Aaron Swartz, a child prodigy who created RSS and co-founded Reddit, clashed with legal frameworks after advocating for open access to scientific research. Despite mentorship from Tim Berners-Lee and Lawrence Lessig, his "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto" criticized publishers like JSTOR for hoarding publicly funded knowledge, leading to federal charges. His struggle between hacker ethos and bureaucratic reality, compounded by severe depression, culminated in a tragic end that underscores the dangerous tension between idealistic information sharing and rigid legal enforcement. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Women Take Down Con Artist00:01:52
This is an iHeart podcast.
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When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
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On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
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I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Hey, everybody, Robert here.
It's the Christmas Two Parter, and every year we try to use our holiday episodes to do something good.
Volunteers Help Border Migrants00:02:02
This year, we're asking you to support the mutual aid project that James Stout over at It Could Happen Here has been a part of for nearly six months in a remote part of the U.S.-Mexico border near Yacoomba, California.
While you're hopefully warm and dry, the Border Patrol is detaining thousands of migrants, including children and the elderly, in the desert without food, water, or shelter when overnight temperatures drop below freezing.
Volunteers provide hot meals, blankets, and toys for children.
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Everyone there, including James, has spent a lot of their own money supporting this effort.
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Oh, what a happy Yuletide.
Merry Xmas to all of you listeners out there in radio land.
It's not radio land.
Radio is a dead medium.
It's a podcast behind the bastards, where normally we talk about the very worst people in all of history, but once a year, one glorious day or week out of the year, instead of talking about the worst people in all of history, we talk about some of the best people in all of history.
And today, as our guest on this Yuletide episode, our only returning Christmas episode guest, Margaret Killjoy, who talks about cool people who did cool stuff for a living in a podcast with that name.
Child Genius Aaron Swartz00:15:12
Hey.
You only cover Santa Claus, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We're getting into the, we're.
Getting into the big man himself.
Um okay now Magpie uh, how do you feel about Christmas?
You christmas person I am?
Now, this is a recent transition.
I decided that it makes sense that everyone wants together to celebrate the darkest time of the year yeah, and that whatever holiday people attach to it, as long as the core of it is, get together with people that you care about.
As the dark set, the dark is here and the cold is coming.
You know yeah yeah, I think that's uh, I tend to be more or less in agreement.
I enjoy celebrating the holiday.
Yeah, that has nothing to do with the guy we're talking about today um, but it is.
It is, you know?
Um yeah, Santa Claus, we are.
We've all gone through, in the period from the early 2000s to today, this really interesting moment, especially those of us.
This is kind of less of a case for people who've been radicals that entire time, but those of us who started from a more centrist moderate, you know, liberal kind of background, this period of like, wow, you know, the internet is going to be this incredible tool for democracy and spreading knowledge.
Uh, the tech industry, they're.
They're like uh, this progressive force in a lot of ways in society.
There's a bunch of things that are going to be made better by connecting people all over the world to oh.
Not only does all this technology not work the way that we thought it and not only is it a lot more toxic, does it have more negative consequences for, for people's mental health, for the health of societies, but it increases the arsenal of authoritarians, and most of the people who are running the tech industry now um, want that right are fundamentally on the side of authoritarians.
There's this kind of movement the NEW YORK Times just did an article on it because that kind of the mainstream starting to be aware of some, to an extent of which it kind of came out of some of the effective altruist stuff that's, that's the effective accelerationist right.
Eff, slash acc is kind of how it'll be written a lot and the idea is like we need to accelerate without thinking of the consequences.
You know Ai, effective Ai, you know um, and push it in every aspect of society and it doesn't matter who it hurts, it doesn't matter what the consequences are, because fundamentally, this is what human beings need and these people are also getting into eugenics.
A lot of these are the folks around Elon Musk.
Um, it's deeply reactionary in many ways, but it came out of, and a lot of some of the people who are are involved in it are folks who came out of in the early 2000s, the late 90s.
Um, you would have thought a lot differently of them, right?
You would have thought that these people were, if not on the side of angels then, broadly speaking, part of a positive trend in our culture.
And today, the hero we're talking about is a guy who's a personal hero of mine.
He was a dude who was, to an extent, on the I think I know it is but yeah yeah he, he was a dude who was to an extent on on.
You know, we don't know because, because of when he died, fundamentally where he would have ended up now I don't think he would be in league with any of those guys.
Um, he's a guy I fundamentally view as a hero uh, and his name was Aaron Schwartz.
Yeah, i'm So excited.
Yeah, spelled S-W-A-R-T-Z.
Aaron Hillel Schwartz was born on November 8th, 1986 in Highland Park, Chicago.
He was the eldest of three brothers and in general enjoyed about as privileged an upbringing as you can have and still do something useful with your life, right?
He's not, he's not born like into crazy money because those people don't tend to do much, right?
There's not an emerald mine in the picture.
Yeah, he's not an emerald miner, but his dad like founds a software firm.
I don't think they're like hundreds of millions of dollars, but I'm sure they have a million or more, you know, in assets, you know, most of the time that he's around.
They're doing very well, right?
And because his dad's the founder of a software firm, his dad's a huge nerd, clearly a very smart guy.
And so from a very early age, there are computers in the Schwartz house.
And eventually, Aaron and all of his brothers, he has two younger brothers will have computers as kids in the early, I mean, in the late 80s, early 90s.
That's very rare, right?
I grew up, my dad was a very early adopter.
Yeah, that was mine.
So we had computers in the 80s and like they were, they cost like all of my dad's money, you know?
Yeah.
You know, I was born late enough in the 80s.
We certainly, if we had a computer in the late 80s, I don't think we did.
But in the early 90s, we had like we had one of the ones that like was pre-floppy disks, whatever those giant ones were.
And like, you know, all it has, you just get green text on the little screen.
Like we had one of those for a while.
Oh, see, it's probably pretty hard to, sorry, never mind.
I don't need to.
My, my, yeah, we had all the like, uh, my dad referred to it as a compact luggable.
It's the size of a briefcase and it has a little green screen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
It doesn't have a hard drive.
It has that, it has an A and a B drive, but not a C drive, you know?
Yeah.
Ancient technology.
Yeah.
Like not only does your phone have more computing power than, I don't know, may have existed in the country at that point.
I don't fully know the answer to that, but like, like fucking your refrigerators have more power than those machines did, right?
Yeah.
But I learned Q Basic on it.
Yeah.
So, so Aaron, by the time he's like three, he's, he's using a computer.
Um, you know, and by the time he's three or four, you know, he's, he's starting to like understand how to actually like make stuff on a computer, like from a very young age.
He's six or seven when their home is wired for internet access.
So again, you're talking like 92.
They're among the very first people to have home internet access.
That is extremely uncommon in the early 90s.
Yeah.
If you followed our stories of tech billionaires, guys like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, or you've done your own reading on Steve Jobs, we haven't covered yet.
We will one of these days.
I definitely do consider him a bastard, although I have kind of more admiration for him as a in terms of just his capabilities than those other guys.
