Translator: lavinia argene Reviewer: Denise RQ
Today I would like to talk about a special person: Aaron Swartz.
Last year, in 2014, a documentary dedicated to him was entitled,
"The Internet's own boy," the favourite of the Internet.
It is very hard to put Aaron into a clear category.
He was an activist, a programmer, a researcher.
I would add hacker, in a good sense, also intellectual and writer.
It is simpler to make a technical list of projects
to which he contributed.
They are dozens and dozens.
At 14, Aaron joined the group which wrote the RSS.
It was ubiquitous in the blogosphere until 10 years ago.
He also built the Creative Commons, being in charge of the technical task.
Today the Creative Commons are in about a billion of contents.
They are free licences that make copyright more open and flexible.
Take for example Wikipedia licence.
At 20, Aaron became a small start-upper.
He founded a thing called Reddit.
He became millionaire all of a sudden.
But actually, Aaron didn't care about money or name.
He kept doing what he always did:
building a free, open, and collaborative Internet.
He worked for Internet Archive and Open Library, two digital libraries
which are just saving the web and protecting terabytes of Internet
which otherwise would be lost.
They are digital memory archives.
He became one of the protagonists of the fight against SOPA,
a wiretapping law which some years ago, forced
even Wikipedia to go on strike, to expire
because it would hugely restrict the freedom of expression on the net.
What absolutely strucks about Aaron
is his extraordinary, impressive, and strong curiosity.
As he writes himself in his blog, Aaron could read until 150 books a year.
All kinds of essays from economics to political theory,
educational history, and computer science.
He carried underarm "The Capital" by Marx at 16.
Aaron, as his brother tells in a very moving moment,
of the documentary you should absolutely see
learned to learn, very early.
His mother tells us that, at a certain point, she was cooking,
and Aaron, who was 2 and a half and was on the high chair,
read the note on the fridge which she had just attached
through some magnets.
But Aaron discovers an important thing.
This yearning of knowledge has a double aspect, that is, it becomes
a desire for sharing knowledge,
because knowledge has to be shared.
Looking at Aaron's projects, we see that they are all tools,
technologies to access to the information.
In Internet Archive he protects memory,
the RSS allowed blogs to synchronize, the Creative Commons are a copyright,
so they make accessible the creative content to people.
The access to the information comes from an extremely simple concept.
It is basic as much as common, that is, information is power.
Information is power,
which, if we just think of it for a second, we can find everywhere.
We can find it in schools, libraries, universities.
"Information is power," said Don Milani, and also Montessori.
Letting people access to information means performing a democratic act.
Our democracy is just based on giving access to learning and education.
Without this there isn't any democracy.
It is an empowerment act in order to qualify people.
As a genius as he is, from his cultural background,
he reaches this point, that is the hacker one.
The hacker as a builder not a destroyer.
When you know the code, and you have the skills to read it,
you can change it, make it yours, let it do what you want.
Therefore, explaining the world
becomes an essential condition in order to bend it,
to make it malleable, to change it.
Making the world a better place assumes
an access to this information.
Therefore, if all institutions are social, that is made of people
and so made of culture, they will be made of words.
Everything becomes violated when you know the code
and how to change it.
But you can't do it on your own.
If you make an Open Source world, everyone will be able to change it.
Making the world a better place will be not a single act of heroism,
but it will be an act of collective building.
In 2011, Aaron showed interest
in this thing called "Open Access."
A big movement for free access to scientific literature.
The field of scientific literature, as a university student can know,
is absolutely chaotic, controversial, and contradictory.
Very few big editors have the key of the power,
making mediocre what is not so, that is scientific information.
And Aaron developed a passion for this, he wrote this thing called
"Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto" here, in Italy.
Its first sentence was, "Information is power."
Aaron downloaded hundreds of thousands of articles
from an academic database: JSTOR.
He was caught. FBI kept an eye on him.
A hacker of such genius cannot go unnoticed.
FBI realized that it had the chance to make Aaron a model.
He was wanted an exemplary punishment, to show to all the hackers outside
that world doesn't change through a couple of lines of code.
Aaron became the subject of a real judicial persecution
for downloading hundreds of thousands of articles from an academic database,
and he could do it, but not on such scale.
He was charged with acts of hacking.
He risked up to 35 years.
He spent millions of dollars during this legal case.
And he was compared to, more or less, to a terrorist.
Two years after his first arrest Aaron hanged himself in New York.
He was 26.
The real issue is that the power knows that information is power.
And if you decide to be the apparatus that stops the system,
this will oppress you by matching the strength of the apparatus around you.
We have already saw it
recently with Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange.
All different cases and yet similar.
People who wanted to give access to information, despite being debatable.
Now I would like to show you a minute of his last interview,
few months before his death.
Host: Just to follow up, how do you feel the fight is going?
Andrea Zanni: It's up to you.
Subtitles are missed, they are coming.
You know, there is a sort of two polarized perspectives:
everything is great, Internet created all this freedom, liberty,
and everything is going to be fantastic,
or everything is terrible.
Internet created all these worlds for cracking down,
that spying and control what we say.
And I think that these both are true.
The Internet has done both, and both are a kind of amazing.
And which one we will know in a long run is up to us.
It make no sense to say,
"One is doing better than the other," you know, they are both true.
And it's up to us which one has to be emphasized
and ones we take advantage of,
and the both all is going to be there."
Aaron says something banal as much as essential.
There are two focused points of view about the Internet:
it is horrible, a platform of mass spying.
It is used to spy, monitor, oppress.
But there is an other point of view:
Internet is fantastic, free, a place of total freedom of expression.
Actually these things are equal, they are both true,
they are things which coexist in the same way.
Internet is too complex to be only one thing.
Aaron says something important, "It's up to us," it depends on us
who will win, because the Internet will always be this complicated thing.
I wanted to finish not with my words because I do not have any one,
but with words of someone better.
"The hell of living people is not something which will happen;
if there is one, it is already here,
the hell which we live every day, which we assemble being together.
There are two ways to not suffer.
The first is easy for many of us:
accepting and become part of it until we will not see it.
The second is more risky and requires continuous attention and learning:
searching and recognizing who and what,
in the middle of hell, is not hell, and make it last, and give it way."
Thank you.
(Applause)