It’s been all over the news today that internet activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide. His name rang a bell when I saw the headlines but I had to read the articles to be reminded of who he was and why he was familiar to so many people. (He was involved in a number of high profile conflicts with the Govt on information sharing and censorship-related issues.) He made a strong impression on a lot of people. I read more than a few commentaries that held him up as a hero. I read enough to want to find out about him. Let me preface my comments below with the statement that it’s a tragedy that he took his life. It’s sad that he wasn’t able connect with the support that could have helped him through his depression. That said, I am at a loss to see him as a hero. He came across as a precocious kid. Incredibly smart. Did some good things. Did some irresponsible things. Someone who left a strong impression on those he interacted with. Rather than the specifics of who Aaron Swartz was though, what struck me even more in the course of my reading was the apparent cultural differences between myself and those of Mr. Swartz generation, i.e., people roughly a generation younger than myself.
In his remembrance of Mr. Swartz, Cory Doctorow writes (emphasis and links mine not Doctorow’s):
I wrote to Aaron for help with Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother to get his ideas on a next-generation electioneering tool that could be used by committed, passionate candidates who didn’t want to end up beholden to monied interests and power-brokers. Here’s what he wrote back:
First he decides to take over the whole California Senate, so he can do things at scale. He finds a friend in each Senate district to run and plugs them into a web app he’s made for managing their campaigns. It has a database of all the local reporters, so there’s lots of local coverage for each of their campaign announcements.
Then it’s just a vote-finding machine. First it goes through your contacts list (via Facebook, twitter, IM, email, etc.) and lets you go down the list and try to recruit everyone to be a supporter. Every supporter is then asked to do the same thing with their contacts list. Once it’s done people you know, it has you go after local activists who are likely to be supportive. Once all those people are recruited, it does donors (grabbing the local campaign donor records). And then it moves on to voters and people you could register to vote. All the while, it’s doing massive A/B testing to optimize talking points for all these things. So as more calls are made and more supporters are recruited, it just keeps getting better and better at figuring out what will persuade people to volunteer. Plus the whole thing is built into a larger game/karma/points thing that makes it utterly addictive, with you always trying to stay one step ahead of your friends.
Meanwhile GIS software that knows where every voter is is calculating the optimal places to hold events around the district. The press database is blasting them out — and the press is coming, because they’re actually fun. Instead of sober speeches about random words, they’re much more like standup or the Daily Show — full of great, witty soundbites that work perfectly in an evening newscast or a newspaper story. And because they’re so entertaining and always a little different, they bring quite a following; they become events. And a big part of all of them getting the people there to pull out their smartphones and actually do some recruiting in the app, getting more people hooked on the game.
He doesn’t talk like a politician — he knows you’re sick of politicians spouting lies and politicians complaining about politicians spouting lies and the whole damn thing. He admits up front you don’t trust a word he says — and you shouldn’t! But here’s the difference: he’s not in the pocket of the big corporations. And you know how you can tell? Because each week he brings out a new whistleblower to tell a story about how a big corporation has mistreated its workers or the environment or its customers — just the kind of thing the current corruption in Sacramento is trying to cover up and that only he is going to fix.
(Obviously shades of Sinclair here…)
also you have to read http://books.theinfo.org/go/B005HE8ED4
For his TV ads, his volunteer base all take a stab at making an ad for him and the program automatically A/B tests them by asking people in the district to review a new TV show. The ads are then inserted into the commercial breaks and at the end of the show, when you ask the user how they liked it, you also sneak in some political questions. Web ads are tested by getting people to click on ads for a free personality test and then giving them a personality test with your political ad along the side and asking them some political questions. (Ever see ads for a free personality test? That’s what they really are. Everybody turns out to have the personality of a sparkle fish, which is nice and pleasant except when it meets someone it doesn’t like, …) Since it’s random, whichever group scores closest to you on the political questions must be most affected by the ad. Then they’re bought at what research shows to be the optimal time before the election, with careful selection of television show to maximize the appropriate voter demographics based on Nielsen data.
anyway, i could go on, but i should actually take a break and do some of this… hope you’re well
[end Swartz commentary]
This was so perfect that I basically ran it verbatim in the book. Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill, and intelligence about people and issues. I think he [Swartz] could have revolutionized American (and worldwide) politics. His legacy may still yet do so.
Mr. Swartz describes treating politics as a game, about developing a ‘buzz’ for his candidate. I find his suggestions offensive. Honestly, they disgust me. Unfortunately, I don’t believe such views are unique to Mr. Swartz. They seem to me fairly widespread. They suggest to me a disconnect with the world which I find very troubling.
A brief story:
On Election Day last November I volunteered to do things that needed to be done for my State Rep candidate, Ken Gordon, and Elizabeth Warren. I put in a full day. The last thing I did before heading home was to give two people a ride to the polls: a grandmother and her granddaughter. (Granddaughter was first time voter.) Why did they need a ride to the polls? After all, they only lived about three miles away. Well, because they didn’t have a car and the nearest bus stop was about half a mile away from their house and the one nearest the polls was a similar distance. Grandmother wasn’t going to be making that trek. Oh, and mom was making her way home from work by bus hoping to get to the polling station (the local high school) before it closed. Metropolitan Boston and you can’t get a goddamn bus to the polls to vote. Nice. Think about the situation for a moment. This is a family that relies on public transportation to get to school, work, etc. They’re just barely hanging on to life in the middle class. A functioning public transit system may well be the difference between them hanging on vs not hanging on. (And I suspect the granddaughter was relying on access a decent public education system as her route to a less tenuous financial situation.) Our elected representatives decide whether or not we have a working public transit system and public education system. You think politics is a game to those people I drove to the polls? You want candidates who “Instead of sober speeches about random words, [have campaign events which are] much more like standup or the Daily Show — full of great, witty soundbites that work perfectly in an evening newscast or a newspaper story.”? If so, then fk you.
UPDATE #1: Perhaps I take Swartz comments to Doctorow too seriously. Maybe he was just riffing on an idea for a book. I don’t think so but perhaps.
UPDATE #2: Also, it appears that Swartz is unfamiliar with modern campaigning. Although the campaigns I was involved with weren’t using twitter, IM, etc. to connect with people we did make extensive use of party databases. And, from my vantage point, those databases appeared quite extensive.
UPDATE #3: While the celebration of style over substance sticks in my craw, the underlying emphasis on information and access to it as the motivation for political action strikes me as a more significant mistake. (I suspect the two things originate from the same place in the mind.) Access to information doesn’t build roads or fix bridges. Access to information doesn’t teach my kids algebra. It doesn’t give them a checkup when they feel sick or make the antibiotics they need to treat their ear infections. Information supports those endeavors but it doesn’t perform essential functions. People do. Same with the focus on whistleblowers. Whistleblowers should be encouraged but whistleblowing isn’t an end in and of itself. Purging graft and corruption from the system makes it possible to do useful work but it doesn’t guarantee that useful work will get done. It’s not enough to ‘reform the system’. Constructive political activism also puts forward a plan for how useful work will get done.