Shava,
I realize that these hacker myths die very hard. And that it is far easier to
imagine that I am a close-minded, prejudiced and cruel witch, basing my beliefs
on "propaganda" or "translations" from the MSM (what, he wrote in Russian? But
I read Russian!) than to accept that Swartz was an imperfect being with
delusions of grandeur, led to his doom by various software cult myths
propagated by his elders.
Of course, if the government sponsored the research (I mentioned that), it
wouldn't entitle *you* to theft, nor would its status "in the public domain".
Crime is crime. But I don't base my judgements on this "propaganda," but, you
know, what Swartz wrote himself. And there he invoked the idea of smashing the
machine because he thought that was how he could achieve change. *He* is the
one seizing power breaking into a server closet and gaining illegal access to a
computer system and grabbing files with a "keep grabbing" script. Who elected
him or even acclaimed him? The geeks who run the servers at MIT weren't
impressed.
Here's what he wrote, which wasn't "The research I'm collecting is
government-sponsored research, all in the public donain, behind a service's
firewall and this material should be freely available."
Instead, he actually wrote this, in his "Guerilla Manifesto", making
characterizations that hardly all would concede, especially when that "private
theft" is not required, as the files are available to children whose very
expensive tuitions are paid by their wealthy parents or by the taxpayer:
"It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil
disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share
them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it
to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We
need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks.
We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access."
He didn't claim what he did *wasn't* a crime; he had at least enough
self-awareness (more than his fans) to know it should be called "civil
disobedience" and indeed guerilla warfare. (By the way, they aren't the same
thing, and its useful to distinguish the two if you want a just society.) At
least accord him the same terms he used himself, even if he himself didn't have
the courage of his convictions to do the time for his crime and wanted it then
somehow to be erased in an act of benevolence.
Someone arrogating power to himself to decide matters of property and economics
that others have legally and rightfully arranged differently is indeed a
"guerilla," and even an authoritarian one. One can reply to his arrogant
manifesto with the simple question, "What do you mean 'we,' white man?" Who
died and made him king?
Let's not pretend he's a mild-mannered reporter interested in knowledge for
knowledge's sake. Let's not pretend this is altruism and anyone who criticizes
it is malevolent. I think even you, Shava, would not want to live in a society
run on the principles of the Guerilla Manifesto where a few get to decide for
the many *by force* and by "the propaganda of the deed".
It's also not true that "they" ("the Man") somehow conceded that all scholarly
material should be free and made it so. If JStor released 4 million files to
undermine Swartz's unilateral use of force, that doesn't mean all academic
files are now free. They aren't. Nor are they required to be.
More could have been achieved by an op-ed piece showing actual knowledge that
was locked up and urging it be released than stealing it by force. This was the
tactic some leftists took when a promising treatment for cystic fibrosis was
just found. Of course, it never seems to be the real scientists and researchers
actually doing this work who make this complaint, because usually they are in
communities that have access to these files for free; it's hackers who don't,
and their claims aren't tested but accepted by the gullible.
Also, I wonder if you have mixed up your foundational myths. Julian Assange
once worked under an NSA grant at his university, did you know that? And his
research was going to be made classified. Research that he charmingly called
the "Rubberhose," about making passwords so encrypted that they couldn't even
be beaten out of a person by a putative policeman. We have his claim on this
story, and no other perspective; the source is a former DARPA employee,
however, so it sounds plausible. He made his lifetime's work to be vengeance
against the NSA,and for some reason began with Hillary Clinton and the Obama
State Department, the way the Russians later did, in this vendetta.
Richard Stillman had a similar grievance, remember? And Mitch Kapor didn't like
it that other people's software was proprietary and for sale, after he made his
first millions himself on proprietary software. I don't wish to live in a
society created by people with such grudges, willing to use force to gain their
revenge for them.
Catherine Fitzpatrick
On Sunday, November 10, 2019, 11:41:25 PM EST, Shava Nerad
<[email protected]> wrote:
Catherine! It's been a while.
If you knew what was involved in Aaron's research, rather than absorbing the
propaganda of the US Attorney's office and translations from MSM, you'd
understand that the research Aaron was collecting was government sponsored
research, all of it in the public domain, that was locked behind a service's
firewall. And that they did not fight the idea that this material should be
freely available, later on, and it is now through their own web and
subscription portals.
You ended up stigmatizing someone unjustly with incomplete information. You
object when others do that, but you see how easy it is to fall into the same
trap yourself.
