i am dirt under the rug.

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” — John Gilmore (1993) (IA)

Texts and textual criticism.

Why I care about this, beyond facts and propriety: I am the human use case for which Aaron Swartz fought and died.

He did this for me—and people in impoverished countries who want to improve their condition—and people trapped by structural injustice in generational cycles of all-American poverty—and intellectually precocious teenagers, like that genius kid whose pancreatic cancer research was mentioned in The Internet’s Own Boy—and so many other human beings who strive for human knowledge.

I’m a socioeconomically marginalized person—politely to understate the matter; that euphemism will preserve my dignity. Guerrilla open access is a lifestyle for me. I embody Aaron’s theory put to practice. I have a hard drive full of academic books and papers, on subjects ranging from mathematics, to history and current events, to gender and sexuality, plus literature—and I actually read all of this.

It’s no secret. My whole comment history at Techdirt is peppered with express mentions of shadow libraries, and evidence that I use them heavily; my comments semi-routinely cite books (many from university presses) and paywalled scholarly papers, none of which I’d have without Aaron’s guerrilla open access.

This person whom I never met is a literal martyr for the cause of giving me the access which makes me me, and which endues my life with meaning and value of which I’d otherwise be bereft. I am in awe.

Then, I see you, Mike Masnick, invoke Aaron on behalf of corrupt billionaires who personally steal my potential as a human—who seek to destroy what it means to be a human for everybody but themselves, in an extreme negative-sum game that rewards a few big winners!

Aaron died because he was so lethally idealistic, he was incapable of fully understanding that his actions could be alleged a “crime”—let alone of getting away with it. (Ironically, but unsurprisingly, it was Quinn Norton who made the most cynically insightful remark about this.) As I myself put it, it’s as if a proverbial Boy Scout tried to be Robin Hood. Noble to a fault. Do you seriously want me to believe that Aaron wouldn’t call out the so-called “AI” companies for what they are and what they are doing?

(The foregoing is a condensed excerpt of a small essay that I wrote yesterday, right after I posted my prior comment in this thread. I could expand it, instead of condensing. If anyone connected to Aaron wants to know how he touches lives from beyond the grave, ping me for what is surely one of millions of stories in a hundred languages.)

The problem is you falsely imply what you think I said, which is wholly different than what I did say.

This is why I called bullshit on you.

At no point have I said I approve of corporate capture of knowledge. Literally the opposite has always been my point. The point I did make was not in favor of the corporate capture, but that to free all knowledge that means that the authors don’t get to control how a work is read, perceived, and built on BY ANYONE.

Otherwise, we absolutely DO end up with corporate capture, because you end up in a world where only big companies who can afford to pay off authors get access to their knowledge.

This is obviously what I said if you had an ounce of reading comprehension.

Before I necessarily proceed to rebut this at length, I caution for future reference against the the intentional fallacy. To retcon your article to fit with your misreading of Schneier’s and Branch’s, you’re a hair’s breadth from expressly arguing what you or they allegedly intended to say—and then using the dirt-cheap propaganda tactic of attempting to enforce your implication with baseless ad hominem insults.

In the following, and as a general rule with few exceptions, I interpret a text by reading only what hermeneutists call “internal evidence” (or “public evidence”); this is similar to what lawyers call reading “within the four corners” of a document. By this reading, neither the author(s) nor anyone else can claim that the text was intended to say other than what it says.

As such, for Aaron’s sake, would you please set the record straight to Bruce Schneier and J. B. Branch [...who are] essentially speaking for Aaron against “AI” corporate capture of knowledge?

Why would I do that when I absolutely agree with Schneier and Branch, as would Aaron?

No, you flatly contradict Schneier and Branch. Slightly paraphrasing one of your prior comments in another thread, I could chalk this up to, “either a reading comprehension skill issue or one in which you are willfully lying about things”; however, it would be an ad hominem. In this case, the ad hominem is non-fallacious—but it is nonetheless unproductive.

It’s more productive to point out three irreconcilable contradictions between Schneier’s and Branch’s position in the text I cited, and yours as it is expressed in this page’s article. There are more, but I need not reach them. Two are express contradictions; one is part express, part unavoidably implied.

  1. As reflected in the title, a key premise of your text is, “Releasing a work into the world is an act of losing control over that work... But, when it comes to the AI fights, many are insisting that they want to do exactly that around AI[.]” (The ungrammatical, self-contradictory disconnect of “control” and “exactly that” is not caused by my ellipsis; you do not write grammatically.) This is in direct conflict with Schneier’s and Branch’s denunciation of the “AI” companies as “literally stealing”—and their whole text’s overarching effect of reconciling the open access movement with a legal crackdown on said “stealing”.

  2. An integral part of Schneier’s and Branch’s “corporate capture” argument is about “control over training data and infrastructure” (my emphasis), in a process by which “public knowledge is absorbed into proprietary systems that the public cannot inspect, audit or meaningfully challenge”. While you actively advocate for that absorption into proprietary systems, you totally ignore infrastructure. Which leads me to...

