The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

The film follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz's help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz's groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two-year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26. Aaron's story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties.

Film by Brian Knappenberger - Luminant Media
http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/26788492/aaron-swartz-documentary-the-internets-own-boy-0
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

A cofounder of the social, news and entertainment website Reddit has been found dead.

He certainly was a prodigy, although he never kind of thought of himself like that.

He was totally unexcited

about starting businesses and making money

There's a profound sense of lost in Highland Park,

Aaron Swartz's hometown,

as loved ones say good bye to one of the Internet's brightest lights.

Freedom, open access and computer activists are mourning his loss.

"An astonishing intellect", if you talk to people who knew him.

He was killed by the government.

and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles.

They wanted to make an example out of him.

Governments have insatiable desire to control.

He was potentially facing 35 years in prison
and a one million dollar fine.

Raising questions or prosecutorial zeal, and I would say even misconduct.

Have you looked into that particular matter and reached any conclusions?

Growing up, you know, I slowly had this process of realizing

that all the things around me, that people had told me

were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be

They weren't natural at all, there were things that could be changed

and there were things that more importantly were wrong and should change.

And once I realized that, there was really kind of no going back.

The Internet's Own Boy.

Welcome to story reading time.

The name of the book is "Paddington at the fair"

Well, he was born in Highland Park and grew up here.

Aaron came from a family of three brothers, all extraordinarily bright.

Oh, the box is tipping over...

So we were all, you know, not the best behaved children

You know, three boys running around all the time, causing trouble

Hey, no, no no!

-Aaron!
-What?

But I've come to the realization that Aaron learned how to learn at a very young age

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight...

- Knock, knock!
- Who's there?

- Aaron
- Aaron who?

- Aaron Funnyman.

He knew what he wanted, and he always wanted to do it.

He always accomplished what he wanted.

His curiosity was endless.

Here's a little picture of what the planets are.

And each planet has a symbol. Mercury symbol, Venus symbol, Earth symbol, Mars symbol...

One day he said to Susan: what's this free family entertainment downtown Highland Park?

He was three at the time.

And she said: what are you talking about?

He said: Look, it says here on the refrigerator, "Free family entertainment downtown Highland Park".

She was floored and astonished that he could read.

It's called "My family Seder".

That Seder night is different from all other nights.

I remember once, we were at the University of Chicago Library.

I pulled a book off the shelf, that was from like 1900.

And showed him: you know, this is an extraordinary place.

We all were curious children, but Aaron really liked learning and really liked teaching.

And what we're going to do is learn is ABC backwards.

Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T...

I remember he came home from his first Algebra class

He was like: "Noah, let me teach you Algebra!"

I'm like: what is Algebra?

And he was always like that.

Now it's press click button, there! Now it's got that!

Now it's in pink!

When he was about two or three years old, and Bob introduced him to computers,

then he just took off, like crazy on them.

(Inintelligible)

We all had computers, but Aaron really took to them, really took to the Internet.

- Working at the computer?
- Naah..

- How c... mommy, why is nothing working?

He started programming from a really young age.

I remember the first program that I wrote with him was in Basic, and it was a Star Wars trivia game.

He sat down with me in the basement, where the computer was,

for hours, programming this game.

The problem that I kept having with him is that there was nothing that I wanted done

And to him, there was always something to do, always something that programming could solve.

The way Aaron always saw it, is that programming is magic.

You can accomplish these things that normal humans can't.

Then we made an ATM, using like a MacIntosh and like a cardboard box.

One year for Halloween, I didn't know what I wanted to be,

and he thought it would be really cool if I dressed up like his new favorite computer,

which at the time was the original iMac.

I mean, he hated dressing up for Halloween but he loved convincing other people

to dress up in these things that he wanted to see.

Host Aaron, stop! Guys, come on, look at the camera!

He made this website called The Info, where people could just fill in the information

I'm sure someone out there knows everything about gold, gold leafing

Why they don't write about that on this website? And then other people can come at a later point

and read that information, and edit the information if they thought it was bad.

Not too dissimilar from Wikipedia, right?

And this was before Wikipedia begun, and this is developed by a 12 year old,

in his room, by himself, running on this tiny server, using ancient technology.

One of the teachers response was, like: "This is a terrible idea, you cant' just let anyone author the encyclopedia.

