Part One: Christmas Hero Episode: Aaron Swartz

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
As media. Hey everybody, Robert here, it's the Christmas two parter,
and every year we try to use our holiday episodes
to do something good. This year, we're asking you to
support the mutual aid project that James Stout over at
It Could Happen Here, has been a part of for
nearly six months in a remote part of the US
Mexico border near Yacoomba, California. While you're hopefully warm and dry,

(00:25):
the border patrol is detaining thousands of migrants, including children
and the elderly, in the desert without food, water, or
shelter when overnight temperatures drop below freezing. Volunteers provide hot meals,
blankets and toys for children. They build shelters even though
the Border Patrol destroys them, and keep rebuilding them so
that people have a place to sleep out in the
freezing wind. Everyone there, including James, has spent a lot

(00:48):
of their own money supporting this effort, and you can
hear more about the efforts of volunteers over on It
Could Happen Here, But your support would mean the world
to James and the other people trying to help migrants
over at the border. Of course, those migrants themselves. You
can donate to this effort at GoFundMe. If you just
type Yakumba Jacumba Migrant Camps go fund me, Yakumba Migrant

(01:13):
Camps go fund me, you'll get it. Or you can
use the link TinyURL dot com slash border agfm that'll
take you right to the fundraiser. So thank you. Ah
what a happy Yule Tie Mary Xmas to all of

(01:34):
you listeners out there in radio land. It's not radio land.
Radio is a dead medium. It's a podcast Behind the
Bastards where normally we talk about the very worst people
in all of history, but once a year, one glorious
day or week out of the year, instead of talking
about the worst people in all of history, we talk

(01:56):
about some of the best people in all of history.
And today, as our guest on this This Yule Tide episode,
our only returning Christmas episode, guest Margaret Killjoy, who talks
about cool people who did cool stuff for a living
in a podcast with that name.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
Hey, you only cover Santa Claus, right, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
We're we're getting into the We're getting into the big
Man himself. Okay, now, Magpie, how do you feel about Christmas?
You Christmas person.

Speaker 2 (02:26):
I am. Now this is a recent transition. I decided
that it makes sense that everyone wants together to celebrate
the darkest time of the year. Yeah, and that whatever
holiday people attached to it, as long as the core
of it is get together with people that you care
about as the dark set, the dark is here and

(02:47):
the cold is coming. You know.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Yeah, Yeah, I think that's a I tend to be
more or less in agreement. I enjoy celebrating the holiday
that has nothing to do with the guy we're talking
about today, but it is. It is. Yeah, Santa Claus
Are we've all gone through in the period from the
early two thousands to today, this really interesting moment, especially

(03:12):
those of us. This is kind of less of a
case for people who have been radicals that entire time,
but those of us who started from a more centrist, moderate,
you know, liberal kind of background, this period of like, wow,
you know, the internet is going to be this incredible
tool for democracy and spreading knowledge. The tech industry they're
they're like this progressive force in a lot of ways

(03:33):
in society. There's a bunch of things that are going
to be made better by connecting people all over the
world to oh, not only does all this technology not
work the way that we thought it, and not only
is it a lot more toxic, does they have more
negative consequences for people's mental health, for the health of societies,
But it increases the arsenal of authoritarians. And most of

(03:54):
the people who are running the tech industry now want
that right, are fundamentally on the side of authoritarians. There's
this kind of movement. The New York Times just did
an article on it, because that kind of the mainstream
is starting to be aware of some to an extent
of which it kind of came out of some of
the effective altruism stuff. That's that's the effective accelerationists, right

(04:15):
e ff slash acc is kind of how toll be
written a lot in the ideas like we need to
accelerate without thinking of the consequences, you know, AI effective AI,
you know, and push it in every aspect of society,
and it doesn't matter who it hurts, it doesn't matter
what the consequences are, because fundamentally this is what human
beings need. And these people are also getting into eugenics.

(04:36):
A lot of these are the folks around Elon Musk.
It's deeply reactionary in many ways, but it came out
of and a lot of some of the people who
are involved in it are folks who came out of
in the early two thousands, the late nineties. You would
have thought a lot differently of them, right, You would
have thought that these people were, if not on the
side of angels, then broadly speaking, part of a positive

(04:58):
trend in our culture. And today. The hero we're talking
about is a guy who's a personal hero of mine.
He was a dude who was to an extent on
this side. But yeah, yeah, he was a dude who
was to an extent on you know, we don't know
because because of when he died, fundamentally where he would

(05:19):
have ended up now, I don't think he would be
in league with any of those guys. He's a guy
a fundamentally view as a hero. And his name was
Aaron Schwartz.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Yeah, I'm so excited.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
Yeah spelled Swartz. Aaron Hillel Schwartz was born on November eighth,
nineteen eighty six, in Highland Parks, Chicago. He was the
eldest of three brothers and in general enjoyed about his
privileged not bringing as you can have and still do
something useful with your life, right, He's not born like
into crazy money, because those people don't tend to do much.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Right. There's not an emerald mine in the picture.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Yeah, he's not an emerald miner. But his dad like
founds a software firm. I don't think they're like hundreds
of millions of job but I'm sure they have a
million or more, you know, in assets. You know, most
of the time that that he's around, they're doing very well. Right,
And because his dad's the founder of a software firm,
his dad's a huge nerd, clearly a very smart guy.

(06:14):
And so from a very early age there are computers
in the Schwartz house and eventually Aaron and all of
his brothers he has two younger brothers, will have computers
as kids in the early I mean in the late eighties,
early nineties.

Speaker 2 (06:27):
That's very rare, right, I grew up My dad was
a very early adopter.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Yeah, it was.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
So we had computers in the eighties, and like they were,
they cost like all of my dad's money, you know.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
Yeah, you know, I was born late enough in the eighties.
We certainly if we had a computer in the late ages,
I don't think we did, but in the early nineties
we had like we had one of the ones that
like was pre floppy discs, whatever those giant ones were,
and like, you know, all it has you just get
green text on a little screen. Like we had one
of those for a while.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
I would say it's probably pre hard to sorry, never mind,
I don't need to my Yeah, we had all the
Like my dad referred to it as a compact luggable.
It's the size of a briefcase and it has a
little green screen.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
It does have a hard drive. It has that. It
has an A in a B drive, but not a
C drive, you know.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah, ancient technology. Yeah, like not only does your phone
have more computing power than I don't know may have
existed in the country at that point. I don't fully
know the answer to that, but like like fucking your
refrigerators have more power than.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
Those machines did, right, Yeah, but I learned Q basic
on it.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
Yeah, So Aaron, by the time he's like three's he's
using a computer, you know. And and by the time
he's three or four, you know, he's he's starting to
like understand how to actually like make stuff on it,
Like from a very young age six or seven, when
their home is wired for internet access. Again, you're talking
like ninety two. They're among the very first people to

(07:56):
have home internet access. That is extremely uncommon in the
early nineties. If you followed our stories of tech billionaires
guys like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, or you've done
your own reading on Steve Jobs. We haven't covered yet.
We will one of these days. I definitely do consider
him a bastard, although I have kind of more admiration
for him as a in terms of just his capabilities
than those other guys. He is a terrible person, don't

(08:17):
get me wrong, right, but.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
In a world of mosques, he stands out like he
did some stuff, right, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
Yeah. If you are familiar with those guys, you'll recognize
that Aaron has a pretty similar upbringing. They all do
come from that kind of background. They're kind of upper
middle class, but they're not super rich, right, But they
are a lot have a lot more money than most people.
They have parents who, if their parents are not tech
nerds themselves, understand the value of computers and get their

