The Idealists Page 2
In 2013, Swartz’s friend Seth Schoen wrote about Swartz’s boundless faith in reason. According to Schoen, Swartz believed he would “fix the world mainly by carefully explaining it to people.”18 Some people, however, didn’t particularly want to have the world explained to them by a dogmatic young man with a flair for polemics. “He’s a young guy who likes to flame,” the software engineer Dave Winer, one of Swartz’s earliest sparring partners, wrote in 2003. “He’s treated me like crap for years, and child or not, I’m tired of it, and I’m not taking it anymore.”19 Though many people thought him brilliant, many others just thought him immature.
Swartz could be dramatic and tendentious, prone to provocative overstatement. As a teenager, he questioned the “absurd logic” of laws that banned the distribution and possession of child pornography.20 In 2006, he argued that music was perhaps objectively improving over time, and that Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier might well be inferior to Aimee Mann’s 2005 album, The Forgotten Arm.21 He eschewed business suits on principle, calling them “the physical evidence of power distance, the entrenchment of a particular form of inequality.”22
“I felt like he certainly had sort of the conviction of youth, in the sense that he was convinced that whatever he was doing at any one time—or at least he sort of projected this—he was absolutely convinced that that was the way to go,” his friend Wes Felter said. “And the thing is that most people sort of outgrow that, and I don’t know if he ever did.”23
Throughout Swartz’s life, simple stimuli routinely elicited complex reactions, and minor aggravations were routinely magnified into moral crises. A pathologically picky eater, Swartz preferred bland, achromatic foods: dry Cheerios, white rice, Pizza Hut’s Personal Pan cheese pizzas. (“This reached its extremes at a World Wide Web conference where all the food was white, even the plate it was on,” Swartz wrote in 2005. “Tim Berners-Lee later pulled my mother aside to share his concerns about this diet.”)24 He suffered from ulcerative colitis, which partially explains his limited palate. But he also told friends he was a “supertaster,” extraordinarily sensitive to flavor, as if his taste buds were constantly moving from a dark room into bright light. His friend Ben Wikler suggested that Swartz was also a “superfeeler,” forever oscillating between emotional extremes.25
On the morning of Friday, January 11, 2013, Swartz seemed particularly morose, in sharp contrast to his earlier optimism. He was slow to rise from bed and told Stinebrickner-Kauffman that he was going to stay home from his job at the global tech consultancy ThoughtWorks. “I said, ‘Well, why don’t I stay home with you, and we’ll go for a hike? We’ll go for a hike today,’ ” Stinebrickner-Kauffman remembered. “And he said no, that he just really wanted to rest, and he needed to be alone.”26
When she got to work, Stinebrickner-Kauffman contacted Wikler and organized a dinner party for that evening, in hopes that the gathering might lift Swartz’s spirits. Wikler had introduced the two of them at the end of 2010, toward the end of Swartz’s relationship with Quinn Norton. “In the first eight weeks that I started dating him, he quit two jobs, broke up with his ex-girlfriend—Quinn—moved from Cambridge to New York, and was indicted,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman recalled. “So it was kind of a big time in his life.”27
Despite these adverse circumstances, a romance flourished between the two. Early in their courtship, Swartz joined Stinebrickner-Kauffman and two mutual friends on a strawberry-picking excursion, much to his evident displeasure. “Strawberry picking wasn’t his idea of a productive way to spend the afternoon,” one of the holidaymakers, Nathan Woodhull, recalled, in a significant understatement. “It was very much Taren’s idea. And I remember joking to her, later, that he must have really liked her.”28
In the spring of 2012, they began to cohabitate, sharing a small apartment near Prospect Park in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. “We would joke about how the two of us would really confuse the census,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman said.29 “We could be reasonably recorded as two unmarried high school dropouts living together in a one-room studio.” As their relationship progressed, Swartz gradually began to bridge the emotional distance that had long set him apart from the world. “Early in our relationship he didn’t want to feel like he was dependent on me in any way,” Stinebrickner-Kauffman remembered. “And I think that changed a lot. I think that he saw us as a pair that could compensate for each other’s strengths and weaknesses.”30 As 2012 drew to a close, their love was stronger than ever before.
On the evening of January 11, 2013, Stinebrickner-Kauffman stopped at Ben Wikler’s apartment on her way home from work. As she played with Wikler’s newborn son, she mentioned that Swartz had told her that he might consider getting married after his case was resolved.31 Swartz had long scorned the idea of marriage, but he was beginning to reconsider his opposition. If a reversal like that was possible, then anything was possible.
But less than two miles away, in a small and dark studio apartment, Aaron Swartz was already dead by his own hand.
* * *
A plan, an arrest, a prolonged indictment, a resolute prosecutor, a suicide—these are the undisputed facts of Aaron Swartz’s case. They are outnumbered by the questions that Swartz’s family, friends, and supporters began asking soon after his death. Why had the US attorneys been so intent on sending Swartz to prison? Why did Swartz choose to hang himself rather than go to trial or accept a plea bargain? How did academic research papers come to be considered private property, protected by law? How did accessing that material without explicit authorization come to be considered a federal crime? These questions remain vexatious even now, almost exactly three years later. This book is an attempt to address them.
