Excerpted from The Idealist by Justin Peters.
On July 28, 2011, a week and a half after being indicted, Aaron Swartz posted to his website a working draft of a document modestly titled “How to Save the World, Part 1.” The post, which he shared with only a few friends, synthesized many of his insights into the ways in which the Internet could be used to organize and catalyze meaningful social change. It was an optimistic theme, all things considered. At the time, for all the talk about how online activism could help save the world, Swartz had little firsthand evidence that such an outcome was possible. He had posted the “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” online, and the orthodox open access community had recoiled from it. Despite Swartz’s best efforts to rally opposition to PIPA, the bill had passed unanimously in the Senate Judiciary Committee and, as of July 2011, looked as if it would soon become law. He had worked to help elect progressive Democrats during the 2010 midterm elections; the Democrats ended up losing control of the US House of Representatives. But the revolution will be A/B tested, and maybe even A/B/C/D and E tested, too. In his working paper, Swartz described his new plan for the future of activism. Rather than form a political action group focused on one single issue or tactic, Swartz proposed that organizers should assemble groups of people supremely competent in certain relevant disciplines — investigators, activists, lawyers, lobbyists, policy experts, political strategists, journalists, and publicists — who could combine their efforts and advocate effectively for any issue, big or small. Swartz envisioned a flexible, intelligent, multifaceted task force that would learn from its mistakes and refine its tactics accordingly: a team of specialists that, cumulatively, worked as generalists.
The informal coalition that assembled to successfully protest SOPA and PIPA roughly conformed to Swartz’s vision of a polymathic activist committee. Their success, in a sense, served as a proof of concept. In the spring and summer of 2012, as the federal case against him continued, Swartz spent his time refining that concept further and mulling the best way to build an organization that did not disempower its members.
If Swartz’s model organization already existed, he hadn’t found it yet. He certainly hadn’t been impressed by most of the large systems he had encountered over the years. He had dropped out of high school and college, forced his own departure from Reddit, and left a string of half-finished projects and short-lived collaborations behind him. Since relocating to New York, he had worked briefly at Avaaz, even more briefly at the activist group Change.org, and most recently at the global IT consultancy ThoughtWorks, a job that he seemed to enjoy — but who could tell, really? Swartz’s restlessness had earned him a reputation. “Because he moved from thing to thing fairly rapidly, that actually ended up imposing a cost, so that people were wary about starting a really big project with him because they worried he wouldn’t stick around,” said Ben Wikler. “That was a reasonable concern to have.”
But just as the advice of an escape artist can be useful in building better jails, Swartz’s estrangement from large organizations provided him with meaningful insight into their defects. He wasn’t, however, quite sure yet about the most efficacious way to fix them — not in a sustainable manner, at least. He searched everywhere for solutions. “He was reading all these management books,” said Wikler. “He was reading biographies of Sam Walton and all these people who built big organizations. He spent hours talking about management and how to make teams work.”
On September 12, 2012, the US Attorney’s Office in Boston filed a new indictment against Aaron Swartz. Federal criminal indictments cannot be amended once they are led, so if a prosecutor wants to add new charges, he must file a superseding indictment, which replaces the old one. New information or new developments in a case commonly account for superseding indictments. But the only thing that had changed since the first indictment came down was that Swartz had shown himself willing to vigorously contest the charges.
This superseding indictment, like many sequels, doubled down on the elements that had made its predecessor such a hit. It increased the number of felony charges against Swartz from four to thirteen, and the maximum number of years he faced in prison from thirty-five to ninety-five. As an acquaintance of Swartz’s, Seth Finkelstein, put it on his blog: “as I’ve said before — they don’t like him. They really don’t like him.” If that point hadn’t been made clear before, the superseding indictment left little doubt.
