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 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 unified 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 built 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, especially in those early days.

Copyright has always been something kind of a burden on the publishing industry and on readers,

but it wasn't an eccessive burden, it was a reasonable institution to have in place,

to make sure that people got paid.

What Aaron's generation experienced was the collision between this antique copyright system

and this amazing new thing we were trying to build, the Internet and the Web.

These things collided, and what we got was chaos.

He then met Harvard's Law professor Lawrence Lessig,

who was then challenging copyright law in the Supreme Court.

The young Aaron Swartz flew to Washington to listen to the Supreme Court hearings.

I am Aaron Swartz and I'm here to listen to the elder, to see the elder.

Why did you fly out here from Chicago and come all this way to see the elder that you met?

That's a more difficult question...

I don't know. It's very exciting to see the Supreme Court,

especially in such a prestigious case as this one.

Lessig was also moving forward with a new way to define copyright on the Internet.

It was called Creative Commons.

So the simple idea of Creative Commons is to give people, creators,

a simple way to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intended to carry.

So if copyright is all about "All rights reserved", then this is a kind of a "Some rights reserved" model.

I wanted a simple way to say to you: here is what you can do with my work,

even if there are other things which you need to get my permission before you could do.

And Aaron's role was the computer part.

Like how do you architect the licenses so they'll be simple and understandable

and expressed in a way so that machines can process it.

And people were like: why do you have this 15 years old kid writing the specifications for Creative Commons?

Don't you think that's a huge mistake?

And they're like: the biggest mistake we would have is not listening to this kid.

He barely is not even tall enough to even get over the podium.

And it wasn't this movable podium so it was this embarrassing thing,

where once he put his screen up nobody could see his face.

When you come to our website here, and you go to "Choose license",

you get to this list of options, it explains what it means, and you've three simple questions:

Do you want to require attribution?

Do you want to allow commercial uses of your work?

Do you want to allow modifications of your work?

I was floored, just completely flabbergasted that these adults regarded him as an adult.

And Aaron stood up there in fromt of a whole audience full of people and just started talking

about the platform that he'd created for Creative Commons.

And they were all listening to him. Just...

I was sitting at the back, thinking: You're just a kid, why are they listening to you?

But they did...

Well, I don't think I comprehended it fully.

Though critics have said it does little to ensure artists get paid for their work,

the success of Creative Commons has been enormous.

Currently on the website Flickr alone, over 200 million people use some form of Creative Commons license.

He contributed through his technical abilities, and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him.

Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog:

I think deeply about things, and I want others to do likewise.

I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people.

I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication.

Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time

on things what won't have an impact.

I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously.

I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience.

I want to make the world a better place.

In 2004 Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University.

He'd had all enterocolitis, which was very troubling and we were concerned about him taking his medication.

He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail of pills every day.

And one of these pills was a steroid which ??? his growth,

and made him feel different from any of the other students.

Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship

and finds himself in effectively a baby-sitting program for overachieving high-school'ers

who in four years are meant to become captains of industry and 1%'ers

and I think it just made him bananas.

In 2005, after only one year of college,

Schwartz was offered a spot at a new start-up incubation firm called Y Combinator, lead by Paul Graham.

He's like: hey, I have this idea for a a website!

And Paul Graham likes him enough, and says: yeah, sure!

Suddenly he drops out of school, moves to this appartment...

So this used to be Aaron's appartment when he moved here.

I have vague memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease

'cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college.

Aaron lived in what's now the living-room and some of the posters are leftovers from when Aaron lived here.

And the library... there are more books, but a lot of them are Aaron's.

Aaron's Y Combinator site was called infogami, a tool to build websites.

But infogami struggles to find users, and Swartz eventually

merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help.

It was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, called reddit.

That we were, starting from almost nothing. No users, no money, no code,

and growing day by day into a hugely popular website.

And it showed no signs of letting up,

first we had 1000 users, then 10000, then 20000 and on, and on... It was just incredible...

Reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet.

There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art, and there's just people who flocked at the site

and made that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news.

Reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some levels,

so on the one hand it's a place where people discuss news of the day, technology, politics and issues,

and yet there is a lot of kind of Not Safe For Work material, offensive material,

there are some sub-reddits where trolls find a welcome home

and so, in that sense reddit has been kind of home to controversy as well.

It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.

Reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant Conde Nast,

who makes an offer to buy the company.

Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions

about like: "How do I store this money?"

- Like a lot of money...
- Like a lot of money.

Like probably more than a million dollars, but I don't actually know.

- And he's how old at the time?
- 19 - 20...

So it was in this apartment, they sat around
on what predated these couches

hacking on reddit, and when they sold reddit

they threw a giant party, and then all flew
out to California the next day

and left the keys with me.

He'd just sold his start up so we all presumed
he was the richest person around

but he said "I'll take this tiny little
shoe-box sized room that's all I need."

It was barely larger than a closet.

The idea of him spending his money on
fancy objects just seemed implausible.

He explains it as "I like living in
apartments so I'm not going to spend money on

a new place to live, I'm not going to buy a
mansion. And I like wearing jeans

and a t-shirt, so I'm not going to spend
any more money on clothes.

So it's really no big deal."

What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic
flows on the internet.

And what commands our attention.

In the old system of broadcasting, you're
fundamentally limited by the amount of

space in the airwaves. You can only send out
ten channels over the airwaves, TV.

Or even with cable, you had 500 channels.

On the internet, everybody can have a channel.
Everyone can get a blog, or a Myspace page.

Everyone has a way of expressing themselves.

What you see now isn't a question of who gets
access to the airwaves,

it's a question of who gets control over the
ways you find people.

You start seeing power centralising in sites
like Google, these gate-keepers that tell you

where on the internet you want to go.

The people who provide you your sources
of news and information.

So it's not only certain people have
a licence to speak, now everyone has

a licence to speak. It's a question of
who gets heard.

After he started working in San Francisco
at Condé Nast he comes into the office

And they want to give him a computer with all
this crap installed on it.

And say he can't install any new things
on his computer.

Which to a developer is outrageous.

From the first day he was complaining
about all this stuff.

"Grey walls, grey desks, grey noise. The first
day I showed up here I simply couldn't take it.

By lunchtime I had literally locked myself
in a bathroom stall and started crying.

I can't imagine staying sane with someone
buzzing in my ear all day

Let alone getting any actual work done.
Nobody else seems to get work done either

Everybody's always coming into our room to
hang out and chat, or invite us to play

the new video game system that Wired is testing."

He really had different aspirations that were
politically oriented. And Silicon Valley just

doesn't really have that culture that orients
technical activity for the purposes of

political goals.

Aaron hated working for a corporation.

They all hate working for Condé Nast, but Aaron
is the only one who is not going to take it.

And Aaron basically gets himself fired.

By not showing up to work, ever.

It was said to be a messy break-up.
Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman

declined to be interviewed for this film.

He rejected the business world. One of the
really important things to remember about

that choice when Aaron decided to leave start-up
culture is that he was also leaving behind

the things that had made him famous and well loved.
He was at risk of letting down fans.

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 shit 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. 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 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, 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
live in the world as it is, to just take

what you're given and 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,

it's always open to recantation or refutation or
questioning. And I think the same applies to society.

Once I realised that there were real 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,
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 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 were in constant contact.

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

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 being a little
bit embattled that the song has.

And it also had 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 webpage 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, borrow it, or browse it.

I love libraries. I'm the kind of person who
goes to a new city and seeks out the library

That's the dream of Open Library,
is building this website where 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,

it'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.

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

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

One of the things Aaron was so 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 US is a
$10 billion per year business.

Pacer is just an incredible abomination
of public service. It's 10 cents a page, it's the

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.

US district courts are very important,
it's where our seminal litigation starts.

Civil rights cases, patent cases. Journalists
and 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.