The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz

property, is another one of those terms cooked up to make us think of intellectual works the same way we think of physical items. But the two are very different. You can’t just punish people because they took away a “potential sale.” Earthquakes take away potential sales, as do libraries and rental stores and negative reviews. Competitors also take away potential sales. One reason people might be buying less CDs is because they’re spending their money on DVDs. Or, as Philip Greenspun has argued, they’re spending their time on cell phones.

Thomas Jefferson? Judging from his letter to Isaac McPherson, Jefferson’s thoughts are thus: No one seriously disputes that property is a good idea, but it’s bizarre to suggest that ideas should be property. Nature clearly wants ideas to be free! While you can keep an idea to yourself, as soon as you share it anyone can have it. And once they do, it’s difficult for them to get rid of it, even if they wanted to. Like air, ideas are incapable of being locked up and hoarded. And no matter how many people share it, the idea is not diminished. When I hear your idea, I gain knowledge without diminishing anything of yours. In the same way, if you use your candle to light mine, I get light without darkening you. Like fire, ideas can encompass the globe without lessening their density. Thus, inventions cannot be property. Sure, we can give inventors an exclusive right to profit, perhaps to encourage them to invent new useful things, but this is our choice. If we decide not to, nobody can object. Accordingly, England was the only country with such a law until the United States copied her. In other countries, monopolies may be granted occasionally by special act, but there is no general system. And this doesn’t seem to have hurt them any—those countries seem just as inventive as ours.

But it’s also worth pausing to ask: what was any of this supposed to achieve? Imagine, for some strange reason, members of Congress didn’t bother avoiding the spotlight. Every day, we saw them, in full HD video, taking money from prominent businessmen. Do we really think even this (far-fetched) instance of transparency would change much? After all, most Americans already think Congress is corrupt. Most Americans think money actually buys politicians’ votes. Seeing it happen in video might be striking, and maybe make for some good segments on the evening news (or, these days, some viral YouTube videos), but would it really change anything? After a couple weeks of chatter, and perhaps a few grandstanding legislative proposals, I suspect it’d just fade into the background.

It’s about blood and war and power, not evidence and argument and policy. (I have one friend who was startled to learn that when members of Congress debate an issue on C-SPAN, they’re speaking not to each other but to cameras in a largely empty room.) I don’t want this to sound overly harsh. The truth is, it’s really hard to do effective philanthropy. With a little work, you could mount a similar critique of the vast majority of our bumbling efforts to do good. Most ideas for helping people that seem reasonable in the abstract turn out to fall apart upon close confrontation with reality. The real question is what happens then. There’s no shame in admitting your mistakes, learning from them, and trying again. Indeed, as my old professor Carol Dweck has shown, that’s the only real route to success. But most of us are too vain or too proud to take that route. We insist that the purity of our intentions reduces the need for careful scrutiny of our effects. Or we try to make ourselves feel better by grasping at any factoid that suggests we had an impact.

Now, the typical way you make good things happen in Washington is you find a bunch of wealthy companies who agree with you. Social Security didn’t get passed because some brave politicians decided their good conscience couldn’t possibly let old people die starving in the streets. I mean, are you kidding me? Social Security got passed because John D. Rockefeller was sick of having to take money out of his profits to pay for his workers’ pension funds. Why do that, when you can just let the government take money from the workers? Now, my point is not that Social Security is a bad thing—I think it’s fantastic. It’s just that the way you get the government to do fantastic things is you find a big company willing to back them. The problem is, of course, that big companies aren’t really huge fans of civil liberties. You know, it’s not that they’re against them; it’s just there’s not much money in it.

in Privacy, Accuracy, Security: Pick Two

when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love—because if you don’t love it, you

are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don’t like to do things they aren’t ‘good’ at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don’t possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.”

