Aaron Swartz’s 34th birthday would have been on Sunday: we must remember him

Aaron Swartz would have been 34 on Sunday. On a day when much of America was celebrating the confirmation that a four year fever dream was finally ending, Swartz’s birthday was a barely noticed footnote. However, it should be seen as significant – Swartz’s life and death are a reminder that there are forces far more powerful than presidents. Swartz himself is a reminder that we should keep on fighting for greater democracy, for the ability of everyday people to build and share things without being trapped in the extractive and exploitative logic of digital capitalism.

Who was Aaron Swartz?

Swartz was a hacker in the truest and strictest sense of the term. Not only was he technically gifted and curious (he helped to build both RSS and Reddit), he also recognised the political dimension of his work. He perhaps understood he was living at a time when the future fabric of social reality was on a knife edge. Indeed, it’s part of the tragedy of his death at 26 that things have played out over the last decade or so in a way that would be deeply antithetical to his way of viewing the world. From a culture of freedom to walled gardens built with little purpose beyond capital accumulation, the world since Swartz’s death in 2013 has been one of decline.

Aaron Swartz and Mark Zuckerberg: two figures at a fork in the road

A Rolling Stone profile published a month after Swartz died compared him to Mark Zuckerberg.

“Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, who built an online empire by corralling and monetizing private information, Swartz dedicated himself to limiting the amount of power institutions could wield over individuals.” This is an astute comparison, and, to a certain extent, reflects the state of the digital world in 2013 – one which was at a fork in the road.

From our perspective in 2020 it underlines the fact that as citizens – digital and otherwise – we still have the ability to make a decision about how and what we do every day, whether that’s to empower or exploit each other. Of course, few of us are going to build a democracy shaping social media platform tomorrow, but there are still ways in which we can acquiesce and comply with the logic of late capitalism.

Thinking about Swartz at the weekend reminded me of a completely unrelated piece by comedian Josie Long. Written for the New Statesman, it’s the final paragraph that sticks in my mind:

“I feel as if I’ve learned that sometimes you have to force yourself out of bitterness and cynicism and despair. That it’s a choice to make initially and to keep making over and over and over again, no matter how hard or tiring or unlikely it feels that you will win.”

In the context of Swartz’s story and the challenge of building a better digital future, this sense of making a choice to do something – whether it’s fight, create, or connect – is one we need to remember every day. Sure, such a sentiment could be dismissed as glib, but when you consider that the very nature of our everyday life is characterized by platforms that use surveillance to in away that inevitably shapes the way you find and interact with information and ideas, then the idea that we can decide to do things at all remains a small but powerful one.

Aaron Swartz’s activism

If Aaron Swartz is to be a source of inspiration for thinking about how we go about building the future, it’s worth also reflecting on the specifics of his activism and what he actually achieved. This includes:

• Downloading and distributing federal court documents stored on PACER database to make them more accessible to the public in 2008.
• Helping to uncover the treatment of Chelsea Manning by submitting Freedom of Information Act requests.
• Creating advocacy groups including Progressive Change Campaign Committee and Demand Progress.
• Playing a key role in the successful (ultimately successful) protests against the Stop Piracy Online Act (SOPA).

This isn’t an extensive list, but it highlights that Swartz’s politics was deeply tied to his technical interests. Although today discussions about freedom and justice often seem to treat both concepts as distinctly separate things (in some instances opposites), for Swartz they were inseparable. There is no justice without freedom and no freedom without justice. The fact that he took his own life facing the prospect of a long jail sentence after being unfairly pursued with exaggerated zeal only emphasises this fact.

The future and freedom

In a speech at a conference in May 2012, Swartz asked something that I think is still deeply evocative: “Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech or like the freedom to murder?”

He was asking the question in relation to what he saw as “a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands.” Viewed one way, his statement highlights the absurdity of such a project – you can’t apply the same logic of normal life to something so qualitatively different as the internet.

But there’s another way to look at his question: he’s not pointing out that it’s ridiculous to apply a specific set of assumptions to a radically different domain; instead he’s questioning but more why it should be inevitable that we should do that at all. It’s almost as if he’s highlighting that the way we act on the internet is indeterminate. He was pointing out that the way we define transgression is up to us, and, moreover, reflects what kind of society we’re trying to be.

As we move into a post-Trump world – and maybe even a Post-COVID one – Aaron Swartz’s legacy reminds us that there are still many things we need to fight for. We just need to want to do it.