The whole reason we have scholars is to write these books for us. How did you have such a terrible idea?"

Me and my other brother will go, like: "Oh, you know, Wikipedia is cool, but we had that in our house, like, five years ago".

Aaron's website, theinfo.org, wins a school competition hosted by the Cambridge-based web design firm Ars Digita.

We all went to Cambridge when he won the Ars Digita prize

and we had no clue what Aaron was doing.

It was obvious that the prize was really important.

Aaron soon became involved with online programming communities,

then in the process of shaping a new tool for the web.

He came saying to me like: Ben, there's this really awesome thing that I'm working on.

You need to hear about it!

And I'm like: yeah, what is it?

And he says: It's a thing called RSS.

And he explains me what RSS is.

And I'm like: why is that useful, Aaron? Is any site using it, like why would I want to use it?

There is this mailing list for people who are working on RSS, and XML more generally.

And there's a person on it named Aaron Swartz, who is combative but very smart and who had lots of good ideas

and he'd never come to the face to face meetings, and they said,

you know, when are you gonna come to any of these face to face meetings?

And he said: you know, I don't think my mom would let me. I'm.. I've just turned 14.

So their first reaction was, you know, this person, this colleague we'we been working with all year is...

was 13 years old while we were working with him, and he's only 14 now.

And their second reaction was: Christ, we really want to meet him! That's extraordinary!

He was part of the committee that drafted RSS.

What he was doing was to help build the plumming for modern hypertext.

The piece that he was working on, RSS, was a tool that you can use to get summaries

of things that are going on on other web pages.

Most commonly, you would use this for a blog. You might have 10 or 20 people's blogs you wanna read.

You use their RSS feeds, these summaries of what's going on on those other pages

to create a unufied list of all the stuff that's going on.

Aaron was very young, but he understood the technology and he saw that it was imperfect

and looked for ways to help make it better.

So his mom started bundling him on planes in Chicago, we'd pick him up in San Francicso.

We'd introduce him to interesting people to argue with, and we'd marvle at his horriffic eating habits.

He only ate white food, only like steamed rice and not fried rice 'cause that wasn't sufficiently white

and white bread, and so on...

And you kind of marvled at the quality of the debate emerging from this,

what appeared to be a small boy's mouth.

And you'd think, this is a kid that's really going to get somewhere if he doesn't die of scurvy.

Aaron, you're up!

I think the difference is that now you can't make companies like dotcoms.

You can't have companies that just sell dog food over the Internet, or sell dog food over cell phones.

But there's still a lot of innovation going on.

Think that maybe if you don't see the innovation, maybe your head is in the sand!

He takes on this, like an alpha nerd personality, where he's

sort of like: "I'm smarter than you, and because I'm smarter than you I'm better than you,

and I can tell you what to do".

It's an extension of, like, him being kind of like a twerp.

So you aggregate all these computers together and now they're solving big problems

like searching for aliens and trying to cure cancer.

I first met him on IRC, or Internet Relay Chat.

He didn't just write code, he also got people excited about solving problems he got.

He was a connector.

The free culture movement, he had a lot of this energy.

I think Aaron was trying to make the world work. He was trying to fix it.

He had a very kind of strong personality, that definitely ruffled feathers at times.

It wasn't necesarily the case that he was always comfortable in the world

and the world wasn't always comfortable with him.

Aaron got into high school and he was really just sick of school.

He didn't like it, he didn't like any of the classes that were being thaught, he didn't like the teachers.

Aaron really knew how to get information.

He was like: "I don't need to go to this teacher to learn how to do geometry.

I can just read the geometry book.

And I don't need to go to this teacher to learn their version of American history,

like I have like three historical compilations here, I could just read them.

And I'm not interested in that, I'm interested in the web".

I was very frustrated with school, I thought the teachers didn't know what they were talking about.

They were domineering and controlling, the homework was kind of a sham

and it was all just like all about a way to pen students all together and force them to do busy work.

And, you know, I started reading books about the history of education and how this educational system was developed.

Then, you know, alternatives to it and ways that people could actually learn things

as opposed to just regurgitating facts that teachers told them.

And that kind of led me down this path of questioning things, once I questioned the school I was in,

I questioned the society that fed the school, I questioned the businesses that the schools were training people for,

I questioned the government that set up this whole structure.

One of the thing he was most passionate about was copyright.