The story of Swartz’s life and the circumstances of his death are recent inflection points in a contentious debate over the means by which information circulates in society and the laws and technologies that speed or delay its progress. Aaron Swartz has become an avatar for a movement, his actions and presumed intentions an argument that the government ought to pass laws that promote, rather than inhibit, the digital dissemination of knowledge.
This debate is not new. The epidemiology of information has been a public-policy concern since the preliterate era, when news and legend spread orally, allowing fealty and rebellion to slowly infect what I’ll call the cultural brain. The cultural brain is the zeitgeist, the ether, the intangible repository of communal interests. The cultural brain is the conversation. Its changing makeup is a function of technological progress. The oral tradition, the printing press, the railroad, the telephone, the radio, the television, the Internet—all of these innovations opened channels for what otherwise might have remained stray ideas, and gave those ideas velocity and direction. They are the mechanisms by which an entire society can come to consider and discuss the same ideas and events. Lawmakers have never been quite sure whether to feed or starve the cultural brain. As communications technologies have advanced, this conflict has intensified.
In his 1987 book, The Media Lab, the entrepreneur and futurist Stewart Brand memorably asserted that “information wants to be free”: that it is effectively impossible to restrict the flow of (and artificially maintain high prices for) data in a world rife with photocopiers, tape decks, instant cameras, digital networks, and other such disseminative tools.32 Brand was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, which, in the 1960s and 1970s, brought long-haired shoppers a message of conscientious consumption. In the 1980s, Brand became interested in digital networks. He thought that, like the tools he had featured in the Catalog, these networks had the potential to bridge cultural chasms and empower their users to transform society.
“Information wants to be free,” with its air of casual inevitability and hazy, imprecise idealism, is less an insight than a bumper sticker, easy to chant, easier to dismiss. Perhaps this is why the phrase resounded. It was pithy, unapologetic. Of course information wants to be free: the more people who are familiar with a particular piece of information, t
he more relevant that information becomes. But fewer people remember what Brand wrote immediately thereafter:
Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, “intellectual property,” and the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.33
Brand’s paradox describes the state in which we find ourselves today, and neatly summarizes the ideologies that have driven the last half century’s worth of data activism. While the members of the copyright bar drafted laws ensuring that information would remain expensive, engineers and futurists constructed a medium that would help set that information free. Since the earliest days of digital computing, idealists have envisioned the machines as the foundation of an infinite library that would offer unfettered access to the fruits of human knowledge and creative production. The “library of the future” would be intuitively organized and universally accessible; it would be responsive, personalized, and intelligent; it would belong to everyone and benefit everyone.
But this dream has consistently been deferred, perhaps because it is and has always been wildly unrealistic. The informaticists Rob Kling and Roberta Lamb characterize computing technology as the “centerpiece of seductive dreams,” a license for digital soothsayers to emphasize computing’s utopian potential while ignoring the sociopolitical realities that might thwart ideal outcomes.34 Theoretically, computers and the Internet can be used to promote congruence, tolerance, and understanding. In the real world, however, forward progress will always be slowed by social and political friction, often generated by those who do not think these goals represent progress at all. Internet enthusiasts often presume that the network inevitably leads to yes, even though the world has always, always, always been defined by no.
For more than a century, Congress and America’s content industries have been of one mind on copyright policy, consistently advocating for longer terms and harsher penalties for scofflaws, nominally in order to empower individual creators, but also to maintain the commercial viability of the companies that publish and distribute those works. Most major new advances in communications have been greeted with a barrage of rhetoric and legislation meant to inhibit the new technologies for the benefit of existing ones.
Meanwhile, unauthorized access to intellectual property has consistently been characterized as piracy, the perpetrators as bespectacled Blackbeards intent on ravaging the cultural commonweal. Statute and morality have been conflated by copyright holders seeking to extend their monopolies and by legislators looking to validate their decisions to pass laws that do so.
Today, the Internet is an information smorgasbord, an endless buffet of data sets, research papers, essays, news articles, instruction manuals, annual reports, and myriad other materials that the curious soul can use for edification and self-improvement. But much of this content is inaccessible, consigned to subscription databases or hidden behind paywalls or subject to other impediments. The Internet has simultaneously shrunk and expanded the world with its hyperlinked data and its decentralized, disintermediated communications. And it has consistently confused and frustrated legislators and capitalists who don’t understand why so many users are so insistent on flouting The Rules.
Aaron Swartz broke The Rules, consistently and creatively. He did not always explain why, but he broke them, and now his death has led many people to question those rules and wonder why they seem so incongruous with the realities of the digital era, in which information has become untethered to physical formats and it takes only moments for news and legend to permeate the cultural brain.