He is a terrible person, don't get me wrong.
Right.
But in a world of musks, he stands out.
He should be some stuff, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you, if you are familiar with those guys, you'll recognize that Aaron has a pretty similar upbringing.
They all do come from that kind of background.
They're kind of upper middle class, but they're not super rich, right?
But they are a lot, have a lot more money than most people.
They have parents who, if their parents are not tech nerds themselves, understand the value of computers and get their kids access to those at a very early age, right?
All of these things are, he, he has the same background as most of our big tech founders do today, right?
Broadly speaking, you know, he's going to wind up being a very different person, but he does come from kind of the same starting position.
One of the real differences with him, all of these guys get kind of framed as, and I think probably believe of themselves as child geniuses.
None of them were.
They're all smart.
Don't get me wrong.
Jeff Bezos, smart guy.
Bill Gates, smart guy.
Steve Jobs, smart guy.
None of them are geniuses, right?
Steve Wozniak, I think, you know, very fair to call that man a technical genius, like a once-in-a-that makes sense.
Once in a generation brain.
None of these guys are technical geniuses.
They're pretty smart.
They're pretty smart and they have enough insight to understand where things are going to go to take advantage of people who are geniuses.
Aaron is a legitimate child genius.
There is no argument with that statement that I have ever seen.
He is like, for an idea of how intelligent he is, he teaches himself to read and his parents don't realize he's done it.
His mom realizes it when they have a sign on the fridge that's like clipped out of the newspaper that's like there's a free family entertainment thing nearby.
And he asks his mom, Hey, mom, what is?
And he like reads the thing out.
And she's like, What are you talking about?
And he points to the fridge and she realizes that he's reading it at age three.
She has no idea that he's he's learned to, this is how she learns that he knows how to read.
Yeah.
He's reading novels by the time he's in kindergarten.
And likewise, around the same time he teaches himself to read a little bit later, he teaches himself to code, you know?
Just a phenomenal mind.
By, again, have never heard any sort of debate on this question.
So obviously, with the resources they have, realizing how fucking smart their kid is, his parents decide to send him to a private school for gifted children, which he attends through middle school.
He teaches himself to program pretty early on.
His first project is a Sudoku-like puzzle game.
At one point, just as like a thing for fun, he builds and programs an ATM machine, like out of cardboard.
And like, I don't know what he uses for the computer, but he gets access to some computer bits.
He like makes an ATM machine.
Hell yeah.
And he realizes early on that with code, he can make things that not only do adults not understand, but like seem like magic to most of the adults around.
Not his dad, his dad knows how to code, obviously, but to most adults.
And a side consequence of this is that from his early days, you know, he's not, I'm sure you and I, like, I was a precocious kid.
I started reading by the time I was in first grade, I was reading novels.
You know, I was reading adult novels when I was in third grade.
I read faster and got onto that stuff faster than most people.
But that's the kind of thing all of the adults around me, my family are big readers.
I saw them reading big books and bigger books than me.
So like I was doing a thing.
I'm like, oh, I'm doing a thing that's kind of like the adults, but they are still doing that thing and they're doing it better.
Aaron is doing a thing adults can't comprehend.
Most adults can't comprehend coding, especially not on the level he is at.
And, you know, that gives him a healthy respect for his own intellect.
And sometimes it gives him kind of an unhealthy respect for his own intellect.
His younger brother has said, like, he was kind of a brat, right?
He knew he was smarter than most people.
He knew he was smarter than most of the adults around it.
And he could be a snotty brat about it, right?
Like, that's pretty inevitable when you've got a kid who's this smart.
They're going to go through that.
It seems to have been a phase for him.
This is not like, I don't think, a lifelong thing for him.
Most people say he was a very down-to-earth guy most of his life, but he has his brat period.
I think that's kind of inevitable when you're this smart.
His parents were part of a reform synagogue, but when he was pretty young, their dad moved them to a Chabad synagogue, which is a kind of Orthodox synagogue.
Fairly early on.
But they're not, you know, Aaron doesn't find himself compelled by organized religion.
And when he's pretty young, he tells his parents, I don't believe in God.
And they let him drop out, right?
They don't seem to have fought him on this, right?
Not longer, not long after that, when he fit after he finishes the eighth grade, he's like, Hey, I don't want to keep going to high school.
I want to drop out.
So he drops out of the ninth grade.
And his dad lets him do this because he's like, Yeah, I actually, I hated high school too.
You know, I got bullied.
Aaron gets bullied.
He's, he's mostly thin, but he's kind of like pudgy around the middle.
He has some body image issues.
And he's like, he's, he's too smart.
Any kid who's that smart is going to get bullied, right?
He's little bitty and he's weird.
He's going to get bullied, you know?
It's also inevitable.
And he's like, I don't want to keep going to high school.
I don't think I need this.
So his dad, he gets to drop out and he starts taking college courses at a nearby college.
And Aaron is as good as his word.
He is the kind of autodidact who has a, he's got a wide-ranging series of interests and he's good at teaching himself things.
And unlike a lot of Tech Wunderkins, he's not just obsessed with code.
That's kind of his first love, but it's honestly, it's right up there with books.
He would read kind of as a young adult upwards of 100 books a year.
And he very quickly gets interested in novels by guys like George Saunders, David Foster Wallace.
These are kind of like some of his favorites where he comes up short.
He's good at teaching himself anything he's interested in.
One of the problems he's going to have, that's kind of a lifelong thing for him, is he can't focus on anything that's not really his top obsession at the moment, right?
He doesn't have generally the ability to kind of long-term stay interested in a specific thing.
He doesn't have a lot of discipline, right?
And that lack of discipline is kind of married with a basic lack of social skills that, again, very much what you'd expect from a kid whose parents let him drop out of school to raise himself on the internet.
One of his childhood friends told an interviewer he needed a couple years to be stuffed in a locker to get his social stuff together.
And I think his friends being a little bit, you know, facetious there, but I think the point is that it's not that being bullied is good, but the friction, experiencing friction and having to work through it with your peers is good.
That is necessary, right?
You don't need to get beaten the shit out of you, but you do need friction.
You need to be in situations where like, well, I don't like the people here, but we have to accomplish a thing together.
That's necessary, you know, for optimal health, I think.
I'm very glad I went to public school.
Yeah, same here.
You know, like even though, yeah, like middle school was a hell nightmare that I mostly disassociated the entire time.
Yeah.
Yeah, I didn't like it, but I think it's broadly speaking, there's, there's things you get out of that that are necessary.
And Aaron's not going to get some of that stuff.
This is something that his family's kind of remarked on since.
So I'm not, I'm not like, I'm not, I'm not making this judgment on them.
This is like based on stuff his family members have said.
He did not have, you know, he has a voracious appetite for knowledge.
What he doesn't have is an appetite for like actual food, right?
He is a famously picky eater.
He preferred white and I think yellow foods and kind of he hated, he's the opposite of Steve Jobs.
He hated fruit.
He like wouldn't eat fruit, basically.
And he pretty much didn't eat vegetables other than fried potatoes because basically 100% of people will eat fried potatoes, right?
