Update:
And confirming my suspicions, here’s a detailed piece about Swartz’s ties to the hacker community, linking Aaron Swartz to Wikileaks (which had already claimed he was a source after his death); to Jacob Applebaum. Applebaum is the WL hacker whom I’ve mentioned before as being linked (in a Rolling Stones article) to imagery from the “V for Vendetta” movie. Swartz is also linked to Bradley Manning.
The Manning tie suggests a motive for Swartz’s depression (if indeed depression was what led to his death).
Swartz might have feared much worse from the Feds than just the investigation of the JSTOR articles.
It also makes one wonder if someone else might have had a motive for eliminating him. It was always implausible to me that Bradley Manning got all those documents on his own. If someone had to get them for him, who better than Aaron Swartz, with his savant0-like skills.
ORIGINAL POST
I’ve never swallowed the media’s uncritical praise for “information activist,” Aaron Swartz.
One story that kept getting repeated was how Swartz co-founded Reddit.
Indeed he did no such thing. He was the founder of Infogami.
The founders of Reddit were Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. Infogami merged with Reddit and one of the pay-offs to Swartz was that he got to claim that he was co-founder.
It’s time put that story to bed. Along with the notion that Aaron Swartz was a hacktivist who gave his life for information freedom.
That’s the story pushed by the media establishment, including its Internet billionaires, who, naturally can make anything a story all on their own, with no factual “there” there.
Aaron Swartz made a lot of money out of what’s in the public realm. He just couldn’t let other people do the same thing.
Just as Julian Assange wanted everyone else’s secrets outed, but not his own.
That’s a self-contradiction so obvious only the media here could gloss over it.
Swartz, a Chomsky and Michael Moore admirer, achieved Internet sainthood, but it is the sainthood conferred by cyber-swarms that engage in kamikaze attacks on any blog that doesn’t join their enthusiasms.
Aaron Swartz was very smart and gifted, but he was also young and naive. He was, I believe, used by the globalist establishment in its ongoing attack on the nation-state of America……..in the services of the supra-national world order.
[Added, Nov. 9. The NWO both attacks and defends the nation-state alternately so as to co-opt both sides of the struggle, but it’s an international order. If there was a natural devolutionary process, I would be all for it. A managed devolution can have only the result all managed processes have – a top-heavy central bureaucracy and increasingly hollowed -out societies.]
[Lila: Nov 8. I rewrote one passage above because I was much too sharp toward Swartz, who was, after all, only 26 or 27. He couldn’t be expected to know all the forces at work in politics nor understood how attractive a great talent would be to them, as a mouthpiece for their ambitious projects. ]
The nation-state is dead. Long live the global state.
When Reddit was created, it struggled initially. Then it suddenly acquired millions of readers and was bought out by Conde Nast publications.
Who is behind Conde Nast?
Samuel Newhouse, the 47th richest American in 2011 (according to Forbes) and the chairman and CEO of Advance Publications, which owns Conde Nast.
Through Conde Nast, Newhouse owns a whole host of magazines: Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Glamour, Ars Technica, Wired, Architectural Digest, and many others.
One meaning of Hoo Ha is vagina. Does that ring a bell?
Vagina was the 2012 book by OccupyWallStreet advocate and chief agitator, Naomi Wolf.
Vaginas are called “p******” in slang.
P**** Riot was the CIA-inflected group behind agitation against the Orthodox Church in Russia.
The New World Order ostentatiously celebrates female sexuality, although it ostentatiously denounces female fertility.
Wired is the magazine whose chief investigative writer Kevin Poulsen worked on a project with Swartz.
Poulsen was once a serial black-hat hacker. He also worked in Silicon Valley in the employ of defense contractors and he hacked into telephone systems, spying on and stealing information from anyone. Poulsen was in the thick of a fight between Glenn Greenwald and Salon on the one hand and Wired and Poulsen on the other about whether chat logs between Adrian Lamo and Bradley Manning actually showed evidence of Wikileaks’ involvement. Poulsen was accused of withholding information, in the same way Greenwald is in turn accused of withholding information.
Is it just coincidence that the same outfits keep showing up in these squabbles or can we surmise that though on opposing sides they set up the parameters of the debate and indeed create the debate?
That Swartz hid his tracks shows he knew what he was doing wouldn’t be passed off as a prank.
That he chose to commit suicide only lends credibility to the suspicion that he might have been used by more powerful entities.
Yes, the prosecution was over-zealous and blundering. But Swartz himself was not doing anything completely innocuous. He was engaged in the “propaganda of the deed” and had been for a while. That made him an enemy of the government.