(08:45):
kids access to those at a very early age. Right.
All of these things, he has the same background as
most of our big tech founders do today. Right, broadly speaking,
you know, he's gonna wind up being a very different person,
but he does come from kind of the same starting position.
One of the real differences with him. All of these
guys get kind of framed as and I think probably

(09:07):
believe of themselves as child geniuses. None of them were.
They're all smart, don't get me wrong. Jeff Bezos, smart guy,
Bill Gates, smart guy, Steve Jobs, smart guy. None of
them are are geniuses, right, Steve Wozniak, I think, you know,
very fair to call that man a technical genius, like
one once in a generation brain. None of these guys

(09:27):
are technical geniuses. They're pretty smart. They're pretty smart, and
they have enough insight to understand where things are going
to go to take advantage of people who are geniuses.
Aaron is a legitimate child genius. There is there is
no argument with that statement that I have ever seen.
He is, like, for an idea of how intelligent he
he is, he teaches himself to read and his parents

(09:49):
don't realize has done it. His mom realizes it when
they have a sign on the fridge that's like cliped
out of the newspaper that's like there's you know, a
free family entertainment you know thing nearby, and he he
asked his mom, hey, mom, what is and he like
reads the thing out and she's like, what are you
talking about? And he points the fridge and she realizes
that he's reading it. At age three, she has no
idea that he's he's learned her This is how she

(10:10):
learns that he knows how to read. Yes, he's reading
novels by the time he's in kindergarten, and likewise, around
the same time he teaches himself to read. A little
bit later, he teaches himself to code. You know, just
a phenomenal mind by again, have never heard any sort
of debate on this question. Yeah, so obviously with the

(10:31):
resources they have. Realizing how fucking smart their kid is,
his parents decide to send him to a private school
for gifted children, which he attends through middle school. He
teaches himself to program pretty early on. His first project
is a Sudoku like puzzle game. At one point, just
as like a thing for fun, he builds and programs
an ATM machine like out of cardboard, and like, I

(10:53):
don't know what he uses for the computer but he
gets access to some computer bits he like makes an
ATM machine.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
Hell yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:59):
And he realized early on that with code, he can
make things that not only do adults not understand, but
like seem like magic to most of the adults around
not his dad. His dad knows how to code, obviously,
but to most adults. And a side consequence of this
is that from his early days, you know he's not
I'm sure you and I, like, I was a precocious kid.
I started reading by the time I wasn't first grade.

(11:21):
I was reading novels. You know, I was reading adult
novels when I was in third grade. I read faster
and got onto that stuff faster than most people. But
that's the kind of thing. All of the adults around
me my family are big readers. I saw them reading
big books and bigger books than me. So like I
was doing a thing, I'm like, oh, I'm doing a
thing that's kind of like the adults, but they are
still doing that thing, and they're doing it better. Aaron

(11:43):
is doing a thing adults can't comprehend. Most adults can't
comprehend coding, especially not on a level he is at.
And you know that gives him a healthy respect for
his own intellect, and sometimes it gives him kind of
an unhealthy respect for his own end. And his younger
brother has said, like he was kind of a brat, right, Yeah,
he was smarter than most people. He knew he was
smarter than most of the adults around, and he could

(12:03):
be a snotty rat about it, right, Like, that's pretty
inevitable when you've got a kid who's this smart, they're
going to go through that. It seems to have been
a phase for him. This is not, like, I don't
think a lifelong thing for him. Most people say he
was a very down to earth guy most of his life,
but he has his brat period. I think that's kind
of inevitable when you're this smart. His parents were part
of a reform synagogue, but when he was pretty young,

(12:26):
their dad moved them to a HBBAD synagogue, which is
a kind of Orthodox synagogue. Fairly early on, but they're
not you know, Aaron doesn't find himself compelled by organized religion,
and when he's pretty young he tells his parents I
don't believe in God, and they let him drop out. Right.
They don't seem to have fought him on this right,
not longer. Not long after that, when after he finishes

(12:48):
the eighth grade, he's like, hey, I don't want to
keep going to high school. I want to drop out.
So he drops out of the ninth grade, and his
dad lets him do this because he's like, yeah, I
actually I hated high school too. I got bullied. Aaron
gets bullied. He's he's mostly thin, but he's kind of
like pudgy around the middle. He has some body image issues,
and he's like, he's too smart. Any kid who's that smart,

(13:09):
it's kind of get bullied. Right. He's a little bitty
and he's weird. He's going to get bullied, you know.
It's also inevitable. And he's like, I don't want to
keep going to high school. I don't think I need this.
So his dad he gets to drop out and he
starts taking college courses at a nearby college. And Aaron
is as good as his word. He is the kind
of autodidact who has a he's got a wide ranging
series of interests, and he's good at teaching himself things,

(13:32):
and unlike a lot of tech wunderkins, he's not just
obsessed with code. That's kind of his first love. But
it's honestly, it's right up there with books. He would
he would read kind of as a young adult, upwards
of one hundred books a year, and he very quickly
gets interested in novels by guys like George Saunders, David
Foster Wallace. These are kind of like some of his
favorites where he comes up short. He's good at teaching

(13:53):
himself anything he's interested in. One of the problems he's
going to have that's kind of a lifelong thing for him,
is he can't focus on anything that's not really his
top obsession at the moment. Right. He doesn't have generally
to kind of long term stay interested in a specific thing.
He doesn't have a lot of discipline, right, And that
lack of discipline is kind of married with a basic
lack of social skills. That again, very much what you'd

(14:15):
expect from a kid whose parents let him drop out
of school to raise himself on the internet. One of
his childhood friends told an interviewer he needed a couple
of years to be stuffed in a locker to get
his social stuff together. And I think his friends being
a little bit, you know, a facetious there, but I
think the point is that it's not that being bullied
is good, but the friction. Experiencing friction and having to
work through it with your peers is good. That is necessary. Right,

(14:38):
You don't need to get beaten the shit out of you,
but you do need friction. You need to You need
to be in situations where like, well I don't like
the people here, but we have to accomplish a thing together.
That's necessary. You know, I'm optimal health.

Speaker 2 (14:49):
I think I'm very glad I went to public school.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
Yeah, same here, you know.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
Like even though yeah, like middle school was a hell
nightmare that I mostly disassociated the entire time.

Speaker 1 (14:58):
Yeah, yeah, I didn't like. But I think it's broadly speaking,
there's there's things you get out of that that are necessary,
and Aaron's not going to get some of that stuff.
This is something that his family's kind of remarked on sense,
So I'm not like, I'm not making this judgment on them.
This is like based on stuff as family members of sex.

Speaker 2 (15:14):
Right, he did not have.

Speaker 1 (15:16):
You know, he has a voracious appetite for knowledge when
he doesn't have as an appetite for like actual food. Right,
he is a famously picky eater. He preferred white and
I think yellow foods and kind of he hated He's
the opposite of Steve Jobs. He hated fruit. He like
wouldn't eat fruit basically, and he pretty much didn't eat
vegetables other than fried potatoes because basically one hundred percent

(15:38):
of people will eat fried potatoes, right, Yeah, no, there's
no Yeah, yeah, I don't know that I've ever met
anyone who won't eat French fries. Yea, so for health
reasons obviously, but like, I don't know any all the
picky eaters. I note, like fries tend to be a
thing there. I don't know. I'm sure there are people
who don't, but that is like weird how many people
are like, yeah, but I'll eat fries.