Yeah, no, there's no, yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know that I've ever met anyone who won't eat French fries.
Yeah, totally.
Somebody for health reasons, obviously.
But like, I don't know any, all the picky eaters I note, like fries tend to be a thing there.
I don't know.
I'm sure there are people who don't, but that is like weird how many people are like, yeah, but I'll eat fries.
Yeah, like fried carbohydrates are tasty.
And we are, most people are hardwired to understand that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the like you, the, I don't know, this is a tangent, but like when, when Europeans realized there were potatoes and what you could do with them, there was the sudden like, oh my God, this is what we've been, this is the real gold of El Dorado is fucking potatoes.
Totally.
Yeah, it's hard.
It's still hard to imagine Europe without corn, tomatoes, or potatoes.
Yeah, like it's, it is, it is.
It's just turnip town.
It's just all turnips.
Yeah, turnips and, I don't know, drinking yourself into an early grave.
So Aaron, obviously he benefits from having a dad who's technically inclined.
The two talked regularly about what the internet was likely to mean for the future.
His dad later said, we were going online when the web was really in its infancy, before there were graphical browsers.
And very quickly, we both realized that this was something that was going to change everything.
A number of people came to that realization, and many of them went on to monetize the internet in ways that have contributed to a great deal of harm.
Aaron's interests from the beginning had a lot less to do with money and a lot to do with the sharing of information.
In 1999, at age 12, he created the Info Network, a user-generated encyclopedia.
Wikipedia didn't launch until two years later, a fact that always seemed to.
So again, when he's 12, he creates Wikipedia, right?
Like the same basic idea.
It doesn't take off.
Wikipedia Curfew and Arrests00:10:46
Wikipedia does.
And that fact kind of, you get the feeling it kind of peeves him a little bit.
He would later tell an interviewer, it was basically Wikipedia, except long before Wikipedia had launched, but I was in middle school at the time.
So my site didn't make it into the New York Times.
And that's kind of, and that's, he's probably right, right?
Yeah, no, totally.
Wikipedia got the early, you know, interest.
And that's why it wasn't.
It's something that was in the air, I guess, you know?
Yeah, which is nothing against the Wikipedia.
I don't think I'm not saying the Wikipedia people ripped Aaron's, like ripped off a 12-year-old, but it shows you, it shows you not just how smart he is, but like where his mind is going in terms of what people can get out of the internet and should get out of the internet, right?
And, you know, Wikipedia, not that there aren't some critiques of it, but like one of the very best things the internet's ever produced, one of the most important and useful things the internet's ever made.
And one of the only artifacts from this time, the time when the internet was going to make us more free instead of less free.
Yes.
And one of the only ones that has not, I don't think in any meaningful sense, because like Google was at one point a pretty wonderful tool and has been deeply corrupted and polluted.
I don't feel like Wikipedia has.
I'm very pro Wikipedia.
Again, there's issues with it.
You know, that's a separate topic, but pretty wonderful contribution.
So anyway, you know, the fact this, Aaron's Wikipedia does not take off, but it does earn him a significant degree of early recognition.
He became a finalist for the Rs Digita Prize, which recognized young people who built valuable non-commercial websites.
He wins a thousand bucks for this and he wins a trip to MIT, where for the first time he meets some of the genius coders and engineers he admired in person.
Now, Aaron had already started communicating online with some of the luminaries in his field, but meeting guys like Philip Greenspun, who developed one of the very first photo sharing sites and is kind of, he's a pioneer in the concept of how digital communities are going to work.
He's a guy who his thinking lays a lot of the groundwork for what becomes social media, you know?
Aaron has his first conversations with this guy about the open source movement, which is popular among the nerds who are still the center of gravity in online technology.
And he becomes entranced.
He decides he wants to join the World Wide Web Consortium.
Today, it's the main international standards organization for the internet.
And he is turned down for joining because he's 13 years old, right?
You know, they're like, well, we don't, we don't let, you know, this is like a, yeah, we don't let 13 year olds in.
They're not, I don't think they're trying to be shitty.
They're just, yeah, it's a sensible rule for a kid who's not Aaron.
Aaron refuses to take no for an answer.
And I'm going to quote from a write-up in the New Yorker here.
Undaunted, he read through the rules of the consortium and found that every member was allowed to send a delegate.
He looked through the lists to find somebody who hadn't sent a delegate and he found one, the HTML Writers Guild.
He emailed the group and asked if he could participate in a W3C workgroup as its delegate and it had no objection.
So he kind of finds a sideways way in, right?
He hears there's a rule against this.
He finds a way around it, you know?
This is going to be a pattern in his life.
This willingness, first off, an unwillingness to take no for an answer if he doesn't think there's a good reason for it.
And second, an unwillingness to listen to rules that he thinks are stupid, right?
That's going to characterize a lot of his future.
Another thing that's going to characterize his life from this point forward is an understanding that unpleasant aspects of life, specifically the bureaucracies that we all have to engage in to some extent to survive, can be avoided, right?
And this is a thing that has positive and negative outcomes for him, right?
His dad's going to later trace this attitude back to his upbringing and the decision he made to let Aaron drop out of school.
Quote, this is his father.
He also never learned to do anything that he didn't want to do.
College is very important that you're forced to study stuff you're not interested in, but he hated the bureaucracy of it, the dumb rules, the pointless assignments.
He just rejected that.
It was like getting him to eat vegetables.
I wonder how much this is like father Self-blaming, not to spoil anyone who has the, I only know the like Cliff Snow version of this man's story.
I think it makes based on his life.
I think he's probably kind of accurately describing his son, right?
This isn't a big track because Aaron accomplishes, spoiler, a lot of shit in the time that he's around.
But I think this is fair.
He, he does not, he is someone who's, he's rarely going to stick with a project for very long.
And I think it is because, and he's also someone who he kind of freezes up when he is sort of confronted with a lot of the realities of bureaucracy because he just doesn't have to, he's, he's most of his life able to get away from it, right?
Yeah.
And again, there's a lot of value in understanding.
I run into this with some of my friends who kind of were more on the anarchist punk side of thing when you have to deal with the legal system and stuff because I've had a lot more dealings with it where it's like, there's just ways that you have to approach it to deal with it.
The same thing with talking to when my close friends or whatever have an issue with like a company, they need to get like a refund or something.
I know how to talk to representatives and shit to make things happen, right?
I just, I have learned that shit over the years.
It's a skill.
Well, it's like when cops are messing with you and you have to like, you have to shut the fuck up, but you have to do it politely and respectfully.
Yeah.
You know, like there's, there are ways to navigate every system of power.
And often the smartest thing to do is to navigate it rather than just fight every aspect of it at every turn.
Yeah.
There's this moment early on in the protests in Portland where, you know, we were filming some people getting arrested and the police said that they were going to arrest me and my media partner.
There were a couple of protesters behind us and they're like, you're all under arrest.
And I was like, what are we under arrest for?
And he said for curfew violation because the mayor had put it a curfew.
And so I was like, well, the mayor's curfew exempts media.
