Aaron Swartz - “The Internet's Own Boy” - Documentary

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I recently watched a documentary called “The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz”. I had sketchy knowledge of who Aaron Swartz was and what he had done. His story turned out to remarkable and tragic, his achievements immense and far-reaching! He killed himself in 2013 at the age of 26, psychologically hounded by a system which wanted to make an example out of him in the post 9-11 world of ever-receding liberties.

The Relevance of Swartz (to our own use of the blockchain even?):
Swartz was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS and the Markdown publishing format, the organization Creative Commons, and the website framework web.py, and was a co-founder of the social news site Reddit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Swartz was precocious; reading fluently by the age of 2 or 3, he got into computing in a big way. By the age of 14 he had co-authored the RSS feed and by his late teens was a founding member of Reddit, which btw @corbettreport has done a recent 'shock-horror' exposé on. Swartz didn't stay in the corporate world for long, and once he left become increasingly involved in using his skills for social justice and political activism.

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Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (authored by Swartz):
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations."
https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt

Swartz was a life-long friend of books, of learning and of knowledge, and he used his scripting skills to download masses of documents and files which were behind government and private paywalls. He did this Robin Hood-esque in order to make them available to the public, but he also took time to analyse them. In his analyses, he discovered and exposed some very high-level connections between corporate money and the 'lawmakers'. This earned him heat from the authorities (and perhaps those even higher up), and they began to apply some nasty dark pressure on a kid who was shit scared of going to jail. This was in the post 9-11 months and eventually he was made an example of to be used as a deterrent! The 'authorities' came down on him so hard and from so many different angles, that he appears to have cracked.

United States v. Aaron Swartz:
In United States of America v. Aaron Swartz, Aaron Swartz, an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist, was prosecuted for many violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA), after downloading a great many academic journal articles through the MIT computer network from a source (JSTOR) for which he had an account as a Harvard research fellow. Facing trial and the possibility of imprisonment, Swartz committed suicide, and the case was consequently dismissed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

Suicide or not - the question although valid is not pursued in the documentary - Swartz was the example which showed others how his particular and powerful brand of internet activism could be conducted. But he did rock some big, fat and powerful boats and I would personally consider it almost certain that his death was assisted.

Interesting posts on Swartz by Steemians:

• Was Aaron Swartz Killed By An MIT Satanic Child Porn Ring? - article summary by @gizmosia
• What Would the Internet be Like Without Aaron Swartz? by @anonnews

The documentary offers an insight into yet another aspect of the Matrix, the inner workings of the Control System which seeks to maintain humanity in a state of ignorance. Swartz's life was dedicated to pushing back against this and it wasn't until I watched this doc that I realised how much this young man – 26 when he died – had actually achieved!

Respect to you AS!