"When we're young we think our cause is a sprint, and when
we're middle-aged we think is it's a marathon," "But when
we're old we think it's a relay race. And Aaron was the one you wanted
to hand it off to."--Doc Searls, at the New York City memorial honoring Aaron Swartz, January 2013
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In 2009, the year I got divorced, my favorite author was David Foster Wallace. Foster Wallace had hanged himself the previous fall, at age 46, in Southern California. I never approached that low during "divorce year," but it was by far the hardest year of my life. This blog was a lifeline for me back then, as well as immersing myself in the brooding genius of David Foster Wallace.
That summer I carried Infinite Jest around the streets of the Mission like a totem, heedless of any concerns that this made me appear like just another hipster or clinger on at the cult of Foster Wallace. I didn't even carry it in a backpack, just used it as a shield as I walked around town.
Just last month Internet activist Aaron Swartz hanged himself too, at age 26. Thanks to the amazing reporting of Justin Peters in Slate, I now know that Swartz was working on a detailed plot summary of Infiniet Jest at the time of his death. This was one of many projects the ever-restless-Swartz had in the hopper at the time of his passing. It seems fitting that one genius related to the work of another.
At the time of his death Swartz was defending himself against government prosecution for downloading 4.8 million articles from the JSTOR database at MIT. Swartz entered a computer closet to do so, and wired an Acer laptop directly into MIT's servers. But to Swartz this should have been public domain material available to all, and he was liberating information rather than stealing it. When he killed himself the government was pursuing charges that would have included jail time, even though by then there were gaping holes in the government's case.
Who was right, in the final analysis? Aaron Swartz or the district attorney? As Swartz put it in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, written when he was 21 years old:
"Forcing academics to pay money to read
the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only
allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles
to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children
in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.
"I agree," many say, "but what can we
do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of
money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal—there's nothing
we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's
already being done: we can fight back.
"Those with access to these
resources—students, librarians, scientists—you have been given a
privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest
of the world is locked out. But you need not—indeed, morally, you
cannot—keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it
with the world."
I agree with 21 year old Aaron, as I near 36 years of age myself. At Samuel Merritt we're forced to maintain proxy servers that keep unauthorized users of the library's collections away (this is the kind of server Swartz hacked into at MIT). We also maintain the conceit that the peer reviewed article is the one and only means of sharing authoritative scholarly knowledge, even though
peer review has many flaws and the digital age
opens up exciting new possibilities. Those new possibilities are naturally open, getting us away from this whole proxy server business.
So I'm with Aaron, absolutely and all the way. The difference, though, is that I've lived long enough to appreciate why systems are so hard to change, and have outlived my own phase of righteous shock. I'm still in the fight, while accepting that it's a long-run game that will never be over.
At age 26 I was every bit as zealous as Swartz, while 10 years on I've entered the middle-aged marathon phase so beautifully captured by Doc Searls above. The "marathon phase" doesn't always bring peace, as Foster Wallace's suicide reveals. But for most of us the enduring victories are those that take the longest to achieve. I wish Aaron had lived long enough to know that this is true.
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