Speaker 2 (15:57):
Yeah, Like fried carbohydrates are tasty and were most people
are hardwired to understand that.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
Yeah, yeah, it's the like you the I don't know,
this is a tangent, but like when when Europeans realized
there were potatoes and what you could do with them,
there was the sudden like, oh my god, this is
what we've been saying. This is the real gold of
El Dorado is fucking potatoes.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
Totally. Yeah, it's hard it's still hard to imagine Europe
without corn, tomatoes or potatoes.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
Yeah, like it's it is, it is, Yeah, turnips and
I don't know, drinking yourself into an early grave. So
Aarin obviously he benefits from having a dad who's technically inclined.
The two talked regularly about what the Internet was likely
to mean for the future. His dad later said, we
were going online when the web was really in its infancy,

(16:49):
before there were graphical browsers, and very quickly we both
realized that this was something that was going to change everything.
A number of people came to that realization, and many
of them went on to monetize the Internet in ways
that have contributed to a great deal of harm. Aaron's
interests from the beginning had a lot less to do
with money and a lot to do with the sharing
of information. In nineteen ninety nine, at age twelve, he

(17:10):
created the Info Network, a user generated encyclopedia. Wikipedia didn't
launch until two years later, a fact that always seemed
to so again when he's twelve, he creates Wikipedia right like,
with the same basic idea. It doesn't take off Wikipedia does,
and that fact kind of you get the feeling it
kind of peeves him a little bit, he would later

(17:31):
tell an interviewer. It was basically Wikipedia, except long before
Wikipedia had launched. But I was in middle school at
the time, so my site didn't make it into the
New York Times. And that's kind of and he's probably right, right, yeah, Now,
totally Wipedia got the early you know interest And that's why.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
I says something that was in the air I guess,
you know, yeah, which is.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
Nothing against the wikipedi. I don't. I'm not saying the
Wikipedia people ripped Erin's ripped off a twelve year old,
but it shows you. It shows you not just how
smart he is, but like where his mind is going
in terms of what people can get out of the
Internet and should get out of the Internet. Right, And
you know, Wikipedia, not that there aren't some critiques of it,
but like one of the very best things the Internet's

(18:08):
ever produced, one of the most important and useful things
the Internet's ever.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
Made, and one of the only artifacts from this time,
the time when the Internet was going to make us
more free instead of less free.

Speaker 1 (18:22):
Yes, and one of the only ones that has not,
I don't think in any meaningful sense, because like Google
is was at one point, a pretty wonderful tool and
has been deeply corrupted and polluted. I don't feel like
Wikipedia has I'm very pro Wikipedia. Again, there's issues with it,
you know, that's a separate topic, but pretty wonderful contribution.
So anyway, you know, the fact this errands Wikipedia does

(18:45):
not take off, but it does earn him a significant
degree of early recognition. He became a finalist for the
rs Digital Prize, which recognized young people who built valuable
non commercial websites. He wins a thousand bucks for this,
and he wins a trip to MIT, where for the
first time he meets some of the genius coders and
engineers he admired in person. Now, Aaron had already started

(19:06):
communicating online with some of the luminaries in his field,
but meeting guys like Philip Greenspun, who developed one of
the very first photo sharing sites and is kind of
he's a pioneer in the concept of how digital communities
are going to work. He's he's a guy who is thinking,
lays a lot of the groundwork for what becomes social media.
You know, Aaron has his first conversations with this guy

(19:27):
about the open source movement, which is popular among the
nerds who are still the center of gravity in online technology,
and he becomes entranced. He decides he wants to join
the World Wide Web Consortium today it's the main international
standards organization for the Internet, and he has turned down
for joining because he's thirteen years old, Right, you know,

(19:50):
they're like, well, we don't we don't let you know,
this is like, yeah, we don't let their dan the
yarrel's in. I don't think they're trying to be shitty,
they're just yeah, it's a sensible rule for a kid
who's not Aaron. Aaron refuses to take no for an answer,
and I'm going to quote from a write up in
The New Yorker here. Undaunted, he read through the rules
of the Consortium and found that every member was allowed
to send a delegate. He looked through the lists to

(20:11):
find somebody who hadn't sent a delegate, and he found one,
the HTML Writer's Guild. He emailed the group and asked
if he could participate in a W three C work
group as its delegate, and it had no objection. So
he kind of finds a sideways way in. Right, he
hears there's a rule against this. He finds a way
around it. You know, this is going to be a
pattern in his life. This willingness, first off, an unwillingness

(20:32):
to take no for an answer he doesn't think there's
a good reason for it, and second an unwillingness to
listen to rules that he thinks are stupid. Right, that's
going to characterize a lot of his future. Another thing
that's going to characterize his life from this point forward
is an understanding that unpleasant aspects of life, specifically the
bureaucracies that we all have to engage in to some
extent to survive, can be avoided. Right, And this is

(20:56):
the thing that has positive and negative outcomes for him. Right.
His dad's going to later trace the attitude back to
his upbringing and the decision he made to let Aaron
drop out of school. Quote, this is his father. He
also never learned to do anything that he didn't want
to do. College is very important that you're forced to
study stuff you're not interested in. But he hated the
bureaucracy of it, the dumb rules, the pointless assignments. He

(21:16):
just rejected that. It was like getting him to eat vegetables.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
I wonder how much this is like father self blaming,
not to spoil anyone who has that. I only know
the like Cliff Snows. Yeah, of this man's story, I
think it makes it based on his life.

Speaker 1 (21:32):
I think he's probably kind of accurately describing his son. Right.

Speaker 2 (21:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
This isn't a big track because Aaron accomplishes, spoiler a
lot of shit in the time that he's around. But
I think this is fair. He does not. He is
someone who's who's rarely going to stick with a project
for very long. And I think it is because and
he's also someone who he kind of freezes up when
he is sort of confronted with a lot of the
realities bureaucracy because he just doesn't have to. He's most

(21:56):
of his life able to get away from it, right. Yeah,
And again there's a lot of value in understanding. I
run into this with some of my friends who kind
of were more on the anarchist punk side of thing.
When when you have to deal with the legal system
and stuff, because I've had a lot more dealings with
it where it's like there's just ways that you have
to approach it to deal with it. It's the same
thing with talking to when when my close friends or

(22:19):
whatever have an issue with like a company they need
to get like a refund or something. I know how
to talk to representatives and shit to make things happen, right,
I just I have learned that shit over the years.
It's a skill.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
Well, it's like when cops are messing with you and
you have to like you have to shut the fuck up,
but you have to do it politely and respectfully.

Speaker 1 (22:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (22:38):
You know, like there are ways to navigate every system
of power, and often the smartest thing to do is
to navigate it rather than just fight every aspect of
it every turn.

Speaker 1 (22:49):
Yeah. There's this moment during early on in the protests
in Portland where you know, we were filming some people
getting arrested and the police said that they were going
to arrest me and my media partner. There were a
couple of protesters behind us and they're like, you're all
under arrest and I was like, what are we under
arrest for? And he said for curfew violation because the
mayor had put it a curfew, and so I was like, well,
the mayor's curfew exempts media. We're you know, press with

(23:12):
badges and stuff on, and you know there's other people
who's trying to argue with the cops, and I just
you know, yelling at them, and I just kind of
keep engaging him in conversation. He's like, I don't care,
I'm go to arrest you. And finally what I say
is like the mayor has said that we're exempt. Are
you countermanding the mayor's orders? And he's a switch flipped
in his head. Yeah, And not only did my partner
and I not get arrested, but like the protesters behind
us did not because it was just like, yeah, you

(23:36):
had to you have to. Like, it's just this understanding
of how bureaucracy and the people who make up bureaucracy
like function.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
Right, totally.

