Madhyamam Online/English February 14, 2013

For a World thats not flat

"Aaron dead. World Wanderer, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one
down .Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep", tweeted1 Tim Berners Lee , the
inventor of World Wide Web on the death of Aaron Swartz. The question of how should
Aaron Swartz be remembered in the annals of history remains equally before
the intelligentsia- the keepers of information and the people he stood for- "the
commons"; knows and know-nots. Eulogists havent failed to mention the credentials
of this computer prodigy.
At the age of 14, Aaron Swartz co-created RSS (Rich Site Summary) 1.0 which helps a
web reader to get updates from any website which confirms to its specifications. He
co-designed Creative Commons licenses, which made easy sharing and usage of
knowledge without law infringements. He dropped out from Stanford University, before
cofounding Reddit, a social and entrainment news website where users provided the
content. Later Reddit was sold to Wired Magazine Company for more than $10 million.
In 2007, he led the development of Open Library.org, an ambitious project to collect
information about every book ever published, which presently is having 1 million
disabled friendly books in public domain. If the story ends here, Aaron would have
been remembered like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Steve Jobs of Apple but with a
tint of ideology about an Open Society.
Exploring this tint of ideology and his pursuit of world where knowledge is accessible
to everyone, one could understand that it cost him a lot. On the day when US court
filings data base , PACER opened up its paid access for free but limited to 17 libraries
, Aaron ran a script which downloaded 19.8 million pages of text worth 3 million
dollars for free public distribution. Later he founded Demand Progress and played a
huge role in building up massive campaigns against the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the
US Senate and its US House of representatives equivalent, the Stop Online Piracy Act
(SOPA) which was allegedly lobbied by Hollywood and Music Industry for 94 million
1

The blue underlined words refers to corresponding links to the information cited

dollars. Following the world-wide public protest , marking American Censorship Day
on 16th November 2011 and internet black outs by Wikipedia, Reddit etc., a large
number of US politicians withdrew their support for the Acts. Meanwhile, he was
arrested from MIT Campus for downloading over 4.8 million articles from JSTOR
which he collected for

free public distribution. He had to face an superseding

indictment of 13 felony counts (Felony counts increased from four to thirteen) through
which he could have faced up to

35 years in prison and fine of one million dollars.

Later, though JSTOR dropped the case, the trail continued with US attorney Ortizs
assertion stealing is stealing and finally on 11th January 2013 he was found dead
after hanging himself in his Brooklyn apartment. Again, he should not be confused
with Robinhood, even though Aarons activism not only cost him talent but his life too.
Delineating the personality of Aaron, which has been largely exercised by popular
media to find out reasons of his genius, activism or his precarious death, largely
outlays a parley of following stages ; a) an internet prodigy and activist, b) kernelspace technology and user space politics, c)memory and myth; and d) knowledge and
power. But this evolution of descriptions fails to go beyond stage b and get submersed
in the process of creating myth out of memories of Aaron. Its essential to go beyond
stage c but definitely not to pathologize the story as Lawrence Lessig worried.
"Freedom of speech has been under threat in every age .The digital age is in fact the
biggest opportunity for freedom since Gutenberg" - Timothy Garton Ash, Oxford
Historian and leader in free speech debate.
A bigger opportunity always comes along with a bigger threat. Here, a threat which
has been resounded by the intellects of the hour; like Karl Marx who was worried
about the increments of technology by bourgeois production relations, leading to
alienation and later marginalization of the large by the accumulation of wealth by few
or like Michael Foucault who believed in the knowledge power duality where power is
constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and truth.
If I may lend Eric Hobsbawms terminologies, what else did humanity witness in its
course from the age of revolution to the age of capital, empires and extremes but the
rise of the enlightened against the vicissitudes of power on their lives?

We live in the age of information with its surplus yearning to connect the far and near;
an age of knows and know-nots. But as Aaron Swartz notes in his opening lines of
Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: "Information is power. But like all power, there are
those who want to keep it for themselves". The Leviathan- Nation States did realize
this erudition of Aaron beforehand , which reflected in their ironical stands during the
debates that happened in recently concluded World Conference on International
Telecommunications (WCIT) of UN International Telecommunication Union.
Superficially it appeared as a debate between neo-liberal States and pro-State control
notions of China and Russia, but both positions were poisoned ice cream candied
with nuts and dried fruits- with varying levels of obscurity. When the latter openly
contested and confessed its going to decide what its people would think, the former
presumably stood for freedom of expression but was ensuring the monopoly of ICANN
(Internet Corporation for Assigned Name and Numbers), a private non-profit entity
which was previously overseen by US. The dichotomy in the stands could be
understood when the same free nations appeal for laws like SOPA and hunts down
people like Aaron Swartz under hollow acts like Computer and Fraud Abuse Act inside
their countries.
The questions around obscurity and access had once led to the criticism of the
writings from Plato through Hegel to Derrida. Today these questions permeates the
circles of intelligentsia , especially when mass movements necessarily doesnt lie under
the wish and will of intellects , it had attained universality in the backdrop of events
like