In the first indictment Swartz had been charged with one count each of wire fraud (maximum prison sentence: twenty years), computer fraud (maximum prison sentence: five years), theft of information from a computer (maximum prison sentence: five years), and recklessly damaging a computer (maximum prison sentence: five years). The superseding indictment now charged him with one count of recklessly damaging a computer (maximum prison sentence: five years), two counts of wire fraud (maximum prison sentence: forty years), five counts of computer fraud (maximum prison sentence: twenty-five years), and five counts of unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer (maximum prison sentence: twenty-five years). All but the wire-fraud charges were brought under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The government manufactured these new counts by treating the downloading incidents in September, October, November, December, and January separately — a seemingly gratuitous prosecutorial tactic that reeked of menace and intimidation: “You want to have a trial? Fine, let’s have a trial.”
The Department of Justice counsels US attorneys against ling unnecessary charges against defendants, in the interests of expediency and justice. “The bringing of unnecessary charges not only complicates and prolongs trials, it constitutes an excessive — and potentially unfair — exercise of power,” notes the United States Attorneys’ Manual, which advises federal prosecutors on best practices. The US Attorney’s Office in Boston held no press conference to explain its decision to bring these new charges, but on his website the day after the superseding indictment was announced, Swartz, quoting the philosopher Bertrand Russell, offered an oblique theory on the prosecutors’ motives: “Since power over human beings is shown in making them do what they would rather not do, the man who is actuated by love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure.”
The same day that the superseding indictment was led, Swartz’s father finally met with MIT’s chancellor and general counsel. But he left that meeting feeling as stymied as ever. “First, [Robert Swartz] wanted MIT to make a public statement. This, the Chancellor and General Counsel explained, MIT would not do,” a report noted of the meeting. Confront reality was one of the life strategies Swartz had articulated in Raw Nerve. The reality of his legal situation at the time was that the tactics he had deployed thus far had been ineffective. The government was still intent on jailing him; MIT was still intent on ignoring him. When Swartz had first been indicted, he’d responded by starting an online petition. This time — A/B testing, etc. — Swartz hired a new lawyer.
At the end of October 2012, Swartz discharged Martin Weinberg and retained Elliot Peters, a partner at the boutique San Francisco firm Keker & Van Nest, as his lead counsel. (Weinberg had taken over the case from Swartz’s first attorney, Andrew Good, in November 2011.) As the case consumed more and more of his time, Swartz had ceased posting to his blog. After concluding the Raw Nerve series on September 25, he wrote only two more entries all year: an essay about the movie Looper on October 8, and another on the film The Dark Knight on November 1. The Dark Knight is a superhero film in which Batman, the villainous Joker, and district attorney Harvey Dent vie for the soul of Gotham City. Each character offers a different strategy for saving the city from organized crime and political corruption. Batman embraces masked vigilantism. Harvey Dent has scores of gangsters arrested on spurious charges. “The Joker had by far the most interesting plan,” wrote Swartz: “he hoped to out-corrupt the corrupters, to take their place and give the city ‘a better class of criminal.’”
In his essay, Swartz strongly supported the Joker’s policy platform. Although the Joker presents himself to the world as a deranged and murderous clown, Swartz claimed that the Joker is actually “homo economicus,” a supremely rational actor, the character who best understands both the problems facing Gotham City and the best solutions to those problems. Batman might have had better gear and Harvey Dent might have had the public’s sympathy—but the Joker understood game theory, the best weapon of all.
Though the Joker’s methods—such as burning large piles of money and blowing up hospitals—might have been controversial, the logic behind them was sound. “And the crazy thing is that it works!” Swartz enthused. Not only did the Joker end up ridding the city of organized crime, he convinced Gotham’s residents to re-evaluate their world and their roles in it. “The movie concludes by emphasizing that Batman must become the villain,” Swartz wrote, “but as usual it never stops to notice that the Joker is actually the hero.”
Excerpted from The Idealist by Justin Peters. Copyright © 2016 by Justin Peters. Excerpted with permission by Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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