Aaron Swartz Legacy: We still have work to do!

Aaron Swartz's goal was to use technology to make the world a better place. He played a seminal role, from a very age, in initiatives that were there to stay: Creative Commons is a place where people donate their intellectual property to the world. Aaron Swartz was one of the major initiative of a news syndication standard, called RSS. He participated to the design of RDF, the Resource Description Frameowork, that describes a knowledge graph of statements that constitutes the foundation of the Semantic Web. He contributed to the create of Markdown, a ultra-simple easy to learn markup language that is now widely used for technical documentation of software and is used as a distraction-free tool by many writers. Aaron Swartz was convinced that science and law should be accessible by the public in general, cost-free, and took initiatives to make this happen. He also copied many files and made them at the disposition of the public, and this is what put him in trouble. He was accused of having violated copyright laws, and was about to be indicted, and possibly jailed, when he took his life, in 2013. He was 26 years old.

Aaron Swartz was a progressive activist, and his indictment happened during the Obama administration, in the wake of Julian Assange and the leaks at Wikileaks, and Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden revealing military information. The big difference is that they were leaking classified documents that they considered the public should know, while Aaron Swartz was "leaking" scientific publications and legal information that he considered any citizen should be able to access.

These actions triggered a strong reaction from the Establishment, which at the time was dominated by the Democrats. They just saw the surface of the process, without getting into the motivations of the "bad actors". Compliance was more important than substance. This attitude was a fatal flow that marked a turning point in the ability of Internet to provide better access to essential information. Maintaining the status quo was more important than introducing deep societal changes that were possible. The publishing paradigm based on the right to copy (copyright) rested on the fact that copies were what was exchanged. However, they failed to see that copying an electronic file is of completely different nature than copying a book or a printed article, and that the process of distributing information on the Internet differs from printing on paper, and moving the printed products to places where they could be sold to their targeted audiences.

The traditional publiers had a hard time transitioning to a new era and were generally on the defensive. Instead of thinking how to integrate the new technicalities involved in online production and publishing, they left it as it was. During that time, the software companies were ready to occupy the market. Apple took the music, Amazon carried the book market, while Google got the knowledge content of the world libraries. Twitter tried to get a hold on the news exchange market. The advent of cloud based servers meant that it was now possible to remove the whole publishing process altogether. When any chunk of data is made available on a cloud server, it can be seen anywhere, by everybody with an Internet connection. The social media platforms provided the ability for anyone to make anything available to anybody, which is exactly what publishing is about, and the finished look at their pages made any piece of information as polished and well presented as any other piece. The reluctance of social media platforms to moderate their content, which has been aggravated recently because it serves the purpose of the far right conspirationists, has made impossible to distinguish trash data from valuable data.

The lack of accountability for what is "published" on the Internet has reduced the traditional publishing activity into shambles, and pushed it in an island that continues to exist, but is not any more considered to be the single source of reliable truth and value.

It has become even worse. The surveillance that is possible by monitoring individual's online activities has given authoritarian regimes ways to spy on their citizens and to detect any activity that goes against the expected behavior of complacent persons. China has innovated in that regard with the allocation of "social credit" that monitors how internet users interact with certain sites, and the credit rate is a decisive factor for deciding who has the right to work, to travel, etc. The US Trump administration has connected private information from isolated databases, such as from the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security, and the information gathered that way serves to sue political opponents. The social media accounts of visitors to the country are being monitored, and visa is denied to people who posted critical reviews of the administration. They have the ability to know where any citizen (or non-citizens) stand regarding their political and personal opinions, and they intend to use it to harm those who disagree with them.

The generalization of the use of Artificial intelligence agents to return information that people are looking for has further aggravated the problem. The lack of accountability of information is now a generalized feature, not a bug any more. AI provides a statistical average of what has been said about a subject. The problem is that, more often than not, this is exactly what people are looking for, and the results are satisfying. But AI succeeds by returning conformity and compliance. All the academic and scientific tradition based on quotations and displaying the sources is being washed up. It is being replaced by an implicit act of blind faith required from the users, which have to believe what they see, because it has become more difficult to access information from reliable sources. This is what Aaron Swartz was trying to avoid, and it is happening before our eyes.

The Ayn Rand belief that markets self-adjust does not really work here. The domination of technology giants only happen with the active involvement of a complicit administration, which favors their interests above those of the public. AI is the favored choice of authoritarian because it pretends providing information that enriches our knowledge, but really tells us how we are supposed to think.

When authoritarian regimes will eventually fail, there will be no way to go back to where we were before. The domination of the technology giants has ripped off the very foundations of democratic societies, mostly because we overlooked the fact that the emergence of what we see as classic western style democracies were in fact based on the ability to use the tools provided by the printing press to disseminate information. The failure of imagining how democracies can survive by adapting to alternate ways to distribute information will keep lingering on. This work is something that we need to do, one way or the other. It will probably take decades of discussions before a working model can be implemented, but we are placed in a situation where we can't procrastinate for ever. It is a question of survival for democratic values to start working on it.