Too stupid to uncover the networks behind Swartz, the government, as usual, hit the weak link in the chain with as big a hammer as it could.
Swartz took his life.
No telling where the investigation might have led.
Had we even the suspicion of a press, someone would have followed the money…
The real story behind much contemporary “hacktivism” and a good deal of social activism.
You heard it first here –
Aaron Swartz was a front.
Advance Publications was the 52nd largest private company in the US in 2012 and it is the holding company for the Newhouse family’s interests.
Through Advance, the Newhouse family owns such cable/telecom companies as Brighthouse Networks and a 31% share in the cable-network Discovery Communications.
Discovery’s other owners include reclusive billionaire John Hendricks, its founder.
Discovery’s most famous shows are the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. In 2009 it ran a viral pandemic survival show.
Discovery Channel has been fingered by several independent bloggers as a venue for the dissemination of disinformation that sanitizes or mainstreams the New World Order and its symbols.
Newhouse and Advance are the powers that propelled Reddit to fame and success.
A precocious savant, Swartz used his credibility as a computer genius to enter politics on behalf of bigger government, surely a strange career move for a “libertarian” folk-hero.
I’m not talking of a law changed here or there. I am not talking about removal of subsidies and enforcement of existing laws.
Schwartz was a front for Democrat interests, as the mover behind Demand Progress and Progressive Change Campaign Committee.
PCCC was behind the rise to stardom of chief “sheriff” on Wall Street, Elizabeth Warren:
“The campaign to draft Elizabeth Warren was declared “The Most Valuable Campaign of 2011” by The Nation magazine.[13] With almost 50,000 individual contributions, the PCCC raised more than $800,000 for Warren’s campaign. (Wikipedia)
The point is not the individual positions for which PCCC advocated – whether for Wall Street reform and net neutrality or against SOPA and Stand Your Ground. I have been on the same side on some of them.
The point is that the PCCC advocated progressive Democrat positions across the board.
It was a partisan political organization. Not an individualist advocate of this or that position, each judiciously considered on its own merits.
Swartz’s last post on his blog before his suicide was about the film, “Dark Knight,” according to a blog calling itself Digital Dark Knight (it carries the subtitle The Ethics of Anonymous).
This Digital Dark Knight blog appears to carry only a few posts from January to April 2013 and they deal with Anonymous, the Dark Knight, the Joker, Swartz and Batman.
Swartz wrote:
“The movie concludes by emphasizing that Batman must become the villain, but as usual it never stops to notice that the Joker is actually the hero. But even though his various games only have one innocent casualty, he’s much too crazy to be a viable role model for Batman. His inspired chaos destroys the criminals, but it also terrorizes the population. Thanks to Batman, society doesn’t devolve into a self-interested war of all-against-all, as he apparently expects it to, but that doesn’t mean anyone enjoys the trials.”
The Dark Knight is another of those movies, like “V for Vendetta,” “Avatar,” and “Zeitgeist,” that propagates images and themes needing to be impressed on the public mind.
The masks from Vendetta appear in a Rolling Stone article about Wikileaks and Jacob Applebaum.
Imagery from Dark Knight follows Julian Assange in his media appearances.
The Digital Dark Knight blog looks much like one of the fake internet persona promised to us by the new information warfare technology of the government and its corporate big brothers.
It seems to have been set up solely to make a connection between Swartz and Dark Knight.
Swartz must be linked in the public consciousness with liberation and salvation.
Assange/Swartz/Anonymous are batmen. Lulz and other pranksters are the Joker.
This is subliminal prepping of the public mind for revolution against the state. But it is a corporate-state sponsored revolution, like Occupy Wall Street.
Behind Wikileaks we find the Rothschild machinery.
Behind Anonymous, Snowden and Greenwald, mega-billion dollar spy corporations.
Behind Aaron Swartz and the anti-IP movement, the cyber-warriors, and the hacktivists, we will also find the information/internet billionaires who make money from the use of public information but object to others doing exactly the same thing.
Their objection is not an ideological one. It is simply a pragmatic one, a partisan one.
The more information a company can take without paying for it, the more money it makes when it commercializes the information. The bigger their market share, the less for others (so they believe) and the more power – financial, social, and political- they gain.
Theft is a great business model, saving R&D costs.
How better to get the public to regard theft as innovation than by adding the word activism to hack?
Doing well by doing good.
Sometimes, just doing well.
Leave doing good to the movie.