We're, we're, you know, press with badges and stuff on.
And, you know, there's other people are trying to argue with the cops.
And I just, you know, yelling at them.
And I just kind of keep engaging him in conversation.
He's like, I don't care.
I'm going to arrest you.
And finally, what I say is like, the mayor has said that we're exempt.
Are you countermanding the mayor's orders?
And his switch flipped in his head.
Yeah.
And not only did my partner and I not get arrested, but like the protesters behind us did not.
Because it was just like, yeah, you had to, you have to flip.
Like, it's just this understanding of how bureaucracy and the people who make up bureaucracy like function, right?
Totally.
Aaron's not going to have a lot of that understanding, right?
I mean, he builds, he does build a lot more of it later in his life, but it's, he, he starts out with less of it than I think even a normal person does because he's just, he's smart enough to get around it for so long.
Yeah.
And he's also engaging in the adult world because a lot of his intelligence levels are at adult levels, but maybe his like social and other understandings are not exactly those levels.
And the adults around him are all, and Corey Doctorow, who's a friend of his from a very young age, will talk about this.
Because Aaron is small, and as we'll talk about, he's kind of sickly, the adults around him that he's quickly living in the world with are very protective of him.
And I do think they're able to kind of shield him from a lot of these sort of realities of dealing with the system, you know?
So he doesn't, he doesn't build up some of those skills as early as he maybe otherwise would have.
Yeah.
So, you know, a lot of positive stuff happening for him in his early adolescence.
A less positive thing that happens during this time is that when he's 12, so kind of the same year he makes his Wikipedia thing, he's diagnosed with ulcerative colitis.
This may help to exchange, to explain some of his pickiness as an eater.
Obviously, it's never a pleasant condition to deal with.
Aaron seems to have particularly struggled.
He would often lose days or entire weeks to abdominal pain so intense it would leave him curled up on the floor.
So he's always got this regular thing in his life where like sometimes he just won't be able to work because he's got, he's in so much pain.
You know, this is a regular thing he struggles with.
That said, when he's able to work, he's so much smarter than most people that he still accomplishes much more than people who are not dealing with this kind of physical stuff are able to accomplish.
In August of 2000, Aaron finds himself on an email discussion thread for a group of programmers who are designing something called RSS, which stands for Real Simple Syndication.
It is a web feed that lets users build their own news aggregators, like pushing content from various sites into a single feed.
And it's also, it's one of the back, like foundational technologies of the internet.
Every website you go to basically uses RSS to push, you know, and collect and stuff the things that they're publishing on a regular basis.
You know, this is one of the most significant developments in the early internet, right?
If you're, if you're thinking about like the invention of like electricity, it's almost like a power transformer, I think might be a good way to describe it.
It is absolutely foundational to how the internet is used.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Aaron is going to be, and there's a whole team of people, all of the others of whom are adults who are working on this, but he's going to be one of them, right?
So he gets into this group.
And again, it's just kind of the nerds that find themselves are working on this.
They're all handling different parts of the project.
And Aaron quickly becomes involved.
And I think everyone who was there agrees he contributed significantly.
It's not like he did not invent RSS, right?
A lot of people did.
But his contributions were substantial to this thing that is a fundamental undergirding of how the internet functions today.
And while this is happening, while he's working on this project, aspects of an ideology start to take shape in him based on his interactions with these other people who are both coders and also hackers, right?
Because at this period in the internet, they're pretty much the same thing, right?
All the people who are building these are also hackers, you know?
Yeah.
And I'm going to quote from an article in The New Republic.
This ethos carried its own ideology, the ideology of free-flowing information or open access as it became known.
A self-taught computer savant rarely felt more helpless than when he was cut off from the websites and books he used to navigate the world.
Without them, he couldn't learn what he needed to earn a living, much less invent some disruptive technology.
I'd skipped college, says Kevin Burton, who first met Swartz through Schwartz through the RSS group.
The fact that I couldn't access materials available to college students was why open access was always important to me.
So Aaron is an auto-didect, so are a lot of these guys.
And he goes from just kind of like, this is just how I am and how I learn to thinking about this more along ideological lines, right?
This is not just a thing for me, but this is a thing for other people, right?
This is fundamental to allowing human beings to progress is making sure that information is accessible and open as much as possible.
If you go through enough recollections of Aaron during this period, people who were in this working group with him will note that he was, again, he could be a little bit of a brat, right?
Fighting for Open Access00:04:37
His questions are always good, but he could be kind of haughty.
He could be kind of aggressive sometimes in how he asked them.
You know, he has a lot of this attitude.
If he doesn't understand where you're doing something, he's like, why are we doing this?
Does this seem like the best thing to do?
What about doing this?
This is coming from a mix of genuine curiosity.
And he could be a little bit snotty, right?
Like he's a kid, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
And he also, he also, this is, you know, not entirely a negative thing.
He fundamentally, he doesn't have kind of a baseline level of respect based on people having greater experience, right?
Because he doesn't have this assumption that that means they know more than him.
And often they don't, you know?
Right.
Anyway, you know who does know more than all of us?
The concept of potatoes.
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There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
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My dad gave me the best advice ever.
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I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
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In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Olespi and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
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And we're back.
So, you know, again, Aaron, still a kid.
And obviously, while he could be kind of a little, maybe a little abrasive sometimes, that doesn't turn anyone off from working with him.
And in fact, his collaborators who know him only from his kind of not quite anonymous, but they don't know who he is, right?
Inventing the Internet Early00:10:23
Responses are only put out because they do in-person meetings regularly for members of this group.
And he doesn't make any of the in-person meetings.
I'm kind of like a drinker.
Like, he doesn't have a driver's license.
Yeah.
And so I'm asking, like, hey, man, like, why don't you ever show up whenever we like meet in person?
He's like, well, I'd have to ask my parents because I'm 14.
And then they're like, oh, shit.
I had a version that happened with Garrison when we started like working with them.
Right.
Like one of our mutual friends, like we had been hanging out with them, you know, after a horrible riot where we all nearly got arrested.
And like the next day, our friend texts me and is like, do you know that they're 17?
It's like, no, in fact, I did not.
Oh, shit.
That's how you learned.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I used to hitchhike with my friend who had a note from their, from her parents being like, yes, I know what my daughter is doing.
It's fine.
At this point, you know, they start, he starts being able to show up in person more often.
These people, I think Corey Doctorow is on this list, recognize like realize, and they're all blown away by like how smart this kid, how young.
And again, they have this kind of, it's this mix of this feeling like we need to protect this kid.
And also this kid is the fucking future, right?
And so he is kind of immediately ushered in and adopted almost by some of the most luminous names in technology, right?
He meets and becomes to some extent a little bit of a protege of a guy named Tim Berners-Lee.
Berners-Lee is an MIT professor.
He invented the World Wide Web.
This is not one of those things where people say so-and-so invented this and it's like bullshit.
It's like, well, they invented.
No, no, he, the World Wide Web is Tim Berners-Lee's invention.
He created this, right?