Speaker 1 (23:42):
Aaron's not going to have a lot of that understanding, right,
he builds he does build a lot more of it
later in his life, but it's he starts out with
less of it than I think even a normal person does,
because he's just he's smart enough to get around it
for so long.

Speaker 2 (23:56):
Yeah, and he's also engaging in the adult world because
a lot of his intelligence levels are at adult levels.
But maybe his like social and other understandings are.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
Exactly yes, and the adults around him are all and
Cory Doctro, who's a friend of his from a very
young age. We'll talk about this because Erin is small,
and as we'll talk about, he's kind of sickly. The
adults around him that he's quickly living in the world
with are very protective of him, and I do think
they're able to kind of shield him from a lot
of these sort of realities of dealing with the system,
you know, so he doesn't build up some of those

(24:27):
skills as early as he maybe otherwise would have. Yeah,
so you know, a lot of positive stuff happening for
him in his early adolescence. A less positive thing that
happens during this time is that when he's twelve, so
kind of the same year he makes his Wikipedia thing,
he's diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. This may help to exchange
to explain some of his pickiness as an eater. Obviously,

(24:50):
it's never a pleasant condition to deal with. Aaron seems
to have particularly struggled. He would often lose days or
entire weeks to abdominal pain intense it would leave him
curled up on the floor. So he's always got this
regular thing in his life where like sometimes he just
won't be able to work because he's got he's in
so much pain. You know, this is a regular thing

(25:12):
he struggles with. That said, when he's able to work,
he's so much smarter than most people that he still
accomplishes much more than people who are not dealing with
this kind of physical stuff, right well accomplish. In August
of two thousand, Aaron finds himself on an email discussion
thread for a group of programmers who are designing something
called RSSI, which stands for Real Simple Syndication. It is

(25:35):
a web feed that lets users build their own news aggregators,
like pushing content from various sites into a single feed.
And it's also it's one of the backroun like foundational
technologies of the Internet. Every website you go to basically
uses RSS to push, you know, and collect and stuff
the things that they're publishing on a regular basis. You know,

(25:56):
this is one of the most significant develop lipments in
the early Internet, right if you're thinking about like the
invention of like electricity, it's almost like a power transformer,
I think might be a good way to describe it.
It is absolutely foundational to how the Internet is used. Yeah, yeah,
so Aaron is going to be, and there's a whole

(26:18):
team of people. All of the others of him are
adults who are working on this, but he's going to
be one of them, right, So he gets into this group,
and again it's just kind of the nerds that find
themselves are working on this. They're all handling different parts
of the project. And Aaron quickly becomes involved. And I
think everyone who was there agrees he contributed. It's not

(26:39):
like he did not invent RSS, right, A lot of
people did, but his contributions were substantial to this thing
that is a fundamental undergirding of how the Internet functions today.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
Right.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
And while this is happening, while he's working on this project,
aspects of an ideology start to take shape in him
based on his interactions with these other people who are
both coders and also hackers, right, because at this period
in the Internet, they're pretty much the same thing.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
Right.

Speaker 1 (27:05):
All the people who are building these are also hackers,
you know. And I'm going to quote from an article
in the New Republic. This ethos carried its own ideology,
the ideology of free flowing information, or open access, as
it became known. A self taught computer savant rarely felt
more helpless than when he was cut off from the
websites and books he used to navigate the world. Without them,
he couldn't learn what he needed to earn a living,

(27:27):
much less invent some disruptive technology. I'd skipped college, says
Kevin Burton, who first met Schwartz through the RSS group.
The fact that I couldn't access materials available to college
students was why open access was always important to me.
So Aaron is an not a what did act? So
are a lot of these guys, and he goes from
just kind of like this is just how it I
am and how I learned to thinking about this more

(27:50):
long ideological lines. Right, this is not just a thing
for me, but this is a thing for other people. Right.
This is fundamental to allowing human beings to progress. Is
making sure that information is accessible. I know, yeah, as
much as possible. If you go through enough recollections of
Erin during this period, people who were in this working
group with him will note that he was again, he
could be a little bit of a brat, right. His

(28:11):
questions are always good, but he could be kind of haughty.
He could be kind of aggressive sometimes, and how he
asked them, you know, he has a lot of this attitude.
He doesn't understand where you're doing something. He's like, why
are we doing this? Does this doesn't seem like the
best thing to do? What about doing this? This is
coming from a mix of genuine curiosity and he's he's
he could be a little bit of snotty, right like
he's he's a kid, you know, yeah, yeah, And he
also he also this is you know, not entirely a

(28:33):
negative thing. He fundamentally he doesn't have kind of a
baseline level of respect based on people having greater experience, right,
because he doesn't have this assumption that that means they
know more than him, and often they don't, you know,
right anyway, you know who does know more than all
of us?

Speaker 2 (28:52):
The concept of potatoes the.

Speaker 1 (28:55):
Potato, I mean, yes, the potatoes are are wise indeed,
but the sponsors of this pod cast no more than anything.
So listen to them and do whatever they tell you.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
Let them sprout in your mind like a potato in
a dark drawer.

Speaker 1 (29:09):
Or very true or literally don't and we're back. So
you know again, Aaron still a kid, And obviously while
he could be kind of a little maybe a little
embrace of sometimes that doesn't turn anyone off from working
with him, and in fact, his collaborators who know him

(29:29):
only from his kind of not quite an honest but
they don't know who he is, right, responses are are
only put out because they do in person meetings regularly
for members of this group, and he doesn't make any
of the in person meetings. And yeah, and so I'm
asking like, hey, man, like why don't you ever show
up whenever we meet in person? He's like, well, i'd

(29:52):
have to ask my parents because I'm fourteen. And then
they're like, oh shit. I had a version that happened
with Garrison when we started like working with them, right,
like one of our mutual friends, like we had been
hanging out with them, you know, after a horrible riot
where all nearly got arrested, and like the next day,
our friend texts me and is like, do you know
that they're seventeen? I was like no, in fact I

(30:12):
did not.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
Oh shit, that's how you learned. Yeah, yeah, I used
to hitchhike with my friend who had a note from
their from her parents being like, yes, I know what
my daughter is doing. It's fine.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
At this point, you know, they start he starts being
able to show up in person more often. These people,
I think Corey doctro is on this list recognize like
real life and they're all blown away by like how
smart this kid, how young? And again they have this
kind of it's this mix of this feeling like we
need to protect this kid and also this kid is
the fucking future, right yeah, and so he is kind

(30:47):
of immediately ushered in and adopted almost by some of
the most luminous names in technology, right he. But he
meets and becomes to some extent a little bit of
a protege of a guy named Tim berners Lee. Berners
Lee is an MIT professor. He invented the world Wide Web.
This is not one of those things when people say
so and so invented this and it's like bullshit. It's like,
well they invented no, no, he The world Wide Web

(31:09):
is Tim berners Lee's invention. He created this, right, He,
in a very literal sense, created this starting in nineteen
eighty nine, he sketches out he's working for CERN at
this point. And here one of the things that CERN,
which is a big research institute. All these colleges, universities,
they all have things that are versions of like what

(31:31):
the Internet is going to be. These electronic communications networks
that allow them to communicate on campus, allow them to
communicate with each other and to some extent with other organizations,
but none of them are built around the same standard,
so letting everything call is a huge fucking mess. And
berners Lee is like, we need a standard solution for

(31:51):
how electronic communication is going to work, and he sketches
out he designs the world Wide Web. That's literally the
thing that he makes, Like, he comes up with a
plan for it's going to be a global web of
individual pages, each of which has their own address. They're
all coded in HTML, and because they're on the same standard,
all of these websites and whatnot can communicate with each other.