  3. You and they identify a problem in superficially similar, but substantively different ways: Your stated desire to “make sure that AI wasn’t just controlled by corporate juggernauts” (my emphasis) is not their “corporate capture” argument. By ineluctable logic, you and they then propose solutions that are not only different, but mutually exclusive.

    The crux of the difference: Your fantasy is “‘for open-source, grassroots AI projects to compete with huge commercial enterprises’” (internal quote is of Ian Bogost, your token author who’s “happy” to see LLMs train on his books). Here is where your ignorance of the infrastructure problem kills your argument. For “grassroots AI” to compete with companies who collectively have trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure is sheer fantasy.

    Are you aware that “AI” companies now have a cartel near-monopsony on hardware purchasing, such that Micron killed its Crucial consumer memory brand to focus on selling HBM5 to Big “AI”? Do you know that chipmakers are re-planning their businesses a decade out based on big-money “AI” demand? (That’s the start of a long list... Are you supposed to be a technology journalist?) How, praytell, do you expect for “grassroots AI” to compete with such hardware firepower?

    For FOSS to compete with Microsoft Windows, Apple OSes, and pseudo-open Google Android is largely a matter of user education. (I advocate adding FOSS and Linux/BSD to public school curricula.) For “grassroots AI” to compete with companies who plug new datacenters directly into nuclear power plants is completely idiotic.

    Schneier and Branch are not idiots. They definitely say “infrastructure”. Wherefore from start to finish, their whole essay cleverly threads the needle of reconciling Aaron’s open access with the insinuated necessity of a legal crackdown on that “literally stealing” done by “AI”. This allows open access advocates to keep their principles, while fighting “AI” with available legal weapons—and it cabins this fight, so that people like you can’t reply with slippery-slope arguments.

I’d never anyone else do that. They achieve it by precisely inverting the “contradiction” that killed Aaron, and turning it against the “AI” companies. Brilliant. If their idea catches on as it deserves to, then I think on the historical stage, this could even be a subtle sort of belated justice for Aaron.

In the abstract, compare the nuanced liberal intellectual arguments for affirmative action and DEI. (I don’t necessarily agree with all of those programs in practice, but I understand and largely endorse the underlying arguments in theory.) Conservative simpletons claim that DEI is “sexist”, “racist”, etc.; they are literal-minded fools with binary thinking. DEI’s literal gender discrimination, literal racial discrimination, etc. is structurally anti-sexist, anti-racist, etc.—just like the Schneier and Branch pro-crackdown argument is also a pro-open-access argument.

So as for the substance of the argument. As for the non-fallacious ad hominem, are you stupid or lying? I take it as evidence that your text starts with the type of preemptive defensiveness people so oft evince in guilt: “There’s no way to write this article without some people yelling angrily at me, so...” It’s a dark pattern in human thought. Cf. the start of Chapter 5 of RFK Jr.’s 2021 book: “I hesitated to include this chapter because any questioning of the orthodoxy that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS remains an unforgivable—even dangerous—heresy among our reigning medical cartel and its media allies. But...” I think I’m on firm ground in reading that as literal mens rea, a guilty-minded confession that he’s intentionally peddling bullshit.

...if you had an ounce of reading comprehension. [...]

You truly have become our dumbest commenter. [...] That you have zero reading comprehension and believe I say and believe things I absolutely do not is a YOU problem.

With a tongue-in-cheek trigger warning for the gendered cultural analogy: What you’re doing here, which you’ve habitually done as to me, is just like manosphere guys who “neg” pretty girls by telling them that they’re ugly. Protip: It only works if the girl is insecure about her appearance. Otherwise, the stuck-up bitch won’t bend over for you.

It’s no laughing matter. This kind of manipulative gaslighting can be harmful to people who are insecure.

That said, it would be amusing that you patently misread me as seeking social validation of my intelligence; although I am lonely, it is obvious that you missed me by a mile. (By the way, anyone who gets that word-puzzle should please contact me. 😔) —It would be, were it not for the likelihood that you’re doing this for the audience.

You should be aware of my comment history; a reasonable person would presume you are. It proves the exact opposite of your stated appraisal of me. However, others who read this particular thread may be completely unaware of it.

When a Net-famous person makes such remarks as quoted above, it comes off to those who see only this thread as an authoritative dismissal of the sorts of sundry idiots, loonies, and cranks whom we all need to ignore as Internet annoyances. It’s a Big Lie on your part, but who goes back and reads the record?

I’ve had to start keeping a list of your deceptive statements, and even your outright falsehoods to propagandize for “AI”.

Keep whatever logs of what I say that you want. My record is completely public.

Indeed. Slashing my explanations to cut this comment’s wordcount, and avoiding more embedded links than your filter robot seems to allow, here are two examples for baseline support of my questionable assertion, as required for arguing in good faith:

Interpretation is left as an exercise to the reader.