving. “Grow up and get a life” is all well and good when your personal life is in a domain that’s growing and steady. Who steals what is about who can — as old Muad’dib observed, the power to destroy a thing is the power to control a thing. There’s no “god-emperor” to put things in train. And human thinking seems inevitably to run to the kinds of “ethics” and ethos you excoriate. None of us are much different from any of the rest of us — some inchoate process, however, leads to the deposition of gold and rubidium in small and large lodes and veins, and some of us are better than others, and fortunate, to get “more” of what’s valued for what it does to our pleasure centers.
“Civil conversation?” What creators understandably want, based on expectations as old as “economy” and “civilization,” is their daily bread, and a little more to get some caviar to spread on it. Other creators have made a structure that facilitates the purloining of what the creators deem as value that they own. You gonna get Fatcomm to sit down and bargain with you? I recall that back in the punch-card day, some dude maybe at estern Electric figured how to rip off MILLIONS (real money back then) in switch gear and stuff, by creating bogus purchase orders, manipulating the filling via the nascent “computer inventory and sales systems,” then erase the transactions by pulling cards and wipiing a few meters of tape. And while I was in the Army in ’69, an “outside expert” contractor setting up the computerized payroll system at Ft. Hood stole millions the same archaic punchcard way, and was not prosecuted but got a big paycheck. That’s still going on, from what I read, all through our increasingly complex digital physiology. So for various reasons, “reputation” among them, a lot of “creators” found and find it “advisable” to bribe the guys to show how it’s done, with money big enough to satisfy their personal lusts, and stop that particular hemorrhage. Derivatives and bank fakery are another expression. For the Jews among us, for all of us, there’s the ancient concepts of realistic views of human behavior, simplified to the management of “yetzer tov” and “yetzer ra.” http://www.jewfaq.org/human.htm
Good luck to the creators, for their sakes because they are in my personal “friend” column, may they prevail in achieving a set of rules, enforceable ones, that protect their interest. Success there might even portend the possibility that there’s the chance of an actual manifestation of what most people feel is necessary, “law and order,” to come out of the randomness and innovation and “creativity” of the techsplosion. On the other hand, every single one of us has a dose of “yetzer ra” in us, and given the opportunity and temptation, we’ll steal, by stealth or by gun or its equivalent, energy and resources that others could use to feed their babies. And reading about the Koch brothers in Fortune, or Papola’s stuff, or Mill or Hegel or whoever, come up with really cogent, seemingly persuasive arguments for why they personally are entitled to dump externalities and get, you know, “MORE!”
There’s always recourse to an expression of what everyone recognizes as that “righteous anger” thing… May nothing but advantage and good things come your way, as long as it doesn’t involve any diminution of my Social Security and veteran’s disability.