(32:14):
This is the foundation of everything that makes the modern
Internet possible. And when berners Lee creates this, he has
this choice, which is that's a patentable idea, right he
could have been the man with the patent for the Internet.
He makes a key decision he chooses not to. He decides,

(32:35):
I am not going to have a patent on this,
so anybody can do this because because he's definitely a
cool dude, right as far as I'm aware of and
as a because he makes this fundamental decision, he's kind
of viewed as a saint within the open source movement
in a lot of ways, right.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
Like not surprising, but it's also a household name.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
Right, Yeah, he's also not a and he's not worth
more money than anyone else in the world could never
conceive of being worth it.

Speaker 2 (33:05):
Yeah, Like, fortunately there's that like thing where money of
only buys happiness up to like seventy K year and
then it just level alone.

Speaker 1 (33:12):
Yeah, so like I'm sure it's up to one hundred
K year and whatever now.

Speaker 2 (33:15):
But yeah, oh yeah, that makes sense. That was like
ten years ago.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
Yeah, berners Lee, you know he choose anyway, he meets
erin early on and is so impressed he basically endorses
him as his heir. Right, this is the kid who's
going to like take the Internet into the future, Like
this is the future of all this stuff that we're
working on. This this really kind of utopian idea of
what connecting the world is going to result in. Right, Yeah,

(33:42):
So this guy, he's so impressed by Aaron he basically
like endorses him as like this is my successor. Right,
this is going to be the guy who takes the
Internet into whatever it becomes in the future. That elevates
Erin immediately. It kind of int like, immediately he's in
the inner circle of people who are inventing the Internet,

(34:02):
which is definitely happening at this period of time, and
Erin gets kind of suddenly thrown into the tech conference
circuit where he is kind of an object of marvel
among the mostly much older men who had helped to
build the foundations of the Internet. There's videos of this
time of him, you know, speaking at conferences and stuff,
and they tend to show Aaron who is absurdly small,

(34:23):
almost especially next to these grown men, giving pretty thoughtful
and complex answers while men decades his seniors sit next
to him on stage. At age fifteen, he sends an
email to a guy named Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is a
legal scholar who is an early prominent activist for what
we call the open Internet, and Lessig is in the

(34:44):
process of inventing something called the creative commons at this point. Right,
Lessig is the creator of the creative comments, which basically
gives creators. You and I've both used creative comments, right, So,
most people who make things that are cool. Yeah, And
it allows creators of all kinds of meat the ability
to copyright their work in ways that allow for adaptation

(35:04):
and distribution much more easily without involving a publisher or whatever. Right.
You don't have to have that, like, you have this
kind of ready made kit for figuring out the rights
status of your work and setting that up. So Aaron
sends this guy an email, and I'm going to quote
from an article in Rolling Stone for what happens next.
Lawrence Lessig, now a professor at Harvard, gave Schwartz his

(35:24):
first job, flying him out to San Francisco to write
code for Creative Comments, a nonprofit that allows users to
copyright the material in less restrictive ways. When the site
celebrated its launch on December sixteenth, two thousand and two,
Schwartz was invited to speak to the crowd of six hundred,
which included Internet luminaries like cred Neumark, the founder of Craigslist.
So Aaron gets up. This is Lessig talking. So Aeron

(35:44):
gets up. He's not even big enough to stand over
the podium, and he explains what the architecture of the
site is, and the audience is just amazed that this
was a fifteen year old kid, So he is. He
helps to create creative comments. It's less ex idea. He
does the coding for it, right, So he is fifteen
teen two of the things that are fundamental underpinnings of
the Internet. To this day, he's had a significant hand

(36:06):
in making RSS and creative comments fifteen years old. Now,
it is worth noting that Lessig is at this point
in time, like a lot of us was, not, like
a lot of people were at this period of time,
one of the wild eyed optimists of the Internet. Right,
he is actually not someone who feels it's inevitable that
the Internet will lead us into a golden age of freedom.

(36:27):
As a legal scholar, he is well aware of the
weapons available to the enemy, and he knows that they
are terrible in nature and inexhaustible nearly in quantity.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
Which makes sense to create something like creative commons because
it's an attempt to keep the Internet on a decent track.

Speaker 1 (36:42):
Yes, exactly, And he's kind of critically and again he'll
have an influence on Aaron, but he is not one
of these people. And like a lot of the people
that Aaron is close to that are making stuff with him,
He's not one of these people who views the Internet
as like this is all fundamentally got to work out
for us. He sees the dangers because he understands the
fucking law. Lawrence had gotten famous in hacker circles for
a book he wrote nineteen ninety nine called Code and

(37:04):
Other Laws of Cyberspace, And again he is a kind
of definitely a visionary. His book argues that programmers are
going to have more influence than laws on the development
of the Internet. And to explain kind of where his
thinking is going and why it is relevant to us today,
I want to read an extended quote from Noah Scheiber
writing for The New Republic, because it describes an extremely

(37:25):
important moment in our early conceptions of the Internet. Quote.
The law could tell you who to associate with and
who not to, but you could always ignore it. If,
on the other hand, a programmer decided it should be
impossible to connect with a certain type of website, the
average person had no way around it. The programmer was god.
Suffice it to say, audiences were intrigued. In the late nineties,

(37:46):
Lessig taught a class about the Internet that was open
to both Harvard law students and MIT engineers. Early in
the term, he asked, how do you know if something
you're doing is wrong. The lawyer said that an action
was wrong if it was against the law. The hackers said,
it was only wrong if you failed to accomplish it.
It was the most fundamental statement of the hacker ethos,
and it seemed, and it teemed with idealism. If it

(38:09):
were possible to increase human welfare through engineering, through delivering
more social interaction or knowledge or happiness to more people
than it would be a moral not to. There was
only one hitch, which Lesseig dutifully explained, but which often
went unheeded. The law would not be standing by idly.
The belief had always been that lawyers can say what
they want and will always have the technology to route

(38:30):
around it, says Been Adida, a programmer who worked with
Lessigan Schwartz. To the hackers, the law was at best anachronistic,
at worst arbitrary, even cruel. Lesseg was one of the
first folks to say, you know the power that code
has over the way people interact online, You would be
foolish to think the law is not going to regulate it.
Adida recalls kind of a key key moment there.

Speaker 2 (38:52):
No, yeah, no, I'm just slept like thinking about it.
I'm like, I mean, what it's like, i mean, it's
all the movie Hackers, right, yeah, yeah, like I mean
obviously doesn't come from the movie Hackers. The movie Hackers
as attempted a representing something. It was like a thing
where like hackers sort of at the time or a
little bit like what the fuck? And then Hackers, like
a couple of years later, I was like, that rules,
that's our fucking legacy, you know. Yeah, but like this

(39:13):
idea that and also this idea that like something is
only wrong if you fail to do it right a
sketchy you know. And it's like it's interesting and you
can see how it was often or often intended as
a force for freedom twenty years ago and is now

(39:34):
that same concept is just.

Speaker 1 (39:37):
Like deeply, let's see what else, right, Yeah. A lot
of people who were hackers, or at least who came
out of the movement that came out of descended from that,
are now into this like dark enlightenment reactionary shit. They're
talking race like, yeah, the there's a fork that is
going to occur in this community, and a lot of
the people in it and what we're talking about, and

(39:59):
you know who we're talking about now. Aaron is certainly
on the side of the light side of that fork, absolutely,
And the fork again, as a spoiler, you could if
you wanted to split the fork at his death when
it occurs.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
Yeah, that makes sense.