Three years after Aaron Swartz died, his story is still on many people’s minds. A large street-art mural of his face, set next to the words RIP AARON SWARTZ, adorns the side of a building in Brooklyn. The filmmaker Brian Knappenberger turned Swartz’s life story into the documentary The Internet’s Own Boy, which played at the Sundance Film Festival and was released in theaters during the summer of 2014. Every year around his birthday, Swartz’s friends and admirers worldwide organize a series of weekend-long “hackathons” intended to stimulate the sorts of social projects Swartz cherished. A cottage industry of programmers and political activists has arisen to ensure that Swartz’s legacy will survive.
Of course, to tell the story of Aaron Swartz requires more than just the story of Aaron Swartz—the difficult, immoderate men and women who preceded him as caretakers of the cultural brain must also be included. They share a spiritual kinship with Swartz, confident, as he was, not only in the righteousness of their causes, but that they themselves were destined to advance them. Their lives, passions, accomplishments, and failures provide a necessary context for Swartz’s life and death. His story is inextricably twined with theirs and cannot adequately be understood without realizing that his predecessors’ lives and works, taken together, created the system that produced, defined, and destroyed him. Aaron Swartz wanted to save the world. But the world was never going to let Aaron Swartz save himself.
1
NOAH WEBSTER AND THE MOVEMENT FOR COPYRIGHT IN AMERICA
A book is intrinsically different from a boat. Both books and boats have definite physical properties: you can see them, touch them, occasionally smell them, and even taste them, if you’re into that sort of thing. But a good boat benefits no one but its owner. Society at large derives no value from your boat, unless you are a noble soul who throws come-one-come-all pontoon parties at your summer place on Green Lake. Society can, however, profit greatly from a good book—or, more precisely, from the good ideas contained therein.
While ideas can improve society, they can also imperil it. The history of civilization is, among other things, the history of powerful people suppressing heterodox ideas, usually by executing their bearers. Chopping blocks and crucifixes are conclusive, but also messy, and they sometimes make martyrs of their victims. Martyrs inspire movements; movements are bad for business. The earliest copyright policies were, in a sense, slightly more humane methods of extinguishing dissent.
Copyright first became a relevant policy question with the European development of movable type circa 1450, when the printer Johannes Gutenberg unveiled his press in the city of Mainz.1 Before then, book copying was an arduous task, done by hand, and governments did not have to fear the rapid scriptorial dissemination of seditious or heretical ideas. Most people were illiterate; culture traveled orally. The printing press made the advance of a general literary culture possible for the first time in human history. Movable type was an accelerant, the printed book a preservative.
By 1500, Gutenberg’s invention had traversed the Continent, and the governments of Europe saw that this new technology could be used to spread troublesome sentiments, which, if widely felt, might destabilize their regimes. Various rulers and their ministers gave this matter some thought, presumably realized that it would be impractical to forcibly lobotomize the reading public, and instead decided that the answer was to regulate what the press could print, and who could do the printing.
In England, this regulation was accomplished by the royal charter, in 1557, of the Stationers’ Company, a guild comprising the licensed printers in the realm.2 The ninety-seven men named in the Stationers’ charter got a pretty good deal: a near-total monopoly on publishing in England as well as the power to fine and jail illicit printers and seize and destroy their output. By this inky circumscription, Queen Mary explicitly intended to disempower the many “scandalous malicious schismatical and heretical persons” who persisted in publishing works that insulted or criticized church and crown. The Stationers were simultaneously printers and censors.
This first foray toward copyright was meant to benefit neither authors nor the public, but the state. The Stationers’ Charter had nothing whatsoever to do with an author’s right to
make a profit, and everything to do with consolidating royal control over printed matter. The publisher held perpetual copyright. The author got little but the diminishing marginal satisfaction of seeing his works in circulation. Once those works were in print, as the essayist Augustine Birrell observed in 1899, “the British author usually disappeared, or if he did reappear, it was in the pillory.”3
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 upended this relationship, and many other things, by establishing Parliament as the fountainhead of governance in England. The stature of the Stationers and the Crown’s control over printed material slowly eroded as the seventeenth century approached its end, culminating in Parliament’s failure, in 1695, to renew the licensing act granting the Stationers their monopoly and powers of proscription. Faced with increased competition, declining profits, a market newly glutted with rival editions of the same books, and an unpleasant sense of existential dispossession, the Stationers pioneered what would soon become a standard industry tactic: they tried to get the copyright laws changed in their favor.
They did not immediately succeed. The Stationers lobbied for the restoration of their monopoly in 1703, 1704, and 1706, and each time found Parliament unmoved by their argument.4 They had better luck in 1707, when they suggested that a new copyright law would help not just printers and booksellers, but the authors of England and their families, who had ostensibly been driven to poverty and ruin by literary deregulation and the ensuing market chaos. Augustine Birrell later observed that the Stationers’ rhetoric about the plight of the British author “has no foundation in the facts of literary life in England.”5 Nevertheless, their claim was apparently convincing, and in 1710 Parliament passed a law that restored at least some order to the world of English literature.