He, in a very literal sense, created this.
Starting in 1989, he sketches out.
He's working for CERN at this point.
And one of the things that CERN, which is a big research institute, all these colleges, universities, they all have things that are versions of like what the internet is going to be, these electronic communications networks that allow them to communicate on campus, allow them to communicate with each other, and to some extent with other like organizations, but none of them are built around the same standards.
So letting everything talk is a huge fucking mess.
And Berners-Lee is like, we need a standard solution for how electronic communication is going to work.
And he sketches out, he designs the World Wide Web.
That's literally the thing that he makes.
Like he comes up with a plan for it's going to be a global web of individual pages, each of which has their own address.
They're all coded in HTML.
And because they're on the same standard, all of these websites and whatnot can communicate with each other.
This is the foundation of everything that makes the modern internet possible.
And when Berners-Lee creates this, he has this choice, which is, that's a patentable idea, right?
He could have been the man with the patent for the internet.
He makes a key decision.
He chooses not to.
He decides, I am not going to have a patent on this.
So anybody can do this.
I didn't want to be able to do that.
This has to be one of the things that I'm going to do.
I'm not a bastards episode.
He's definitely a cool dude, right?
As far as I'm aware of.
And because he makes this fundamental decision, he's kind of viewed as a saint within the open source movement in a lot of ways.
Right.
Like, not surprising.
But it's also why he's not a household name, right?
Yeah.
He's also not a, and he's not worth more money than anyone else in the world could ever conceive of being worth.
Yeah.
Like, um, fortunately, there's that like thing where a money of only buys happiness up to like 70K a year and then it just levels off.
So like I'm sure it's up to 100K a year or whatever now.
But yeah.
Oh, yeah, that makes sense.
That was like 10 years ago.
Yeah.
Berners-Lee, you know, he choose anyway.
He meets Aaron early on and is so impressed.
He basically endorses him as his heir, right?
This is the kid who's going to like take the internet into the future.
Like this is the future of all this stuff that we're working on, this, this really kind of utopian idea of what connecting the world is going to result in, right?
Yeah.
So this guy, he's so impressed by Aaron.
He basically like endorses him as like, this is my successor, right?
This is going to be the guy who takes the internet into whatever it becomes in the future.
That elevates Aaron immediately.
It kind of like immediately he's in the inner circle of people who are inventing the internet, which is definitely happening at this period of time.
And Aaron gets kind of suddenly thrown into the tech conference circuit, where he is kind of an object of marvel among the mostly much older men who had helped to build the foundations of the internet.
There's videos of this time of him, you know, speaking at conferences and stuff, and they tend to show Aaron, who is absurdly small almost, especially next to these grown men, giving pretty thoughtful and complex answers while men decades his seniors sit next to him on stage.
At age 15, he sends an email to a guy named Lawrence Lessig.
Lessig is a legal scholar who was an early prominent activist for what we call the open internet.
And Lessig is in the process of inventing something called the Creative Commons at this point, right?
Lessig is the creator of the Creative Commons, which basically gives creators, you and I have both used Creative Commons, right?
So most people who make things that are cool.
And it allows creators of all kinds of media the ability to copyright their work in ways that allow for adaptation and distribution much more easily without involving, you know, a publisher or whatever, right?
You don't have to have that.
Like you have this kind of ready-made kit for figuring out the rights status of your work and setting that up.
So Aaron sends this guy an email, and I'm going to quote from an article in Rolling Stone for what happens next.
Lawrence Lessig, now a professor at Harvard, gave Schwartz his first job, flying him out to San Francisco to write code for Creative Commons, a nonprofit that allows users to copyright their material in less restrictive ways.
When the site celebrated its launch on December 16th, 2002, Schwartz was invited to speak to the crowd of 600, which included internet luminaries like Cred Newmark, the founder of Craigslist.
So Aaron gets up.
This is Lessig talking.
So Aaron gets up.
He's not even big enough to stand over the podium and he explains what the architecture of the site is.
And the audience is just amazed that this was a 15-year-old kid.
So he is, he helps to create Creative Commons.
It's Lessig's idea.
He does the coding for it, right?
So he is 15, two of the things that are fundamental underpinnings of the internet to this day.
He's had a significant hand in making RSS and Creative Commons.
15 years old.
Now, it is worth noting that Lessig is at this point in time, like a lot of us, was not, you know, like a lot of people were at this period of time, one of the wild-eyed optimists of the internet, right?
He is actually not someone who feels it's inevitable that the internet will lead us into a golden age of freedom.
As a legal scholar, he is well aware of the weapons available to the enemy, and he knows that they are terrible in nature and inexhaustible nearly in quantity.
Which makes sense to create something like Creative Commons because it's an attempt to keep the internet on a decent track.
Yes, exactly.
And he's kind of critically, and again, he'll have an influence on Aaron, but he is not one of these people.
Unlike a lot of the people that Aaron is close to that are making stuff with him, he's not one of these people who views the internet as like, this is all fundamentally got to work out for us.
He sees the dangers because he understands the fucking law.
Lawrence had gotten famous in hacker circles for a book he wrote in 1999 called Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.
And again, he is kind of definitely a visionary.
His book argues that programmers are going to have more influence than laws on the development of the internet.
And to explain kind of where his thinking is going and why it is relevant to us today, I want to read an extended quote from Noah Scheiber writing for the New Republic, because it describes an extremely important moment in our early conceptions of the internet.
Quote, the law could tell you who to associate with and who not to, but you could always ignore it.
If, on the other hand, a programmer decided it should be impossible to connect with a certain type of website, the average person had no way around it.
The programmer was God.
Suffice it to say, audiences were intrigued.
In the late 90s, Lessig taught a class about the internet that was open to both Harvard law students and MIT engineers.
Early in the term, he asked, How do you know if something you're doing is wrong?
The lawyer said that an action was wrong if it was against the law.
The hackers said it was only wrong if you failed to accomplish it.
It was the most fundamental statement of the hacker ethos, and it seemed and it teemed with idealism.
If it were possible to increase human welfare through engineering, through delivering more social interaction or knowledge or happiness to more people, then it would be immoral not to.
There was only one hitch which Lessig dutifully explained, but which often went unheeded.
The law would not be standing by idly.
The belief had always been that lawyers can say what they want and will always have the technology to route around it, says Ben Adida, a programmer who worked with Lessig and Schwartz.
To the hackers, the law was at best anachronistic, at worst arbitrary, even cruel.
Lessig was one of the first folks to say, you know, the power that code has over the way people interact online.
You would be foolish to think the law is not going to regulate it, Adida recalls.
Kind of a key, key moment there.
No, yeah, no, I'm just like thinking about it.
I'm like, I mean, one, it's like, I mean, it's all the movie hackers, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Like, I mean, obviously, it doesn't come from the movie hackers.
The movie hackers is attempted representing something.
It was like a thing where like hackers sort of at the time were a little bit like, what the fuck?
And then hackers, like a couple years later, was like, that rules, that's our fucking legacy.
You know?
Yeah.