Speaker 1 (40:13):
Honestly, you would not be wrong to necessarily when you.

Speaker 2 (40:19):
Say indie media leads to Twitter, leads to Elon Musk Twitter,
you know, like.

Speaker 1 (40:26):
Yep, yeah, exactly. At age seventeen, Aaron is accepted to
Stanford for obvious reasons. Not hard to see how that happens.
Aaron is obviously brilliant. Anyone with eyes can see that
he's going to change the world, and Stanford wants some
of his shine for themselves, right. That is what they do,
that is how they make their bread. But as soon

(40:47):
as Aaron arrives at the elite West Coast school, he
sees it for the sham that it was. He writes
at the time that Stanford is quote an idyllic little
school in California, where the sun is always shining, and
the grass is always green, and the kids are always
out a tan. After three days at Stanford, Aaron decides
to attend a party, he kind of forces himself to go.
An article in The New Republic makes it seem like

(41:08):
this was kind of an anthropological experiment by Aaron, more
of that than an attempt to enjoy himself.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (41:14):
He merely wanted to document the mating rituals of the teenager,
a species that alternatively mystified and horrified him. In my
culture of vaguely technical people, people converse by sharing information
through mutually beneficial discussion and debate, he wrote on his blog.
But the teenager system is altogether different and wholly alien
to them. He is frustrated by more than just a

(41:34):
lack of social skills. Aaron is angry that Stanford required
ID cards with RFID transmitters, which can be used to
track students. He hates the library because of how it's organized.
He thinks it's an efficient and I'm sure he's right
about that. And he was disgusted by the hygiene levels
at the shared student facilities like the laundromat. As a
consequence of this disillusionment, he spends most of his time

(41:56):
in college hanging out with adults, particularly Lawrence Lessig and
friend of the Pod Corey, doctor Rowe Lessig is again
the guy who funded Creative Commons, and Corey is an
activist and a wildly prolific author, very good author. They were,
in short, good influences. But one also has to assume
any seventeen year old who's hanging out with these guys
and out their fellow teenagers, they're not going to get

(42:18):
better at.

Speaker 2 (42:18):
Fitting in, right, Like, yeah, that's fair.

Speaker 1 (42:22):
Not that that's the most important thing, but you know,
that's just a thing that's happening to him, right, And again,
given some of the shit Stanford grads have recently been
responsible for might have been for the best, like those
guy's worse influence and not his fellow Stanford students. So
this is not without stress though, right, The fact that
he is adopted by, welcomed in by all of these

(42:43):
very accomplished adults is not a thing devoid of stress
for him. Right. The sheer odd confidence guys like Tim Berners,
Lee and Lessig have for Schwartz is at that's a
lot to put on the shoulders of a seventeen Yeah, right,
being told you're the future of the Internet, You're going
to be critical in this thing that is we believe
necessary for the development of the human race. To be

(43:04):
told that before you're even seventeen, that's a lot to
have on your shoulders. Right. Aaron has absolutely shown an
appetite for this work, but that doesn't mean there's not
a burden there, right. Lisa Rain, one of Lesseg's aides,
later told New Republic, with his intellect, we wanted to
harness it for good instead of evil. I was worried
that Microsoft would get a hold of him, which, again,

(43:26):
for these adults, not an unreasonable thing to be concerned about.

Speaker 2 (43:30):
Right.

Speaker 1 (43:32):
So, I think, you know, all of this is based
in a pretty wonderful amount of confidence that even love
these guys had for Erin. Doctor Oh again has made
the statement that a couple of times because, in part
because Erin is so small, so vulnerable, you have this
instinctivety to protect him, and this married with this intense
faith in him. I think this led to a situation

(43:52):
where Erin felt a lot of personal responsibility for the
future of the Internet and people at a young age,
and that's going to be difficult for him. That's going
to be an added stress in his life. It is
also worth noting here that Aaron is one of the
most prolific bloggers of his generation. His need to create
pros and work his thoughts and feelings out through the
written word is as strong, if not stronger, than his

(44:13):
desire to code, and in fact, there will be a
point in his life when he's like, I don't I
think I'm done with coding. I want to become an author.
I would rather be like a middling author than a
great coder. Like that's the thing he expresses at a
point that's real.

Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah, did he write much fiction or anything like that?
I guess we'll talk.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
About He had a novel that he kind of repeatedly
worked on that he never I don't think he ever
quite finished it. There's a book of his essays that's out.
He's got this is again. You know, he's still a teenager.
As smart as he is, He's working a lot of
shit out. And one of those things is he has
this deep desire for privacy. All of his friends will
say he had a lot of issues sometimes with his
friends knowing each other because he hated the idea that

(44:52):
people would be talking about him, even if it was positive,
when he wasn't there, Like, he just really had a
gut revulsion of that This was kind of ward in
him with his need to publish every single thing that
he thought on the Internet under his name. Right, this
is a complicated thing for this kid to deal with. Yeah,
and I'm going to quote from Rolling Stone again here.
On his blog, he had told this story about having

(45:13):
a crush on this girl and stalking her. Lessig recalls,
not in a gross way, it was cute. Anyway. He
came to a reception at the law school whe Lessig
was a professor, and I recount this during a conversation.
He takes me aside and he goes, why would you
do that? I said, what do you mean? He said,
tell the secret? I said secret? You blogged it? He said, yeah,
well I blogged it, meaning I blogged it for the
people who read my blog. I didn't blog it so

(45:34):
the whole world would know. And he is he's dealing
with an early version of what we're all going to
deal with as the Internet goes from this thing that
only a few weirdos are on, do this thing that
everyone is on by default, where he's like, you know,
Lesseg's like, well you published this, right, why can't I
talk about this? And he's like, well, I published it
for the Internet, now for the real world.

Speaker 2 (45:52):
I'm very glad that I was an adult before social
media and live journal on show.

Speaker 1 (45:55):
Absolutely Jesus, speaking of Jesus, buy some products. Jesus will
be happy.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
Jesus, We're back.

Speaker 1 (46:12):
So Aaron decides to leave Stanford. He's there like a
year and he decides to bounce, and that next summer
he gets approached by what's called why Combinator, and why
Combinator is an incubator for tech founders.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
Right.

Speaker 1 (46:25):
He had by this point come up with his own
idea for a startup called infogami. This was a kind
of early social media application, but instead of centralizing users
on a one controlled hub, it would allow users to
make their own websites. Right. So, instead of you can
create your own account on this site and share stuff
like you do on Instagram or whatever on the site,
you create your own website and it's your website. I'm

(46:47):
just creating a centralized set of tools for you to
build your own websites.

Speaker 2 (46:50):
Right.

Speaker 1 (46:51):
Schwartz's instincts here show how different he is from a
lot of the other tech genius types coming because they're
all thinking, how can I create a walled garden and
trap people there. That is not at all what he's
thinking now, more of.