Learning is like compound interest. A little bit of knowledge makes it easier to pick up more. Knowing what addition is and how to do it, you can then read a wide variety of things that use addition, thus knowing even more and being able to use that knowledge in a similar manner.‡ And so, the growth in knowledge accelerates.

This is why children who get started on something at a young age, as Mozart did, grow up to have such an advantage. I’ve always thought that this was the reason kids (or maybe just me) especially disliked history. Every other field—biology, math, art—had at least some connection to the present and thus kids had some foundational knowledge to build on. But history? We simply weren’t there and thus know absolutely nothing of it. It was tempting to write that “the rate of growth” accelerates, but that would mean something rather different. And even if (highly implausibly) we were able to control the circumstances in which all children grew up so as to maximize their ability to perform the most important tasks, that still would not be enough, since in addition to aptitude there is also interest

Many people, of course, are uninterested in such things precisely because they aren’t very good at them. There’s nothing like repeated failures to turn you away from an activity. Perhaps this is another reason to start young—young children might be less stung by failure, as little is expected from them

And this, in short,‡ is the position I find myself in. I don’t want to be a programmer. When I look at programming books, I am more tempted to mock them than to read them. When I go to programmer conferences, I’d rather skip out and talk politics than programming. And writing code, although it can be enjoyable, is hardly something I want to spend my life doing. Well, shorter than most DFW. Perhaps, I fear, this decision deprives society of one great programmer in favor of one mediocre writer. And let’s not hide behind the cloak of uncertainty; let’s say we know that it does. Even so, I would make it. The writing is too important, the programming too unenjoyable. And for that, I apologize.

You’ll probably never run for Congress. For starters, I bet you’ve never even considered it. Isn’t running for Congress a job for celebrities, larger-than-life figures, people with big egos and an unquenchable thirst for power? But that’s just the problem: the sort of people who want to run for office tend to be terrible officeholders. As Gore Vidal put it, “Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.”

One theory of the ideal politician is of some kind of selfless public servant. Such a representative would fairly represent local interests, listening to their constituents and faithfully fighting for their views in the Capitol. They use their judgment and shared values to decide what’s best for the people they represent. But such a man can only exist in a world devoid of conflict. If there are no deep policy disputes, then legislating is easy. But in most modern American communities, this is pure fancy. There are rich and poor, corporations and unions, left and right. Their demands are serious—and typically irreconcilable. No representative can faithfully represent their common interests because on the biggest questions of public concern there simply is no common interest. As a result, the notion of “a national interest” is inevitably hijacked by the dominant group in society. Reagan, for example, claimed his opponents represented the special interests: women, poor people, workers, young people, old people, ethnic minorities—in short, most of the population. (“This confusion allows Reagan to treat the exploited as exploiters by contrasting the people with the ‘special interests.’”)† As a result, the people who claim to be simply representing their district end up playing something like the role Domhoff ascribes to the town newspaper:

Instead of fighting for a shared objective, the “rational” politician is driven by incentives. He does not vote the way he thinks is best for his constituents, but simply the way he thinks is most likely to get him reelected. If there’s something he believes is right, but is unpopular, he will drop it. Given a difficult decision, he’ll conduct a poll. And as his electorate changes, so do his views. He’ll tack to an extreme for the primary, then back to center for the general election. The rational choice politician is an easy fellow to corrupt. If a special interest can help him win reelection, he’ll work for the benefit of that interest. But even beyond such blatant corruption, his whole view of his constituency is warped by his quest for victory. He doesn’t care about the people who live in his district, he cares merely about the ones that vote. And in the U.S., that means the wealthy: in a typical election, about 35% of the poorest quintile turns out; that number is 71% for the richest quintile.†

