Aaron Swartz: The Wunderkind of the Free Culture Movement
On the Media
WNYC Studios
4.6 • 8.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2013, 26-year-old software developer and political activist Aaron Swartz died by suicide. He had been indicted on federal charges after illegally downloading 4.8 million articles from JSTOR, a database of academic journals, and potentially faced a million dollar fine and decades in jail. While his death made headline news, Swartz had long been an Internet folk hero and a fierce advocate for the free exchange of information. In his book, The Idealist, writer Justin Peters places Swartz within the fraught, often colorful, history of copyright in America. Brooke talks with Peters about Swartz's legacy and the long line of "data moralists" who came before him.
Music in this podcast extra:
"Moss Garden" by David Bowie"Heroes" by David Bowie; performed by The Meridian String Quartet"Life On Mars?" by David Bowie; performed by The Meridian String Quartet.
This segment originally aired in our January 15, 2016 program, "Terms of Engagement."
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is on the Media's Midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. January 11th will mark the |
| 0:06.4 | ninth anniversary of the death of Aaron Swartz. The 26-year-old software developer and political |
| 0:13.1 | activist killed himself in his Brooklyn apartment. He'd been indicted on federal charges after |
| 0:19.9 | illegally downloading 4.8 million articles from JSTOR, a database of academic journals, |
| 0:27.8 | and he potentially faced a million-dollar fine and decades in jail. These are the basics of the |
| 0:34.6 | Swartz story, facts that made headlines and introduced much of the world to a computer programming |
| 0:41.1 | prodigy, a fierce advocate for the free exchange of information, a long-time internet folk hero. |
| 0:48.9 | Here's Swartz in a 2011 interview. |
| 0:51.8 | You know, I slowly had this process of realizing that all the things around me, but people had told me |
| 0:56.1 | were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be, it weren't natural at all. |
| 1:00.8 | They were things that could be changed and they were things that more importantly were wrong and |
| 1:04.0 | should change. And once I realized that, there was really kind of no going back. I mean, that is a |
| 1:10.0 | pretty accurate distillation of the way he seemed to have lived his life. I spoke to author Justin |
| 1:15.6 | Peters in 2016 after he'd written his book, The Idealist, Aaron Swartz, and The Rise of |
| 1:22.8 | Free Culture on the internet. The book recounts Swartz's prolific but often troubled life and his |
| 1:29.5 | tragic death, but it's much more than a biography. Peters places Swartz on the long, fraught |
| 1:36.0 | history of copyright in America alongside other so-called data moralists with whom Swartz shared |
| 1:42.5 | key qualities and an unshakable commitment to the idea memorably sloganized by whole Earth |
| 1:50.6 | catalog founders Stuart Brandt that information wants to be free. Information wants to be free |
| 1:57.5 | is only half of it, right? Yeah. The full statement was, information wants to be free because it |
| 2:02.4 | has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine, too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive |
| 2:08.4 | because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away because |
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