Speaker 2 (47:03):
A massimone guy than a Twitter guy.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
Yeah, yeah, definitely, at least ideologically. Now, that's not how
this project's going to end up, because you know, he
moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he starts working on this
project with pretty feverish intensity. While he's doing this, he's
going to intermittently struggle with his illness. You know, this
physical pain increasingly brings about bouts of depression that would
render him unfunctional for weeks at a time. Still, on

(47:29):
the day's Aaron could work again. He's able to accomplish
so much work that it all kind of shakes out
well in the long run. And eventually why Combinator pairs
him with two other founders, para dudes named Steve Huffman
and Alexis o'hanian, who were working on their own product Reddit,
Serena Williams's husband, That's right, yes, Serena Williams's husband. So

(47:51):
they are basically a lot of Aaron's ideas for Infogomi
get folded into Reddit, and you know, Reddit kind of
has started to exist, but it doesn't work it boogie,
it's unstable. It can't be adopted on any meaningful scale
because it's like, it's not good yet. Aaron comes in
and he fixes all of the code, right, and so
he becomes one of the founders of Reddit, which is,

(48:13):
of all of the big modern social media sites, the
closest to the old Internet. It still exists on the
new one.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
And it's funny because reddithead this reputation of like being
the incubator of bad ideas, but compared to everything that
came after, Reddit's a little haven of like like when
I want to look up a review of a product,
I type thing and then read it, you know.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
Yeah, and if I have a problem, a technical issue
I need to fix something, like, I will find the
answer on Reddit before I find it on Google these days, right,
I mean, I use Google, but I type the question
and Reddit on it exactly find useful shit like it is.
It is, for all of its flaws, still one of
the best things on the Internet. Yeah, so at this
point he is he is helping to invent Reddit, He

(48:56):
has helped to invent RSS, He has helped to invent
the creative commons. Right, nineteen year old kid, you know,
kind of verging on I think twenty. At this point,
his contributions are undeniable. But for the other folks at Reddit,
his co founders, he is becomes increasingly frustrating to work
with because while when he's working he gets a lot done,

(49:17):
I think in total he gets as much done as anyone.
He has this habit of dropping out of contact for
days or even like a week or so at a time,
and like hiding in his apartment. And when he does it,
he's just reading books NonStop generally, or he's in too
much pain to do much, but he doesn't. He's not
good at communicating with the team about this stuff.

Speaker 2 (49:35):
So, like, you know, that's it.

Speaker 1 (49:36):
I don't think the Reddit guys are wrong, Like, yeah,
it was kind of a frustration that he would just
get a drop out and that we wouldn't know why. Right.
This is about the time he gets kind of disillusioned
with coding. In a two thousand and six blog post,
he describes writing as his desired purpose in life. The
good news for Aaron is that later that year, Conde
Nast bought Reddit for twelve million dollars, and Aaron receives

(49:59):
an even chunk of the payout. We don't know how
much he gets. He seems not to have told anyone
specifically about it. Probably somewhere a million or north of
a million, right. Yeah, it's enough money, especially back then,
that he does not have to work. You know, he
would eventually have to make more money. Right. You can't
live generally, probably off your whole life, for your whole life,
off a million dollars if you're young. Right, But that's

(50:20):
enough money that he doesn't have to worry about money
for quite a while, right. And it's also you know,
I found this interesting New Yorker article that is kind
of a more a bit of a more critical take
on Aaron and his legacy than some of the others
that talks spends a lot of time talking about how
much he loves money, which I don't think is fair.
It does quote him talking about, you know, making some
kind of bratty statements about like, oh, you know, I

(50:42):
lose that much money in my couch cushions or whatever,
and talk about how cool it is to have like money,
and it kind of makes the claim that like, oh, yeah,
Aaron loved money, which is not borne out by the
rest of his life. I think he just has a
reaction that any nineteen or twenty year old when they
suddenly have a million dollars, which is like, fuck, that's dope.
I don't have to do a thing I don't want
to do anymore sick, which I don't think is I

(51:03):
don't think that's element evidence of him being shallow. Who
wouldn't feel that way? Right?

Speaker 2 (51:07):
Also, like, when you live in capitalism, you're presented as
if it is a video game with a point system,
and the measurement of the point system is money. And
if you are a kid and you believe that that
makes sense, you got told that, you know. But yet
he also was doing all of this work to specifically
under like the fact that his hero is the person

(51:27):
who didn't he didn't lock shit up, you know, like yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
His life past this point is not going to be
defined by him seeking out money. Yeah right, Like that's
ultimately what I'll make the decision based on. Yeah, Like,
I'm sure he was fucking thrilled. Who wouldn't be, right, right, Like,
that doesn't matter how much you hate capitalism. It's great
to have enough money that you don't have to worry
about money anymore. Yeah, totally, my parents knees. Yeah yeah, yeah,

(51:53):
so Kande asked, buys it. They move shit over to
like San Francisco, which thinks where their offices are. He
stays on for a while, right, they make him move
back West to work out of the office, which he hates.
He hates working, he hates the corporate environment. He justlkes
San Francisco. You know, it's not his place. It's not
his kind of lifestyle.

Speaker 2 (52:14):
Right.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
He has a lot of issues adapting to this, not
surprising based on the guy we've known so far. He
meets a woman while he's in San Francisco. She becomes
his girlfriend, a journalist named Quinn Norton. We will talk
about Quinn Norton later. Controversial figure to say the least.
She is a journalist who works with hackers. That's a

(52:35):
lot of for reporting. She's also an anarchist. That's how
she described. I don't know more about the tendency she
subscribes to, but that's how she self describes. And by
this point, according to Quinn, who is very close with him,
at this period, he's growing dissolutioned with his work on Reddit. Quote.
He wasn't sure if he had done a good thing.
He began to see it as a way people wasted time.

(52:56):
So he's got some issues with creating this thing that's
one of the first kind of Web two point zero
sort of foundations. This is also kind of going back
and forth on This is part of what it's going
to become. Another common pattern with Aaron, which is that
he seems to regularly find himself racked with doubt over
whether or not he'd accomplished anything of value in his life. Right.
This is a regular thing for him where he's like,

(53:17):
I don't think I've ever made anything. I think some
of that's just because everything he makes is part of
a team, right, And he's not going to be one
of these guys like fucking Zucker. And that's true of
all of these guys, by the way, all of these
tech luminaries, none of them make anything on The closest
you get is maybe Wosniak, right, who did legitimately sit
down at a cobble together a personal computer. Right, But

(53:38):
like none of these founders make anything on their own,
you know, like that just simply doesn't happen, right, And
like Aaron understands that. I think he feels kind of
insecure about it. But like Aaron is everyone who was
a part of these projects is like, yeah, he was
a big part of them, he'd right, but.

Speaker 3 (53:53):
He didn't invent replace a web like his particular like right, yeah,
Lessig is a guy who, yeah, just invented the world
Wide Web, right, Yeah, you know Aaron seems to have
kind of I don't think it's a constant thing for him,
because he also has these periods like he can be
a little braggy.

