Aaron Swartz is the defenseless dead.
- Author: impurify
- Date: Techdirt time (#5595952)
- Archive: archive.is
- Text source: Verbatim original Markdown that I wrote in a text editor, then pasted into Techdirt’s comment box.
- Follow-up: Mike Masnick, “Oh you can go fuck all the way off.”
Although this article is a few years old, I must in conscience remark on a problematic issue that Ctrl-F tells me none of the 119 comments addressed:
I get that it feels bad that your works are being used in ways you disapprove of, but that is the nature of releasing something into the world. And the underlying point of the Books3 database is to spread access to information to everyone. And that’s a good thing that should be supported, in the nature of folks like Aaron Swartz.
Mike Masnick, please don’t so simplistically evoke a famous, widely-revered idealist to take your side in a controversy where he can’t contradict you, because he’s safely dead.
The original author has the right to speak up about the bad things, or to denounce the bad people, but the simple fact is that once you’ve released a work into the world, the original author no longer has control over how that work is used and interpreted by the world.
In itself, that’s not a good thing—especially not when the author is dead, so he cannot speak up as Derek Powazek of Fray did (“Genuinely, how dare you.”) (and further down, another comment denouncing “a shockingly abominable take”).
Instead of telling you my own inferences about what Aaron may have opined, I’ll punt this to the nuanced analysis of Bruce Schneier and J. B. Branch (2026), “AI and the Corporate Capture of Knowledge”:
More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him.
[...]
Swartz’s fight was not simply about access, but about whether knowledge should be governed by openness or corporate capture, and who that knowledge is ultimately for. He understood that access to knowledge is a prerequisite for democracy. A society cannot meaningfully debate policy, science or justice if information is locked away behind paywalls or controlled by proprietary algorithms. If we allow AI companies to profit from mass appropriation while claiming immunity, we are choosing a future in which access to knowledge is governed by corporate power rather than democratic values.
How we treat knowledge—who may access it, who may profit from it and who is punished for sharing it—has become a test of our democratic commitments. We should be honest about what those choices say about us.
Methinks I’ll go with Schneier and Branch—not a simpleton’s take of, “Hurr durr, when Aaron Swartz said ‘the democratization of knowledge’, he meant free cultural strip-mining by billionaires who design to rule all meat-slaves with robot-overseers.”
Parenthetically, I note that Aaron met Sam Altman at Y Combinator—and he warned others that Altman is a “sociopath” who “can never be trusted”. Just saying. Aaron Swartz could usually recognize corruption when he saw it—in an individual, or in an industry that corrodes the ethical integrity of all who embrace its product.