Today we have one representative for every 208,000 voters. Even if we again assume only a quarter will vote in the primary, that’s still 50,000 people. Just to have a three-minute conversation with each of them would be a year’s worth of work—and that’s assuming that they were all lined up to talk to you, with no downtime in between conversations. So instead of talking with voters, you talk at them: through TV ads and postal mailers and signs along the street. And all those things cost money. Instead of finding your friends and neighbors electing you to run, you throw fund-raisers for the wealthy and try to prove to them you have the right stuff. Just as with candidates, we can imagine three different types of wealthy people involved in politics: the self-described public servant, who wants to support candidates that will actually help out the community; the cynical operator, who gives money to those who give him profitable laws in return; and the ideologue, who supports the candidates who believe in the same strong values they do

It is this—the filter—that is crucial. Everyone in Congress, everyone running for Congress could be a total saint, the perfect public servant, voting only in accordance with their genuine beliefs about what was best for their constituents, and the place would still be hopelessly corrupt. Because the issue is not just that the politicians skew their votes toward the whims of the wealthy once they’re in office, but that politicians who do not share the wealthy’s views never make it that far

Enter the political consultant. Wherever there are unworldly people with pockets full of cash, there are unscrupulous professionals eager to lighten the load. Politics is no different. Like piranhas smelling blood, the candidate is quickly surrounded by consultants eager to help.

It used to be, Keynes says, that wealthy men just thought investing was the manly thing to do. They weren’t going to sit around and calculate what kind of bonds yielded the greatest expected return. Bonds are for wusses. They were real men. They were going to take their money and build a railroad. But they don’t make rich people like that anymore. Nowadays, they put their money in the stock market. Instead of boldly picking one great enterprise to invest in, they shift their money around from week to week (or hire someone else to do it for them). So these days, it’s the stock market that stimulates most new investment. But how does the stock market figure out what profits are supposed to be? In truth, it has no more clue than you do. It’s really just based around a convention. We all pretend that whatever the stock price is now is a pretty decent guess and then we only have to worry about the various factors that will cause the stock price to change. We forget about the most basic fact: that nobody has any clue what the stock price should be to begin with. So instead of people trying their best to figure out which businesses will make money in the future, and investing in those, we have people trying to figure out which stock prices will change in the future, and trying to get there first. It’s like a giant game of musical chairs—everybody’s rushing not to be the one left standing when the music stops.

markets get, the faster people can move their money around and the more trading is based on this kind of speculation instead of serious analysis. And that’s scary because—recall—the whole point of the stock market is to decide the crucial question of what we, as a society, should build for the future. As Keynes says, “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.” The best solution is probably a small tax on each trade. Not only would this raise a ton of money (modern estimates suggest even a tiny tax could raise $100 billion a year), it would help redirect all the brains on Wall Street from these wasteful games of musical chairs to something actually useful.

useful, like food and clothing. So those are Keynes’ prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time—from around the 1940s to the 1970s—that’s kind of what we did. The results were magical: the economy grew strongly, inequality fell away, everyone had jobs. But, starting in the 1970s, the rich staged a counterattack. They didn’t like watching inequality—and their wealth—melt away. There was a resurgence in classical economics, Keynes was declared to have been debunked, and interest rates were raised drastically, throwing millions out of work. The economy tanked, inequality soared, and things have never been the same since. For a while people talked about levels of inequality that hadn’t been seen since the 1920s. Then they talked about a recession the size of which hadn’t been seen since the 1930s. Once again, Keynes provides us with the instructions on how to get out of this mess. The question is whether we’ll follow them.

American intelligentsia, though less harshly and clumsily regulated than its Soviet counterpart, has been no less effectively subordinated to the goals of the state.” (I would add only that the domestic economy is structured to make the majority of the population expendable servants of the rich)

The government of a republic, James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 39 (“Conformity of the Plan to Republican Principles,” 1788), must “be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic.” Looking at our government today—a House of professional politicians, a Senate filled with multimillionaires, a string of presidential family dynasties—it seems hard to maintain that our officials are in fact “derived from the great body of the society” and not “a favored class” merely posing as representatives of the people. Unless politics is a tradition in your family, your odds of getting elected to federal office are slim. And unless you’re a white male lawyer, you rarely get to vote for someone like yourself in a national race. Nor, in reality, do we have an opportunity to choose policy positions: no major candidates support important proposals that most voters agree with, like single-payer health care.