Speaker 1 (54:09):
I don't think in an unhealthy way, because he's accomplished
a lot. I think it's just when he's sick, when
he's hurting, when he's dealing with bouts of depression. This
is a thing that comes up with him a lot,
like I don't think I've ever made anything about you, right,
it's irrational. That doesn't stop that, I mean, everyone from happening, right,
right exactly, And maybe that can help you if you
deal with imposter syndem knowing that, like yeah, this guy

(54:31):
who literally no one can deny his contributions to science
and technology felt that way too. So yeah, again, he's
struggling increasingly during this period, and the fact that he
has to work at this office, he's in a place
he doesn't really want to be, contributes to that, and
I'm going to quote from Rolling Stone again. That Christmas,
two months after he'd started working in Redditt San Francisco office,

(54:54):
Schwartz took a trip to Berlin to attend the Chaos
Communication Congress, one of the most popular HA conventions in
the world. On his way back home, he stopped in
Cambridge for a visit when his lifelong stomach troubles asserted themselves,
leaving him writing in pain for several days. On January eighteenth,
two thousand and seven, he wrote a post on his
blog titled A Moment Before Dying, which began there is

(55:14):
a moment immediately before life becomes no longer worth living,
when the world appears to slow down and all its
myriad details suddenly become brightly, achingly apparent. Written as a
short story in the third person, the post described a
young man Erin, who had decided to kill himself for Erin,
and this is him writing. That moment came after exactly
one week of pain, seven days of searing, tormenting agony

(55:37):
that poured forth from his belly. The post alarmed his
Reddit partners. It was the first they had heard from
him in weeks, and it appeared to be a suicide note. Ohanian,
one of the original founders, called the local police department
and officers were dispatched to the apartment. Just before they arrived,
Schwartz snuck out this onto the street, and in the
wake of the incident, went to links to downplay at severity,
changing the original post from Erin to Alyx as if

(55:59):
to make clear that suicide was not something the actual
Erin would ever seriously consider. So that's, you know, shows
you where his head is. That's worrying, right. I'm not
surprised and was concerned by this. I mean, chronic illness
is an It's a real motherfucker yeeah. Now, this plus
the fact that he had not been showing up to

(56:20):
work for long periods of time, is going to be
what precipitates a pretty rapid resignation from Reddit, and in
short order, Erin is a free agent again. His next
project would be his most ambitious, The Open Library. Along
with Brewster Kahl, Alexis Rosi, a, Nan Chappotu, and Rebecca Malamood,
Aaron embarked on a project to collect online digital copies

(56:44):
of every book imaginable. The idea is every book will
have a page to the extent that's possible. The ones
that are open source, that are old enough will have
full scans of the book that you can like search
and read. The books that we don't have access to
will at least have, you know, ideally we'll get a
copy or that people could check out online or something,
but we'll at least have a page for it that
explains who wrote it, what it is, what's in it.

(57:05):
And the online library is still around today. It's one
of the most significant storehouses of knowledge in the history
of the human race. Right, Aaron is foundational in creating
the open library. He's one of the people who helps
to found it. He's only on that, I think for
like a year, maybe a little less, and you know,
he contributes significantly, and then he finds himself drawn in

(57:26):
another direction and kind of bounces. Some of this is
because he gets frustrated with the refusal of big libraries
to share their catalogs. But as call, who's one of
the founders, later told Rolling Stone, Aaron floated, that's how
he worked, and you had to accept it. He didn't
ask to get paid much. He really thought of himself
as a volunteer for the world, and that is what
he does. He'll come into these projects, he'll help with

(57:48):
the founding vision, he'll help make them work, and then
he's going to bounce you know, yea and move on
to the next thing. That's just who he is. That's
how his brain works, that's how he's functional, right, And
you know calls atude is like, yeah, you know, it
would have been nice to have him around for longer,
but he did. He did his bit, and he moved on.
And that's just Aaron. You just have to understand that.

Speaker 2 (58:07):
Well, you know that is.

Speaker 1 (58:14):
Longer, but yeah, he did his bit. So if you're
keeping track, Aaron Schwartz, who is now at the start
of his twenties, I think he's just now able to
drink legally, has played a key role in developing RSS,
in the creation of creative commons, in the creation of Reddit,
and in the creation of the Open Library. Now, what's

(58:34):
most amazing to me about this guy is that at
this point he could have picked a lucrative job for
himself literally anywhere in the tech industry. There is nowhere
that would not have that wouldn't have paid so much.
It hurt to get this guy right. He does not
have any interest in that his heart continually pulls him
towards projects that serve a social good and make knowledge

(58:54):
accessible to as many people as possible. That's not specifically
his goal his entire career, but that's he is right now.
In two thousand and eight, Aarin attends a retreat by
the EIFL, the Electronic Information for Libraries. It's a nonprofit
that seeks to increase access to knowledge in developing economies
around the world. The event, which is held at a

(59:16):
former monastery in Italy, seems to have had a somewhat
evangelical air to it. Erin is perhaps overtaken by the
sense of techno optimism in the air, and it's not
hard to see why. This was the tail end of
the Bush years, this long period of neo con dominance
that is eroding in the face of Barack Obama's presidential campaign,
which is the most optimistic thing Americans had seen in

(59:37):
politics in a generation. At least. Late in the event,
Erin and an unknown number of co writers put together
a document known as the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto. A
number of people contribute, it is unclear how many. It
is unclear who they are. Erin's is the only name
that winds up on the thing right, and it includes
some pretty spicy lines. This is how it opens. Information

(01:00:00):
is power, but like all power, there are those who
want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire as
scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries and books and
journals is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a
handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring
the most famous results of the sciences, you'll need to
send enormous amounts to publishers like read Elviser, and the

(01:00:21):
document points out one of the things that's happening here
is a lot of these publishers. The information in them
is maybe in a lot of cases open source. It's
publicly funded studies. But unless you're able to get to
one of the libraries that has it, you have to
pay to get access to the documents that it's You
have to pay his service like jstore to get access
to it. And Aaron's like, that's fucking bullshit. You know,

(01:00:43):
like this is our information, and you know, obviously the
other stuff I think should be shared too. The document
points out that open access, if successful, would only ensure
ongoing access for future publications, while the total of published
work up to the point that open access becomes a
thing would remain locked up. The document decries this as
too high a price to pay, and then asks rhetorically,

(01:01:05):
what can we do about this? Quote those with access
to these resources, students, librarian, scientists, you have been given
a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of
knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out.
But you need not. Indeed, morally you cannot keep this
privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it
with the world, and you have trading passwords with colleagues,

(01:01:26):
filling download requests for friends. So he is basically saying
what people are already doing, have access to the stuff
to their buddies, we need to do for the world.
We need to do this to give access, particularly to
people in the global South. You do not have the
infrastructural access to this stuff in the same way that
people can kind of wangle their way into getting it
in the United States. In Europe. This is controversial among

(01:01:50):
his colleagues at this conference. These are all people who
believe in open access, but they are people who work
within the system for legal nonprofit organizations. Aaron is saying
some hackers here right what he is saying could be
read as an incitement to illegal activity, which.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
Is good positive.

Speaker 1 (01:02:07):
I totally agree, yeah, that this is controversial among people
who are like, we are working within the system and
this we see this as potentially kind of dangerous right now,
the fact that this is controversial among them, it's not
wildly different in tone from a lot of hacker pros
that has come out in the nineties and early two thousands.
And you know, eventually, whatever hubbub there is from this

(01:02:27):
kind of passes and life goes on for a while,
and that's where we're going to end for part one
of this episode. Magpie, how are you feeling?

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):
I feel great because I know that only positive things
are coming in the future. And yep, I really the
main thing that I know about is this open access
stuff about arn Schwartz, and I as someone who also
has never I've never had institutional access to this knowledge,
and I do a lot of history research and things

(01:02:57):
like that, so I've always been very appreciative of I
don't know how to phrase this carefully. I like open access,
That's what I'll say. And I think that it's an important,
important thing like that. It is just actually true, and
especially talking about it in terms of like how it
impacts people in the global South, like where you can't like,

(01:03:19):
you know, I don't go to a fancy college, but
I know some people go to fancy colleges, and so
I just am like, hey, what do you think about
this one thing? You know?

Speaker 1 (01:03:26):
Yep. So well, that's the podcast. We'll be back next
week for the conclusion.

Speaker 2 (01:03:32):
Oh about Santa Claus.

Speaker 1 (01:03:35):
All right, everybody, thanks for listening. We's done zo bye.
Behind the Bastards is the production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Christmas Hero Episode: Aaron Swartz