But like this idea that, and also this idea that like something is only wrong if you fail to do it, right?
That's sketchy.
Yeah.
And it's like, it's interesting.
And you can see how it was often or often intended as a force for freedom 20 years ago.
And is now that same concept is just like deeply, yeah.
A lot of people who were hackers or at least who came out of the movement that came out of descended from that are now into this like dark enlightenment reactionary shit.
They're talking race.
Like, yeah.
There's a fork that is going to occur in this community and a lot of the people in it.
Hackers Turn Reactionary00:14:54
And what we're talking about, and you know, who we're talking about now, Aaron, is certainly on the side, the light side of that fork.
Absolutely.
And the fork, again, as a spoiler, you could, if you wanted to, split the fork at his death when it occurs.
Yeah, that makes sense, honestly.
You would not be wrong to necessarily.
When you have the same like indie media leads to Twitter, leads to Elon Musk Twitter, you know, like, yep.
Yep, exactly.
At age 17, Aaron is accepted to Stanford for obvious reasons.
Not hard to see how that happens.
Aaron is obviously brilliant.
Anyone with IS can see that he's going to change the world.
And Stanford wants some of his shine for themselves, right?
That is what they do.
That is how they make their bread.
But as soon as Aaron arrives at the elite West Coast school, he sees it for the sham that it was.
He writes at the time that Stanford is, quote, an idyllic little school in California where the sun is always shining and the grass is always green and the kids are always out getting a tan.
After three days at Stanford, Aaron decides to attend a party.
He kind of forces himself to go.
An article in The New Republic makes it seem like this was kind of an anthropological experiment by Aaron, more of that than an attempt to enjoy himself.
Quote, he merely wanted to document the mating rituals of the teenager, a species that alternatively mystified and horrified him.
In my culture, of vaguely technical people, people converse by sharing information through mutually beneficial discussion and debate, he wrote on his blog.
But the teenager system is altogether different and wholly alien to me.
He is frustrated by more than just a lack of social skills.
Aaron is angry that Stanford required ID cards with RFID transmitters, which can be used to track students.
He hates the library because of how it's organized.
He thinks it's inefficient.
And I'm sure he's right about that.
And he was disgusted by the hygiene levels at the shared student facilities like the laundromat.
As a consequence of this disillusionment, he spends most of his time in college hanging out with adults, particularly Lawrence Lessig and friend of the pod, Corey Doctorow.
Lessig is, again, the guy who funded Creative Commons.
And Corey is an activist and a wildly prolific author, very good author.
They were, in short, good influences.
But one also has to assume any 17-year-old who's hanging out with these guys and not their fellow teenagers, they're not going to get better at fitting in, right?
Like, yeah, that's fair.
Not that that's the most important thing, but you know, that's just a thing that's happening to him, right?
And again, given some of the shit Stanford grads have recently been responsible for, might have been for the best.
Like, those guys were his influence and not his fellow Stanford students.
So this is not without stress, though, right?
The fact that he is adopted by, welcomed in by all of these very accomplished adults is not a thing devoid of stress for him, right?
The sheer odd confidence guys like Tim Berners-Lee and Lessig have for Schwartz is a lot.
That's a lot to put on the shoulders of a 17-year-old, right?
Being told you're the future of the internet.
You're going to be critical in this thing that is, we believe, necessary for the development of the human race to be told that before you're even 17, that's a lot to have on your shoulders, right?
Aaron has absolutely shown an appetite for this work, but that doesn't mean there's not a burden there, right?
Lisa Rain, one of Lessig's aides, later told New Republic, with his intellect, we wanted to harness it for good instead of evil.
I was worried that Microsoft would get a hold of him, which again, for these adults, not an unreasonable thing to be concerned about, right?
So I think, you know, all of this is based in a pretty wonderful amount of confidence and even love these guys had for Aaron.
Doctorow, again, has made the statement that a couple of times that because in part because Aaron is so small, so vulnerable, you have this instinctive need to protect him.
And this married with this intense faith in him, I think this led to a situation where Aaron felt a lot of personal responsibility for the future of the internet and people at a young age.
And that's going to be difficult for him.
That's going to be an added stress in his life.
It is also worth noting here that Aaron is one of the most prolific bloggers of his generation.
His need to create prose and work his thoughts and feelings out through the written word is as strong, if not stronger, than his desire to code.
And in fact, there will be a point in his life when he's like, I don't, I think I'm done with coding.
I want to become an author.
I would rather be like a middling author than a great coder.
Like that's the thing he expresses at a point in his life.
That's real.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Did he write much fiction or anything like that?
I guess we'll talk about that.
I think he had a novel that he kind of repeatedly worked on that he never, I don't think he ever quite finished it.
There's a book of his essays that's out.
He's got, this is, again, you know, he's still a teenager, as smart as he is.
So he's working a lot of shit out.
And one of those things is he has this deep desire for privacy.
All of his friends will say he had a lot of issues sometimes with his friends knowing each other because he hated the idea that people would be talking about him, even if it was positive when he wasn't there.
Like he just really had a gut revulsion of that.
This was kind of warred in him with his need to publish every single thing that he thought on the internet under his name, right?
This is a complicated thing for this kid to deal with.
And I'm going to quote from Rolling Stone again here.
On his blog, he had told this story about having a crush on this girl and stalking her, Lessig recalls.
Not in a gross way.
It was cute.
Anyway, he came to a reception at the law school where Lessig was a professor.
And I recount this during a conversation.
He takes me aside and he goes, why would you do that?
I said, what do you mean?
He said, tell the secret.
I said, secret, you blogged it.
He said, yeah, well, I blogged it, meaning I blogged it for the people who read my blog.
I didn't blog it so the whole world would know.
And he is dealing with an early version of what we're all going to deal with as the internet goes from this thing that only a few weirdos are on to this thing that everyone is on by default, where he's like, you know, Lessig's like, but you published this, right?
Why can't I talk about this?
And he's like, well, I published it for the internet, not for the real world.
I'm very glad that I was an adult before social media and live journal and shit.
Absolutely.
Jesus.
Speaking of Jesus, buy some products.
Jesus will be happy.
Jesus.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
So Aaron decides to leave Stanford.
He's there like a year and he decides to bounce.
And that next summer, he gets approached by what's called Y Combinator.
And Y Combinator is an incubator for tech founders, right?
He had by this point come up with his own idea for a startup called Infogami.
This was a kind of early social media application, but instead of centralizing users on a one-controlled hub, it would allow users to make their own websites, right?
So instead of you can create your own account on this site and share stuff like you do on Instagram or whatever on this site, you create your own website and it's your website.
I'm just creating a centralized set of tools for you to build your own websites, right?
Okay.
Schwartz's instincts here show how different he is from a lot of the other tech genius types coming because they're all thinking, how can I create a walled garden and kind of trap people there?
That is not at all what he's thinking.
Now, more of a Mastodon guy than a Twitter guy.
Yeah, yeah, definitely, at least ideologically.
Now, that's not how this project's going to end up because he moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he starts working on this project with pretty feverish intensity.