social

media

fuelled

Arab

Spring

which

shook

decades

of

dictatorship, controversies around vaulted Internet services in China ,the attempts to

arrest the Wikileaks Founder, Julain Assange at Ecuadorean Embassy or more
evidently in the protests that happened in India after the gang rape of a woman in
Delhi on 16th December 2012.
Further , the debates of freedom to express (here to connect) can be around another
dimension , when the law fails to provide adequate space for technology and its
creators .It is becoming more evident when it comes to developing nations like India
which is estimated to have a third of Worlds poor and with an one-fourth population
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illiterate. The Narmada Bachao

Andolan

or protest against Kudankulam Nuclear

Power Project can also be considered as repercussions when the space provided for
technology was not bound by ethics. The public clamor against arresting two students
in Mumbai for posting and "liking in face book on the death of Bal Thackeray was an
example of the invasion of social controls into the newly built cyber space for a
deviance check ; no less was the move of a publishers consortium of Oxford University
Press, Cambridge University Press and Taylor & Francis against a photocopy shop in
the campus of Delhi School of Economics on charges of copyright infringement, but for
deterrence . All theses ruptures exist as coordinates in an ill-built space that
developing nations are creating as they embrace more technology and information.
They are derivatives of a mismatch between science, and law with its ethics binding
science. A discrepancy in these Urim and the Thummim of human philosophical
understanding would cause serious casualties and Aaron was the most recent victim
to it.
May be its the circulatory of power we should question not the law it makes .More
precisely not just the Nation-States alone. How else the Nation-States both in high and
low of developmental indices have rules like 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(4) of US or 66 A of India
IT Act which hold the potency to be draconian ? Then we will have to see who gives us
information ,point fingers to them and ask Roman Satirist Juvenals classic question:
Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?(But who will guard the guard themselves?) . The
power to control binaries and bits by AND, NOT, OR Gates and other complex IC chips
created a world of information surge and unprecedented technological inventions for
humanity. But their metaphorical counterparts like e-journals created by free public
contribution but with heavy access payments, search engines giving populist choices,
advertisement propelled corporate media or the state which censors media are all
equally perpetuating marginalization of knowledge and therein of people.
To liberate data from the hands of conglomerates, is important not only because
"bringing down the things from the top and making it more egalitarian is something
that we should strive for" but "for everything there exists someone who cares a great
deal about it" and "everyone has a way of expressing themselves" (Quotes from Aaron
Swartz's interview with Steal this film) . The #pdf tribute event which saw uploading of
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a large number of academic articles online for free public distribution and
organizing hack nights are definitely expressing the public grief but the mourners
should not forget the greater debate; the debate in which the gatekeepers of
information keep the law of the land in their bay and provide fragmented spaces for
people to access knowledge and develop their identity. If regulation of the regulators
seems anarchical or idealist, its at least required to maintain the axioms of law in
correct posture, like the ones of deterrence and proportionality, for if else the sources
of knowledge that the gatekeepers protect would extinguish- which is existential both
for the people at the centre and margins. This essentially has to be addressed
considering facts like the largest democracy in the world is turning out to become the
largest IT power in the world too. To an extreme, an age where a hacker community
could threaten to topple a democracy politically is not so far .More importantly, the
law framework and state policies or other power derivatives should reform so as they
dont create outcast in cyber space as done through Caste segregation by
Brahamaincal systems or the Indian State pursuit of Naxalites.
During the Freedom to Connect conference 2012 mentioning about the success of
anti-SOPA-PIPA movement, Aaron noted "We won this fight because everyone made
themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this
crucial freedom. They threw themselves into it...."
Lets keep spaces for innovation in our mind, society and law, else like Aaron Swartz,
the prodigies of future will have to write notes in their blog on what if they get hit by a
truck and end it with a line I'm not dead yet ! .Its not just this tint of irony
that completes the life of this young man, rather it's the ideas that he left for free and
connected world beyond obscurities of two infinite ends - a world that's not flat .