One of the most compelling visions for rebooting democracy adopts this system of abstraction for politics. Parpolity, developed by the political scientist Stephen Shalom, would build a legislature out of a hierarchical series of nested councils. Agreeing with Madison, he says each council should be small enough that everyone can engage in face-to-face discussion but large enough that there is a diversity of opinion and the number of councils is minimized. He estimates the right size is 25 to 50 people. So, to begin with, let us imagine a council of you and your 40 closest neighbors—perhaps the other people in your apartment building or on your block. You get together every so often to discuss the issues that concern you and your neighborhood. And you may vote to set policy for the area which the council covers. But your council has another function: it selects one of its own to send as a representative to the next council up. There the process repeats itself: the representative from your block and its 40 closest neighbors meet every so often to discuss the political issues that concern the area. And, of course, your representative reports back to the group, gets your recommendations on difficult questions, and takes suggestions for issues to raise at the next area council meeting.

By the power of exponents, just five levels of councils, each consisting of only fifty people, is enough to cover over three hundred million people. But—and this is the truly clever bit—at the area council the whole process repeats itself. Just as each block council nominates a representative to the area council, each area council nominates a representative to the city council, and each city council to the state council, each state council to the national council, and so on. Shalom discusses a number of further details—provisions for voting, recalls, and delegation—but it’s the idea of nesting that’s key. Under such a system, there are only four representatives who stand between you and the people setting national policy, each of whom is forced to account to their constituents in regular, small face-to-face meetings. Politicians in such a system could not be elected through empty appeals to mass emotions. Instead, they would have to sit down, face-to-face, with a council of their peers and persuade them that they are best suited to represent their interests and positions.

Take, for example, trade policy. The conservative nanny state is more than happy to sign free trade agreements that let manufacturing jobs in the United States flee offshore. And they’re happy to let immigrant workers come into the country to replace dishwashers and day laborers. But when it comes to the professional class, like doctors, lawyers, economists, journalists, and other professionals, oh no!, the conservative nanny state does everything it can (through licensing and immigration policy) to keep foreign workers out.

in Introduction

Two years ago this summer I read a book that changed the entire way I see the world. I had been researching various topics—law, politics, the media—and become more and more convinced that something was seriously wrong. Politicians, I was shocked to discover, weren’t actually doing what the people wanted. And the media, my research found, didn’t really care much about that, preferring to focus on such things as posters and polls. As I thought about this more, its implications struck me as larger and larger. But I still had no bigger picture to fit them in. The media was simply doing a bad job, leading people to be confused. We just had to pressure them to do better and democracy would be restored. Then, one night, I watched the film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (I think it had come up in my Netflix queue). First off, it’s simply an amazingly good film. I’ve watched it several times now and each time I’m utterly entranced. It

South Korea, the country with the highest rate of broadband adoption, politics has been turned upside down by OhmyNews, a five-year-old website. Founded by Oh Yeon Ho, OhmyNews has a feature unlike any other paper: more than 85% of its stories are contributed by readers. Almost anyone can write for OhmyNews: the site posts 70% of all stories that are submitted, over 15,000 citizen-reporters have published stories. OhmyNews copyedits their work but tries to leave their differing styles intact. The citizen-reporters write about things they know about and that interest them; together they end up covering most of the traditional spectrum. Yet their new voices end up providing coverage on things which typically get ignored by the mainstream media.†

Aaron was nothing if not a compulsively curious and hardworking person, yet, as these pages make viscerally clear, he felt profoundly stifled in school. He laments the ways time is wasted, important topics are trivialized, and teachers are forced by the administration to fixate on testing instead of teaching for its own sake, which means that students become correspondingly blinkered, obsessed with passing or failing instead of getting truly absorbed in the subject at hand.