While he's doing this, he's going to intermittently struggle with his illness.
This physical pain increasingly brings about bouts of depression that would render him unfunctional for weeks at a time.
Still, on the days, Aaron could work again.
He's able to accomplish so much work that it all kind of shakes out well in the long run.
And eventually, Y Combinator pairs him with two other founders, a pair of dudes named Steve Huffman and Alexis O'Hanian, who were working on their own product, Reddit.
Serena Williams' husband.
That's right.
Yes.
Serena Williams' husband.
So they are basically a lot of Aaron's ideas for Infogami get folded into Reddit.
And, you know, Reddit kind of has started to exist, but it doesn't work.
It's, it's buggy.
It's unstable.
It can't be adopted on any meaningful scale because it's like, it's not good yet.
Aaron comes in and he fixes all of the code.
Right.
And so he becomes one of the founders of Reddit, which is of all of the big modern social media sites, the closest to the old internet that still exists on the new one.
And it's funny because Reddit had this reputation of like being the incubator of bad ideas.
But compared to everything that came after, Reddit's a little haven of like, like when I want to look up a review of a product, I type the thing and then Reddit, you know?
Yeah.
And if I have a problem, a technical issue, I need to fix something, like I will find the answer on Reddit before I find it on Google these days, right?
I mean, I use Google, but I type the question and Reddit on, and that's how I find useful shit.
Like it is, it is, for all of its flaws, still one of the best things on the internet.
Yeah.
So at this point, he is, he is helping to invent Reddit.
He has helped to invent RSS.
He has helped to invent the Creative Commons, right?
A 19-year-old kid, you know, kind of verging on, I think, 20 at this point.
His contributions are undeniable.
But for the other folks at Reddit, his co-founders, he becomes increasingly frustrating to work with because while when he's working, he gets a lot done.
I think in total, he gets as much done as anyone.
He has this habit of dropping out of contact for days or even like a week or so at a time and like hiding in his apartment.
And when he does it, he's just reading books nonstop generally, or he's in too much pain to do much.
But he doesn't, he's not good at communicating with the team about this stuff.
So like, you know, that's, I don't think the Reddit guys are wrong.
Like, yeah, it was kind of a frustration that he would just get a dropout and we wouldn't know why.
Right.
This is about the time he gets kind of disillusioned with coding.
In a 2006 blog post, he describes writing as his desired purpose in life.
The good news for Aaron is that later that year, Condé Nast bought Reddit for $12 million and Aaron receives an even chunk of the payout.
We don't know how much he gets.
He seems not to have told anyone specifically about it.
Probably somewhere a million or north of a million, right?
Yeah.
It's enough money, especially back then, that he does not have to work.
You know, he would eventually have to make more money, right?
You can't live generally probably off your whole life for your whole life off a million dollars if you're not young, right?
But that's enough money that he doesn't have to worry about money for quite a while, right?
And it's also, you know, I found this interesting New Yorker article that is kind of a more, a bit of a more critical take on Aaron and his legacy than some of the others that talks, spends a lot of time talking about how much he loves money, which I don't think is fair.
It does quote him talking about, you know, making some kind of bratty statements about like, oh, you know, I lose that much money in my couch cushions or whatever, and talk about how cool it is to have like money.
And it kind of makes the claim that like, oh, yeah, Aaron loved money, which is not borne out by the rest of his life.
I think he just has a reaction that any 19 or 20 year old would when they suddenly have a million dollars, which is like, fuck, that's dope.
I don't have to do anything I don't want to do anymore.
Sick.
Which I don't think is, I don't think that's evidence of him being shallow.
Who wouldn't feel that way, right?
When you live in capitalism, you're presented as if it is a video game with a point system and the measurement of the point system is money.
And if you are a kid and you believe that, that makes sense.
You got told that, you know?
But yet he also was doing all of this work to specifically undermine.
Like the fact that his hero is the person who didn't, he didn't lock shit up, you know?
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
His life past this point is not going to be defined by him seeking out money.
Million Dollar Shock00:11:50
Yeah.
Right.
Like that's ultimately what I'll make the decision based on.
Like I'm sure he was fucking thrilled.
Who wouldn't be?
Right.
Right.
Like that doesn't matter how much you hate capitalism.
It's great to have enough money that you don't have to worry about money anymore.
Yeah, totally.
I'll buy him a parent's.
I'm going to be sneeze.
Yeah.
So Conde Nest buys it.
They move shit over to like San Francisco, which I think is where their offices are.
He stays on for a while.
Right.
They make him move back west to work out of the office, which he hates.
He hates working.
He hates the corporate environment.
He dislikes San Francisco.
You know, it's not his place.
It's not his kind of lifestyle, right?
He has a lot of issues adapting to this.
Not surprising based on the guy we've known so far.
He meets a woman while he's in San Francisco.
She becomes his girlfriend, a journalist named Quinn Norton.
We will talk about Quinn Norton later.
Controversial figure, to say the least.
She is a journalist who works with hackers.
That's a lot of her reporting.
She's also an anarchist.
That's how she describes.
I don't know more about the tendency she subscribes to, but that's how she self-describes.
And by this point, according to Quinn, who is very close with him at this period, he's growing disillusioned with his work on Reddit.
Quote, he wasn't sure if he had done a good thing.
He began to see it as a way people wasted time.
So he's got some issues with creating this thing that's one of the first kind of Web 2.0 sort of foundations.
This is also kind of going back and forth on this is part of what it's going to become another common pattern with Aaron, which is that he seems to regularly find himself racked with doubt over whether or not he'd accomplished anything of value in his life, right?
This is a regular thing for him where he's like, I don't think I've ever made anything.
I think some of that's just because everything he makes is as part of a team, right?
And he's not going to be one of these guys like fucking Zucker.
And that's true of all of these guys, by the way, all of these tech luminaries.
None of them make anything on there.
The closest you get is maybe Wozniak, right?
Who did legitimately sit down and cobble together a personal computer.
But like none of these founders make anything on their own, you know, like that just simply doesn't happen.
And like Aaron understands that.
I think he feels kind of insecure about it.
But like Aaron is everyone who was a part of these projects is like, yeah, he was a big part of them.
He did.
But he didn't invent the replacement web like his particular like blessing is a guy who he just invented the World Wide Web, right?
Yeah.
You know, Aaron seems to have kind of, I don't think it's a constant thing for him because he also has these periods.
Like he can be a little braggy.
I don't think in an unhealthy way because he's accomplished a lot.
I think it's just when he's sick, when he's hurting, when he's dealing with bouts of depression, this is a thing that comes up with him a lot.
Like, I don't think I've ever made anything of value, right?
It's irrational.
That doesn't stop us from happening.
Right.
Everyone.
Exactly.
And maybe that can help you if you deal with imposter syndrome, knowing that, like, yeah, this guy who literally no one can deny his contributions to science and technology felt that way too.
Yeah.
So yeah, again.
He's struggling increasingly during this period.
And the fact that he has to work at this office, he's in a place he doesn't really want to be contributes to that.
And I'm going to quote from Rolling Stone again.
