The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #4

He got to where he was supposed to be going, and had the self-awareness

and the orneriness to realize that he had climbed the mountain of sh*t to pluck

the single rose and discovered that he'd lost his sense of smell,

and rather than sit there and insist that it wasn't as bad as it seemed,

and he did get the rose in any event,

he climbed back down again, which is pretty cool.

The way Aaron always saw it, is that

programming is magic--

you can accomplish these things that normal

humans can't, by being able to program.

So if you had magical powers, would you use

them for good, or to make you mountains of cash?

Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries

he had met as a child.

The man who had invented the World Wide Web,

Tim Berners-Lee.

In the 1990s, Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on

one of the most lucrative inventions of

the 20th century,

but instead of profiting from the invention

of the World Wide Web, he gave it away for free.

It is the only reason the World Wide Web exists today.

Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by Tim.

Tim is certainly a very prominent early Internet genius, who doesn't in any sense cash out.

He's not at all interested in how he's going to figure out how to make a billion dollars.

People were saying, "Ah, there's money to be made there,"

so there would have been lots of little webs,

instead of one big one,

and one little web, and all sorts of webs doesn't work,

because you can't follow links from one to the other.

You had to have the critical masses--the thing was the entire planet,

so it's not going to work unless the whole planet can get on board.

I feel very strongly that it's not enough to just live in the world as it is,

to just kind of take what you're given, and you know, follow the things that adults told you to do,

and that your parents told you to do, and that society tells you to do. I think you should always be questioning.

I take this very scientific attitude, that

everything you've learned is just provisional,

that it's always open to recantation or refutation or

questioning, and I think the same applies to society.

Once I realized that there were real serious problems--fundamental problems--

that I could do something to address, I didn't see a way to forget that. I didn't see a way not to.

We just started spending a lot of time,

just kind of as friends.

We would just talk, for hours, into the night.

I definitely should have understood that he was flirting with me. I think to some degree,

I was, like, this is a terrible idea, and impossible, and therefore I will pretend it is not happening.

As my marriage was breaking down, and I was

really stuck without anywhere to go,

we became roommates, and I brought my daughter over.

We moved in, and furnished the house, and it

was really peaceful.

My life had not been peaceful for a while, and really neither had his.

We were extremely close from the beginning of our romantic relationship.

We just...we were in constant contact.

But we're both really difficult people to deal with. [laughs]

In a very Ally McBeal discussion, he confessed he had a theme song, and I made him play it for me.

It was "Extraordinary Machine" by Fiona Apple.

I think it was just that sense of kind of being a little bit embattled that the song has,

and it also had, like, this hopefulness to it.

By foot it's a slow climb, but I'm good

at being uncomfortable so I can't stop

changing all the time

In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic

about life. Even when he didn't feel it,

he could be tremendously optimistic about life.

Extraordinary machine

- What are you doing?

(Quinn) - Flicker has video now.

Swartz threw his energy into a string of new

projects involving access to public information,

including an accountability webside called

Watchdog.net,

and a project called The Open Library.

So, the Open Library Project is a website you can visit at openlibrary.org,

and the idea is to be a huge wiki, an editable website with one page per book.

So for every book ever published, we want to have a web page about it that combines

all the information from publishers, from booksellers, from libraries, from readers

onto one site, and then gives you links where

you can buy it, you can borrow it, or you can browse it.

I love libraries. I'm the kind of person who

goes to a new city and immediately seeks out the library.

That's the dream of Open Library, is building this website where both you can leap

from book to book, from person to author, from subject to idea, go through this vast tree

of knowledge that's been embedded and lost in big physical libraries, that's hard to find,

that's not very well-accessible online. It's really important because books are our cultural legacy.

Books are the place people go to write things down,

and to have all that swallowed up by one corporation is kind of scary.

How can you bring public access to the public domain?

It may sound obvious that you'd have public access to the public domain,

but in fact it's not true. So the public domain should be free to all, but it's often locked up.

There's often guard cages. It's like having a national park but with a moat around it,

and gun turrets pointed out, in case somebody might want to actually come and enjoy the public domain.

One of the things Aaron was particularly interested in was bringing public access to the public domain.

This is one of the things that got him into so much trouble.

I had been trying to get access to federal court records in the United States.

What I discovered was a puzzling system called PACER.

Which stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records.

I started Googling, and that's when I ran

across Carl Malamud.

Access to legal materials in the United States is a ten billion dollar per year business.

PACER is just this incredible abomination

of government services. It's ten cents a page,

it's this most braindead code you've ever seen. You can't search it. You can't bookmark anything.

You've got to have a credit card, and these are public records.

U.S. district courts are very important; it's

where a lot of our seminal litigation starts.

Civil rights cases, patent cases, all sorts of stuff. Journalists, students, citizens and lawyers

all need access to PACER, and it fights them every step of the way.

People without means can't see the law as readily as people that have that Gold American Express card.

It's a poll tax on access to justice.

You know, the law is the operating system of our democracy, and you have to pay to see it?

You know, that's not much of a democracy.

They make about 120 million dollars a year on the PACER system,

and it doesn't cost anything near that, according to their own records. In fact, it's illegal.

The E-Government Act of 2002 states that the courts may charge only to the extent necessary,

in order to reimburse the costs of running PACER.

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