Until today I had not heard of the name Aaron Swartz. A dive down one twitter rabbit-hole led me to this documentary and I was quite amazed to learn about this child prodigy, this teenager who was one of the founders of Reddit, an architect of Creative Commons, the slayer of draconian legislations that restricted internet freedom, and conscientious young man who was driven to kill himself by MIT and the Obama administration.
As if all these were not achievements enough for a lifetime, Swartz also gets the credit to enabling the discovery of a test that leads to the early detection of pancreatic cancer!
A friend who studied at MIT thought there was nothing new or shocking about MITs role in making a scapegoat out of Swartz. "It is difficult to admire MIT if you're a thinking person", he said, "Most of the research there is centred on war weapons and the best way to kill". So it may not be surprising that the Obama government wanted to make an example of a man whose principal crime was to get past the JSTOR paywall and download years of public-funded research papers.
Until last year I would have thought such a move went against the very grain of USAs self-proclaimed position as a 'land of the free'. The aggressive rise of China, the Covid-19 pandemic, Galwan, and the nine-dash-line leads me to a more hardline position against authoritarian regimes who are trying to turn this freedom into some kind of liability.
If internet freedom and free access of research from US universities only leads to a one-way flow of information and technology, it may not be a bad idea to temper the zeal of youngsters, who, for all their deep knowledge, are unable to see the big picture of global geo-politics.
