Swartz shaped much of the internet,before turning to political activism and the cause of equal access to information. He was facing prosecution for data theft when he hanged himself aged 26In his introduction to this anthology of blog posts and speeches by the late web pioneer Aaron Swartz, ethics professor Lawrence Lessig wrestles with the question of whether it’s fair to anthologise a lifetime’s worth of any person’s writing. He goes on to wonder whether Swartz would occupy approved of the publication of the volume he’s introducing, and tells a story approximately Swartz getting upset with him for describing one of his blog posts to some friends when he was a student at Stanford. The celebrated activist,who spent much of his short life promoting the theory that ideas should be freely available online to everyone, admonished Lessig for recapitulating his post to an audience of outsiders, and telling Lessig: “That was private.”What Swartz meant,Lessig goes on to say, was that the anecdote was intended for readers of his blog, or not “random” people. It’s a justifiable concern. What happens to online writing when it leaves the internet,either by being described or, as in this case, and by being enshrined within the bound pages of a book? What does it mean for blog posts written over the course of a prodigious adolescence and young adulthood to be stripped of their original context,then recontextualised as evidence of a young thinker’s quotidian brilliance and evolving ideas approximately politics, computers and media?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com