Lanterna Rally

Author: Aaron Swartz

Publisher:

Published: 2016-05-01

Total Pages: 826

ISBN-13: 9781533142856

In late 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded a large number of academic journal articles through MIT's computer network. At the time, Aaron was a research fellow at Harvard University, which provided him with an authorized account. Aaron's motivation for downloading the articles was never fully determined. However, friends and colleagues reported that Aaron's intention was either to publicly share them on the Internet or uncover corruption in the funding of climate change research. Faced with prosecutors being overzealous and a dysfunctional US criminal justice system, Aaron was charged with a maximum penalty of $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison, leading to a two-year legal battle with the US federal government that ended when Aaron took his own life on January 11, 2013. Aaron taught himself to read when he was three. At twelve, he created a user-generated encyclopedia, which he later likened to an early version of Wikipedia. He then turned his computer genius to political organizing, information sharing and online freedom. Aaron was on to making a better world for us all; a freer world. Raw Thought, Raw Nerve: Inside the Mind of Aaron Swartz contains the life's work of one of the most original minds of our time. Notes on this second edition In October 2014, we published the first edition of this book (see book Page 7 for details). It was then the first and only book containing Aaron Swartz's lifetime work. When the first edition of "Raw Thought, Raw Nerve: Inside the Mind of Aaron Swartz" was released, we did not claim copyright. Our copyright statement was then the same as it is today: the content is copyrighted to Aaron Swartz. In an article titled "If I get hit by a truck", Aaron Swartz asked "that the contents of all my hard drives be made publicly available". On his blog, Aaron never mentioned anything against commercial publishing. He was, however, against abusive and restrictive copyrights. In August 2015, The New Press, claiming to have obtained exclusive copyright from Sean B. Palmer (Aaron's legal IP owner), and without notice took steps to shutdown our publication to release several months later a scaled down version of this present book. Much has been said and written about this unlawful and unethical action towards Aaron's wishes, but to this day (May 2016), neither The New Press, nor Sean B. Palmer has made any public comments. In publishing the first edition of this book, our humble goal was to express what was going on in Aaron's mind; i.e who was he? why did he repeatedly hacked into academic databases? what was he trying to tell us? The best way to achieve that was through the articles Aaron left on his website. Some of them dated back to 2002, when he was 16. Through a total of 1364 articles available on his website, Aaron clearly stroke us as sharp and openhearted. Aaron surely -like all of us- was trying to find his place in this world; but beyond that, he was genuinely on the path to making this world a better place in the smartest possible way, hence bringing solutions to some of today's problems, and not merely criticizing what other people do -which is very too often the case in politics. He reminded us of Steve Jobs. He could have been as brilliant as Jobs in his own field. Although we selected 300 out of 1364 articles, the resulting book was 824-page thick, divided into seven categories, i.e. Economics, Politics & Parody, Science & Stuff, Work & Tech, Education, Life, and a series of touching articles titled "Raw Nerve", as well as the beautiful piece written by Robert Swartz, titled "Loosing Aaron". According to Sean B. Palmer's latest statement in an Open Letter, Aaron would probably have wanted to release his work under Non-Commercial Creative Commons. In order to comply with Aaron's wishes, this book has been released as a not-for-profit publication.