RIP, Aaron Schwartz [questions]

Aaron Schwartz

"...The left has succeeded in making it sound hollow and unconvincing. Your average liberal blogger is happy to admit all the papers are full of lies, all the politicians are bland sellouts, and the government is run by lobbyists and corporate hacks. And (nothing new here) your average citizen is happy to agree (it takes a lot of education to be dumb enough to think otherwise). But where do you go from there"

"...The economic crisis has shattered the Washington Consensus more than a thousand Chomsky op-eds could, while the Internet has made it possible to organize people by the million. But the left can’t seem to move beyond its reactive stance. If you want books that criticize the policies of the Bush administration, you can fill up a whole library. But if you want books on what to do instead, where do you go?"

"...I’ll even go further and take a stab at describing Chomsky’s solution: democracy. Media democracy, to prevent the population from being misled by deluded elites with big megaphones. Economic democracy, to promote a better mix and fairer distribution of societal goods and necessary evils. And political democracy, so that our military isn’t led by murderous thugs into endless immoral engagements.

This philosophy is so different from the dominant consensus that it takes far more than two paragraphs to explain, let alone argue for. But who’s even trying? Instead, the audience is forced to read a shelf of Chomsky and reverse-engineer the principles behind it.

This is better than nothing—it worked for me—but it obviously puts a hard limit on who can be persuaded. People without the time or the ability end up as the folks you see in liberal blog comments: people who know something is badly wrong, but aren’t quite sure what it is or what to do about it.

In short, leftist intellectuals need to move from simply poking holes in the dominant consensus to clearly articulating their alternative and proposing a concrete method for promoting it (Chomsky, for all his brilliance, seems to espouse a theory of change that doesn’t go much beyond getting people at his book readings to join the local ISM chapter). I hope that more people will, because I sometimes fear that if they don’t, there may not be many leftist intellectuals anymore." /Aaron Schwartz/

[you can read the whole article here: http://crookedtimber.org/2009/08/04/toward-a-larger-left/]

Aaron Hillel Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was an American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet Hacktivist.
Swartz was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS and the Markdown publishing format, the organization Creative Commons, the website framework web.py and the social news site, Reddit, in which he became a partner after its merger with his company, Infogami.

Swartz's work also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism. He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to learn more about effective online activism. In 2010 he became a research fellow at Harvard University's Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig. He founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by MIT police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after systematically downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR. Federal prosecutors later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution and supervised release.
Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would serve six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn, New York apartment, where he had hanged himself."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz]

[His blog: https://aaronsw.jottit.com/howtoget and https://aaronsw.jottit.com/]