So what is it schools are really doing if not educating the next generation? Well, just look at what’s left over: schools are places where kids must show up every day at 8 a.m. for years on end, sit at uncomfortable desks under fluorescent lighting with a group of relative strangers, and obey arbitrary instructions from their superiors about the appropriate way to carry out repetitive intellectual assignments. Even a casual glance at a modern office will show you that these are skills very much in demand. Ask employers what they want from their employees, and they don’t say academic brilliance. Indeed, in the 1970s employers were complaining that their workers were too educated, causing “unrealistic job expectations.” The resulting “poor worker attitudes” led to “productivity and quality problems and (in some cases) to outright sabotage.”† Instead, employers ask for “character”: “a sense of responsibility, self-discipline, pride, teamwork, and enthusiasm.” In other words, employers want people they can rely on to do their work with pride and enthusiasm—and certainly not people who would engage in misbehavior and sabotage.

And looking at workers who are liked by their bosses finds they have basically the same traits as those students who are liked by their teachers: “consistent attender,” “dependable,” “identifies with job/school,” a willingness to quit, and “prosocial attitudes”—i.e., a willingness to do more for the boss.• Edwards 1977. In short, schools don’t really teach kids anything because they’re not about really teaching kids anything. They’re about teaching kids to stay quiet, do their work, and show up on time. This isn’t an accident. This was the plan all along.

in School

So why did the mill owners spend so much money building and running these schools? They were quite clear about their intent. The classes were justified not for their usefulness but because memorizing them was a form of “moral education” leading to “industrious habits . . . and the consequent high moral influence which it exerts upon society at large.” As one Lowell manager explained it, “I have never considered mere knowledge, valuable as it is in itself to the laborer, as the only advantage derived from a good common-school education. I have uniformly found the better educated, as a class, possessing a higher and better state of morals, more orderly and respectful in their deportment, and more ready to comply with the wholesome and necessary regulations of an establishment.” Not only were those who went through school better at following rules, but they were less likely to stir up trouble: “In times of agitation I have always looked to the most intelligent, best educated, and the most moral for support and have seldom been disappointed . . . . But the ignorant and uneducated I have generally found the most troublesome, acting under the impulses of excited passion and jealousy.” In other words, “that class of help which has enjoyed a good common-school education are the most tractable, yielding most readily to reasonable requirements, exerting a salutary and conservative influence in times of excitement, while the most ignorant are the most refractory.”† In short, “the owners of manufacturing property have a deep pecuniary interest in the education and morals of their help.”

I can hear the objections now. “That’s a conspiracy theory!” they cry. As a simple factual matter, that’s badly mistaken. A conspiracy theory is the notion that a small group of people have, in secret, managed to subvert the way things normally work. What I’m talking about is exactly the opposite: it’s a large group of people, working in public, making sure things keep going the way they normally keep going.

The effect on the students is almost heartbreaking. Taught that reading is simply about searching contrived stories for particular “text features,” they learn to hate reading. Taught that answering questions is simply about cycling through the multiple-choice answers to find the most plausible ones, they begin to stop thinking altogether and just spout random combinations of test buzzwords whenever they’re asked a question. “The joy of finding things out” is banished from the classroom. Testing is in session. Such drills don’t teach children anything about the world, but it does teach them “skills”—skills like how to follow senseless orders and sit at your desk for hours at a time. Critics of high-stakes testing say that it isn’t working as planned: teachers are teaching to the test instead of making sure kids actually learn. But maybe that is actually the plan. After all, employers seem to like it just fine.

Sure, some of it is self-selection. Leftists are by nature missionaries since, following Rousseau, they believe “man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains,” while conservatives understand that the corruption is in our nature and institutions just reflect it.

leftists go into “missionary professions”: journalism, teaching, politics