Sometimes compassion, rather than judgmentalism, is a better path. It leaves
you open to learning, rather than snapping your mind shut when something comes
into your sphere of influence that fits your cognitive biases.
yrs,SN
Shava [email protected]https://patreon.com/shava23
On Sun, Nov 10, 2019 at 4:20 PM later <[email protected]> wrote:
I have never gotten involved here, not least because there are no like-minded
people.
Thank you, Catherine, for taking time to write. Not that your liberal lenses at
the world seem any less distorted and oppressive, just differently distorted
and oppressive than those of techie libertarians, but at least you share your
blind spots and half-completed claims trying to engage in an argument, and I
respect that attempt. I wish there were more dialogue across our fault lines,
and I am the first to admit my intolerance towards liberals and libertarians
alike...
@Catherine: I'd like to ask you to think/imagine real people in this world,
body after body, who cannot become "a member of a university".
On 11/10/19 5:27 PM, Catherine Fitzpatrick wrote:
I rarely get involved in debates here because there are no like-minded
people, except some who lurk.
A founding coder of Diaspora committed suicide, too. If Diaspora were viable,
we'd all be there now, but it isn't, so we're not. It was "given to the
community" which is geek-speek for saying "unpaid open source zealots got tired
of working on it". Maybe that's why you can't find it anywhere.
I'd invite you to contemplate more deeply how the nihilistic, extreme culture
of the hacker in fact led us to the abusiveness of Twitter, Facebook, Google
and others and even the exposure of our elections to Russian GRU agents.
It's not unrelated. The profound disdain for private property is intimately
related to the rampant lack of privacy now, like it or not. You didn't want to
see democratically elected politicians regulate the Internet through SOPA or
CISPA; so you got the Russians to regulate your Internet for you.
If you don't like the fact that academic publishers charge money to cover
costs -- and no, your research grant or the university's grants don't "already
cover these costs", then don't buy them. There are workarounds. One of the most
obvious workaround is to be a member of that university with a library card in
that university -- then you get the publications for free! In fact, Swartz
could have taken out publications for free with an MIT card if he were truly
interested in finding some journal for his research. But he didn't do that,
because he wasn't about that.
He wanted to commit a raucous "propaganda of the deed" by making it big and
criminal to "make a point". Except, rarely does extremism bring that desired
effect.
You can get friends to get you publications; you can join Academia.org and
get many of those you need for free, and for their low subscription fee get
others. Pay walls are not the crippling effect on scholarship imagined. In
fact, I never hear techies complain about the real crippling effect, which is
the high cost of textbooks, even e-books, in the hundreds of dollars. And
really, the high cost of education in general, caused by all sorts of things,
including the addition of numerous officials who now have to watch for Title
IX, gender, transgender, etc. issues. And it's ok to question these costs and
these programs and these methods and still support the rights of LGBT and other
minorities.
The reason the academic journals were targeted is that they enabled activists
to choose a hated target -- imagined greedy middlemen gouging poor students and
professors -- that wasn't the academic world per se, but was part of their
hypothetical "The Man" and "Neo-Liberalism" and blah blah. These campaigns
aren't about academic freedom. They are about technocommunist partisans'
movements against capitalism. The sort of capitalism that enables Stanford,
where this list is homed, to exist and thrive. If you want to have a radical
hackers' movement espousing communism, that's fine, but don't pretend it's
about academic freedom.
Prosecutors overreach all the time. The plea-bargaining system creates all
kinds of abuses and the bail system is broken. But you can tackle those
problems without committing crime -- all sorts of groups from the ACLU to local
committees, churches, synagogues, etc. which I and many others support are
helping refugees do this all the time. They don't break and enter into server
rooms and paralyze networks and steal files to do this.
If someone is "neurologically atypical," which is meant as a badge of pride
like "indigo children," to overcome real or imagined prejudice, that doesn't
mean if they commit suicide, that the government or society or evil capitalists
or anything of the sort has killed them. They are responsible for their own
actions.
I'm going to continue to use Facebook because there is nothing as good,
whatever its faults. People and groups in poor countries, like Ukraine or
Belarus or Turkemenistan, which I follow, use Facebook as a kind of free web
site -- institutions like the parliament or the military even of countries like
Ukraine have Facebook pages instead of paying money to maintain websites. They
do this also to avoid censorship in their homelands. Of course Facebook is
where you keep up with relatives because the imagined privacy tradeoffs are
absolutely nothing like being hacked and doxed by Anonymous and other
criminals, something I've experienced personally many times because they don't
like my criticism, they are totalitarians. It's not the NSA that exposed
people's privacy when they legitimately gathered data; it's Glenn Greenwald who
put up the photos and information of girlfriends of the Taliban and their
children. And so on.
