Read Online The Boy Who Could Change the World by Aaron Swartz - Free Book Online
Authors: Aaron Swartz
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silver bullet, as nice as the word transparency may sound. But it was easy to delude myself. All I had to do was keep putting things online and someone somewhere would find a use for them. After all, thatâs what technologists do, right? The World Wide Web wasnât designed for publishing the newsâit was designed as a neutral platform that could support anything from scientific publications to pornography.
Politics doesnât work like that. Perhaps at some point putting things on the front page of the New York Times guaranteed that they would be fixed, but that day is long past. The pipeline of leak to investigation to revelation to report to reform has broken down. Technologists canât depend on journalists to use their stuff; journalists canât depend on political activists to fix the problems they uncover.Change doesnât come from thousands of people, all going their separate ways. Change requires bringing people together to work on a common goal. Thatâs hard for technologists to do by themselves.
But if they do take that as their goal, they can apply all their talent and ingenuity to the problem. They can measure their success by the number of lives that have been improved by the changes they fought for, rather than the number of people who have visited their website. They can learn which technologies actually make a difference and which ones are merely indulgences. And they can iterate, improve, and scale.
Transparency can be a powerful thing, but not in isolation. So, letâs stop passing the buck by saying our job is just to get the data out there and itâs other peopleâs job to figure out how to use it. Letâs decide that our job is to fight for good in the world. Iâd love to see all these amazing resources go to work on that .
How We Stopped SOPA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg
May 2012
Age 25
For me, it all started with a phone call. It was Septemberânot last year, but the year before that, September 2010. And I got a phone call from my friend Peter. âAaron,â he said, âthereâs an amazing bill that you have to take a look at.â âWhat is it?â I said. âItâs called COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act.â âBut, Peter,â I said, âI donât care about copyright law. Maybe youâre right. Maybe Hollywood is right. But either way, whatâs the big deal? Iâm not going to waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright. Health care, financial reformâthose are the issues that I work on, not something obscure like copyright law.â I could hear Peter grumbling in the background. âLook, I donât have time to argue with you,â he said, âbut it doesnât matter for right now, because this isnât a bill about copyright.â âItâs not?â âNo,â he said. âItâs a bill about the freedom to connect.â Now I was listening.
Peter explained what youâve all probably long since learned, that this bill would let the government devise a list of websites that Americans werenât allowed to visit. On the next day, I came up with lots of ways to try to explain this to people. I said it was a great firewall of America. I said it was an Internet blacklist. I said it was online censorship. But I think itâs worth taking a step back, putting aside all the rhetoric, and just thinking for a moment about how radical this bill really was. Sure, there are lots of times when the government makes rules about speech. If you slander a private figure, if you buy a television ad that lies to people, if you have a wild party that plays booming music all night, in all these cases, the government cancome stop you. But this was something radically different. It wasnât that the government went to people and asked them to take down particular material that was illegal; it shut down whole
Politics doesnât work like that. Perhaps at some point putting things on the front page of the New York Times guaranteed that they would be fixed, but that day is long past. The pipeline of leak to investigation to revelation to report to reform has broken down. Technologists canât depend on journalists to use their stuff; journalists canât depend on political activists to fix the problems they uncover.Change doesnât come from thousands of people, all going their separate ways. Change requires bringing people together to work on a common goal. Thatâs hard for technologists to do by themselves.
But if they do take that as their goal, they can apply all their talent and ingenuity to the problem. They can measure their success by the number of lives that have been improved by the changes they fought for, rather than the number of people who have visited their website. They can learn which technologies actually make a difference and which ones are merely indulgences. And they can iterate, improve, and scale.
Transparency can be a powerful thing, but not in isolation. So, letâs stop passing the buck by saying our job is just to get the data out there and itâs other peopleâs job to figure out how to use it. Letâs decide that our job is to fight for good in the world. Iâd love to see all these amazing resources go to work on that .
How We Stopped SOPA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgh2dFngFsg
May 2012
Age 25
For me, it all started with a phone call. It was Septemberânot last year, but the year before that, September 2010. And I got a phone call from my friend Peter. âAaron,â he said, âthereâs an amazing bill that you have to take a look at.â âWhat is it?â I said. âItâs called COICA, the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeiting Act.â âBut, Peter,â I said, âI donât care about copyright law. Maybe youâre right. Maybe Hollywood is right. But either way, whatâs the big deal? Iâm not going to waste my life fighting over a little issue like copyright. Health care, financial reformâthose are the issues that I work on, not something obscure like copyright law.â I could hear Peter grumbling in the background. âLook, I donât have time to argue with you,â he said, âbut it doesnât matter for right now, because this isnât a bill about copyright.â âItâs not?â âNo,â he said. âItâs a bill about the freedom to connect.â Now I was listening.
Peter explained what youâve all probably long since learned, that this bill would let the government devise a list of websites that Americans werenât allowed to visit. On the next day, I came up with lots of ways to try to explain this to people. I said it was a great firewall of America. I said it was an Internet blacklist. I said it was online censorship. But I think itâs worth taking a step back, putting aside all the rhetoric, and just thinking for a moment about how radical this bill really was. Sure, there are lots of times when the government makes rules about speech. If you slander a private figure, if you buy a television ad that lies to people, if you have a wild party that plays booming music all night, in all these cases, the government cancome stop you. But this was something radically different. It wasnât that the government went to people and asked them to take down particular material that was illegal; it shut down whole
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