That Christmas, two months after he'd started working in Reddit's San Francisco office, Schwartz took a trip to Berlin to attend the Chaos Communication Congress, one of the most popular hacker conventions in the world.
On his way back home, he stopped in Cambridge for a visit when his lifelong stomach troubles asserted themselves, leaving him writhing in pain for several days.
On January 18th, 2007, he wrote a post on his blog titled A Moment Before Dying, which began, there is a moment immediately before life becomes no longer worth living when the world appears to slow down and all its myriad details suddenly become brightly, achingly apparent.
Written as a short story in the third person, the post described a young man, Aaron, who had decided to kill himself.
For Aaron, and this is him writing, that moment came after exactly one week of pain, seven days of searing, tormenting agony that poured forth from his belly.
The post alarmed his Reddit partners.
It was the first they had heard from him in weeks, and it appeared to be a suicide note.
Ohanian, one of the original founders, called the local police department, and officers were dispatched to the apartment.
Just before they arrived, Schwartz snuck out onto the street and in the wake of the incident went to links to downplay its severity, changing the original post from Aaron to Alex, as if to make clear that suicide was not something the actual Aaron would ever seriously consider.
So that's, you know, shows you where his head is.
That's worrying, right?
I'm not surprised Ohanian was concerned by this.
I mean, chronic illness is a under whatever.
It's a real motherfucker.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, this, plus the fact that he had not been showing up to work for long periods of time, is going to be what precipitates a pretty rapid resignation from Reddit.
And in short order, Aaron is a free agent again.
His next project would be his most ambitious, the open library.
Along with Brewster Kahl, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chapothu, and Rebecca Malamoud, Aaron embarked on a project to collect online digital copies of every book imaginable.
The idea is every book will have a page to the extent that's possible.
The ones that are open source that are old enough will have full scans of the book that you can like search and read.
The books that we don't have access to will at least have, you know, ideally we'll get a copy that people could check out online or something, but we'll at least have a page for it that explains who wrote it, what it is, what's in it.
And the online library is still around today.
It's one of the most significant storehouses of knowledge in the history of the human race, right?
Aaron is foundational in creating the open library.
He's one of the people who helps to found it.
That's cool.
He's only on that, I think, for like a year, maybe a little less.
And, you know, he contributes significantly and then he finds himself drawn in another direction and kind of bounces.
Some of this is because he gets frustrated with the refusal of big libraries to share their catalogs.
But as Carl, who's one of the founders, later told Rolling Stone, Aaron floated.
That's how he worked and you had to accept it.
He didn't ask to get paid much.
He really thought of himself as a volunteer for the world.
And that is what he does.
He'll come into these projects.
He'll help with the founding vision.
He'll help make them work.
And then he's going to bounce, you know, and move on to the next thing.
That's just who he is.
That's how his brain works.
That's how he's functional, right?
And, you know, Carl's attitude is like, yeah, you know, it would have been nice to have him around for longer, but he did, he did his bit and he moved on.
And that's just Aaron.
You just have to understand that.
And like, well, that's the picture version of him, too.
You know, that is a lot for longer.
But he did his bit.
He did his bit.
So, if you're keeping track, Aaron Schwartz, who is now at the start of his 20s, I think he's just now able to drink legally, has played a key role in developing RSS in the creation of Creative Commons, in the creation of Reddit, and in the creation of the open library.
Now, what's most amazing to me about this guy is that at this point, he could have picked a lucrative job for himself literally anywhere in the tech industry.
There is nowhere that would not have, that wouldn't have paid so much it hurt to get this guy, right?
He does not have any interest in that.
His heart continually pulls him towards projects that serve a social good and make knowledge accessible to as many people as possible.
That's not specifically his goal his entire career, but that's where he is right now.
Yeah.
In 2008, Aaron attends a retreat by the EIFL, the Electronic Information for Libraries.
It's a nonprofit that seeks to increase access to knowledge in developing economies around the world.
The event, which is held at a former monastery in Italy, seems to have had a somewhat evangelical air to it.
Aaron is perhaps overtaken by the sense of techno-optimism in the air, and it's not hard to see why.
This was the tail end of the Bush years, this long period of neocon dominance that is eroding in the face of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, which is the most optimistic thing Americans had seen in politics in a generation, at least.
Late in the event, Aaron and an unknown number of co-writers put together a document known as the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.
A number of people contribute.
It is unclear how many.
It is unclear who they are.
Aaron's is the only name that winds up on the thing, right?
And it includes some pretty spicy lines.
This is how it opens.
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.
Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences?
You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elvesir.
And the document points out, one of the things that's happening here is a lot of these publishers, the information in them is maybe in a lot of cases open source.
It's publicly funded studies.
But unless you're able to get to one of the libraries that has it, you have to pay to get access to the documents that it's in.
You have to pay a service like JSTOR to get access to it.
And Aaron's like, that's fucking bullshit.
Yeah.
You know, like, this is our information.
And, you know, obviously the other stuff I think should be shared too.
The document points out that open access, if successful, would only ensure ongoing access for future publications, while the total of published work up to the point that open access becomes a thing would remain locked up.
The document decries this as too high a price to pay and then asks rhetorically, what can we do about this state of affairs?
Quote, 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.
And you have trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
So he is basically saying, what people are already doing who have access to this stuff to their buddies, we need to do for the world.
We need to do this to give access, particularly to people in the global south who do not have the infrastructural access to this stuff in the same way that people can kind of wangle their way into getting it in the United States and Europe.
This is controversial among his colleagues at this conference.
These are all people who believe in open access, but they are people who work within the system for legal nonprofit organizations.
Aaron is saying some hacker shit here, right?
What he is saying could be read as incitement to illegal activity.
Yeah, which is good.
Positive.
I totally agree.
Yeah.
This is controversial among people who are like, we are working within the system and this, we, we see this as potentially kind of dangerous.
Right.
Now, the fact that this is controversial among them, it's not wildly different in tone from a lot of hacker pros that has come out in the 90s and early 2000s.
And, you know, eventually whatever hubbub there is from this kind of passes and life goes on for a while.
And that's where we're going to end for part one of this episode, Magpie.
How you feeling?
I feel great because I know that only positive things are coming in the future.
And I really, the main thing that I know about is this open access stuff about Aaron Schwartz.
And I, as someone who also has never, I've never had institutional access to this knowledge.
And I do a lot of history research and things like that.
So I've always been very appreciative of, I don't know how to phrase this carefully.
I like open access.
That's what I'll say.
And I think that it's an important, important thing.
Like that, it is just actually true.
And especially talking about it in terms of like how it impacts people in the global south, like where you can't like, you know, I don't go to a fancy college, but I know some people go to fancy colleges.
And so I just, I'm like, hey, what do you think about this one thing?
You know?
Yep.
The Importance of Open Knowledge00:02:12
So, well, that's the podcast.
We'll be back next week for the conclusion.
Oh, ho, ho.
About Santa Claus.
All right, everybody.
Thanks for listening.
We've done Zoe.
Bye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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