I think few of you ever have to test your beliefs in the real world and see
how they sound to ordinary people. You could try it at Thanksgiving with your
relatives whom you think are morons because they voted for Trump. Most often
they did that because of disgust at campus political correctness and extremist
techie views imposed on us all now. But you'd like to pretend it's only because
they're racists. You can go on pretending that and insist on splitting the
Democrats into more and more fine-tuned sectarian grouplets in which you will
feel you have at last achieved political correctness. But then we'll get Trump
again. Thanks!
Catherine Fitzpatrick
On Sunday, November 10, 2019, 03:19:02 PM EST, Rand Strauss
<[email protected]> wrote:
> you have a disgusting mentality…
Let’s please have no name-calling here, or pretend people have a "mentality",
much less that one can deduce it. Let’s keep the conversation constructive and
curb our impulses to insult each other, even to highlight contrasting views.
We have the institutions we have, and they have advantages and disadvantages.
When the academic publishing groups began, they added a lot of value- there
was no internet. They were expensive because publishing was expensive because
distribution was inefficient. Alternatives are emerging.
Aaron Swartz was one of many non-neurotypical people who were born long
before the term was coined. Back then, one was either fit to stand trial, or
unfit, sane or crazy. Today, we know that there are many spectra of cognitive
abilities and tolerances. Many more people are capable of standing trial, of
thriving in schools, of contributing in many ways to society if accommodations
are made. Aaron had both genius and short-sightedness.
Clearly Aaron missed the many compelling perspectives that showed he was
valued and needed and, after a time at least, could find a community in which
he could thrive. And he continues to have a lot of company in this regard.
Suicide, as well as near-suicide, suicidal thoughts and depression are all too
common, especially in America. Humanity has made some incredible strides in
understanding and treating these phenomena, but there are still huge holes in
distribution.
Many, many prosecutors have been guilty of overreach, filling America’s
prisons with all sorts of people who should never have been there, or should
have had much shorter sentences. These prosecutors reflect a large fraction of
society that reacts to small crimes with name-calling, labelling a whole person
as a criminal, especially if they have a cognitive difference, seem to oppose
an establishment norm, or if their skin is darkened by pigments. This extends
to our schools as well, with the rallying cry of "zero tolerance."
What are we going to do about it?
Except, humanity also seems to be weak when it comes to "we", and "doing."
For instance, I have a list of dozens of web-based political-reform efforts
(sites). While all but mine, and perhaps another, seem unlikely to make a real
difference, there’s no group maintaining the list, much less embellishing it,
much less publishing it, much less (to my knowledge) studying the phenomena to
see what’s promising and what’s missing (much less working on mine...)
> We created it, and it still exists. It's called Diaspora*.
You didn’t even say how to find it ( https://diasporafoundation.org/ ), much
less how to participate on this list through it. Is there a LiberationTech
pod? I spent 5 minutes looking around it- it seems almost impenetrable…
Does MeWe.com satisfy your anti-facebook requirements? We could make a
group there, such as: https://mewe.com/join/liberationtech. To augment,
certainly not to replace, this forum.
Every single one of us, and every single one of "them" is every day doing
what we think and feel is appropriate given our thoughts, feelings and
judgements of our abilities, needs, wants and opportunities in the world.
We’re swept up by inspirations, whether of Aarons willingness to oppose the the
paywalls around knowledge or the prosecutor’s willingness to defend society’s
rules about property and order. Meanwhile, Trump has further institutionalized
chaos and stupidity, CO2 levels are averaging about 406, and the new normal is
ever-worsening climate change catastrophe. While we have many partial answer,
we clearly have a long way to go.
'Best wishes as we approach Thanksgiving. -r
On Nov 10, 2019, at 8:11 AM, Yosem Companys <[email protected]> wrote:
In fact, the masses ✊🏻✊🏽✊🏿 would like to see an Anti-Facebook - with the
potential for limitless friends, more efficient algorithms and no distortion of
information. We can all collectively usher in a more beautiful digital 💻
world, free of Facebook's limitations and unjust ♠️ social media practices #️⃣
But people need to use such alternate, community friendly solutions if they
are to dethrone Facebook. And that requires public awareness. And that requires
mass-scale earned media or expensive marketing/advertising. (In the absence of
collective action, the only other solution is turning these networks into
public utilities.) --
Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable from any major commercial
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