Further Reading Aaron Swartz’s unfinished whistleblowing platform finally launches

Every element of Aaron Swartz’s brief, remarkable life exemplifies the stuff we cover all the time on Ars. His tech-filled upbringing, his teenage rise to geek royalty, his hand in reddit’s genesis, and his online political activism made him a worthy subject of Ars conversation well before he became a household name.

Sadly, Swartz’s story didn’t reach critical mass until he took his own life nearly two years after being indicted by a federal court on twelve felony charges. The case hinged on allegations that he had downloaded 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, an online academic research archive, which he accessed from within MIT’s campus without permission.

In the weeks after his suicide, the Internet saw both a massive outpouring of grief and a comprehensive examination of what made his case so outrageous. The latter makes the new feature-length documentary about his life, The Internet’s Own Boy, less than indispensable in telling Swartz’s story, but considering the fact that he spent his final years trying to make information free and open, that’s fitting.

Where the public record falters—and where this film picks up the slack—is in making sense of Swartz’s personality. Director Brian Knappenberger can’t completely overcome the bias inherent in honoring Swartz’s memory, but he still mostly finds the right balance when recounting the coder’s life history and the rapidly changing world of technology around him. The result connects the dots between a young genius and a burdened overachiever facing decades in prison and a lifelong mark of “felon.”

The story of an “alpha nerd”

After briefly summarizing Swartz’s federal court case and subsequent death, The Internet’s Own Boy quickly changes tone by presenting a squeaky-voiced toddler in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt reading books and playing with his two younger brothers. Between home video clips, family members tell stories of his early brilliance—reading grown-up sentences by the time he was three years old, using computers before that, creating a poor man’s version of Wikipedia in 2000 when he was only 12.

Swartz once told his younger siblings, “There was always something programming could solve,” and the documentary latches onto that as a thesis statement. He was a vocal member of the early RSS development community as only a teenager, and he helped build the guts of Creative Commons before attending Stanford, the school he dropped out of so he could focus on giant Internet projects like reddit and Demand Progress. He was no minor contributor to such efforts, and he racked up a great many fans before turning 18; such luminaries, who appear in the film to speak on Swartz's behalf, include Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, and others.

Viewers who aren’t well versed in acronyms like RSS, PACER, and JSTOR can look forward to clear, brief summaries of the work that Swartz obsessed over, all presented with snappy isometric diagrams. The technical stuff doesn’t get in the way of understanding Swartz’s total personality, but Knappenberger occasionally overdoes the explanations, as if to avoid having to reveal the coder’s most disagreeable traits.

Cory Doctorow calls him “combative but smart,” and Swartz is described in other scenes as a picky eater, an “alpha nerd,” and “a strong personality that ruffled feathers at times.” Enough backhanded compliments accumulate over the film’s runtime that viewers may wonder how much the film softened its treatment of Swartz, but it also presents Swartz’s various higher-level and mission statements about doing good, freeing information, and “making the world a better place.”

These moments punctuate the stories of his later-life initiatives, which accelerated after he left reddit, a company he co-founded. After seeing the federal court database PACER lock citizens out of public information via paywall, Swartz coordinated the legal, free accumulation of its database. On the heels of that success, he set his sights on JSTOR, the giant scientific journal database that houses a mix of publicly and privately funded research behind its own semi-opaque paywall.

Swartz exploited that weird not-quite-paywall by logging into JSTOR from MIT’s libraries under fake accounts to download its giant database of journals and papers. When his heavy activity was noticed and subsequently blocked, Swartz allegedly responded by waltzing into MIT’s basement and attaching a computer directly to the university’s network to resume his downloads.

The Internet’s Own Boy focuses heavily on the MIT story that led to his arrest and years of back-and-forth with the federal government, and savvier documentary viewers won’t learn too much new information. Other than a few stark scenes, particularly the security camera footage of Swartz in MIT’s basement, the film recounts details that had already been laid bare, including federal prosecutors’ disproportionate aggression and JSTOR withdrawing its initial request for prosecution.

Fighting bias with bias?

Where the film could have shone is in telling the story from all sides, but its cast of confidants and colleagues rarely sways to any side other than Swartz’s. In particular, the film's talking heads almost unanimously agree that the current copyright system is “antiquated,” and they make few comments about content protection, let alone new ways for creatives and coders to make money on a share-crazy Internet. (The closest the film comes is in explaining Swartz’s work on Creative Commons, which the film later describes as an imperfect system.)

That’s a hard complaint to swallow, since much of Swartz’s downfall comes from his singular view about copyright, and the trouble he eventually faced is met in the film with mostly blind rage and utter disagreement. At no point are his criminal actions at MIT described as “civil disobedience,” for example; instead, Swartz’s actions are compared to the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who broke and bent laws in their early careers.

Only incredibly late in the film do we get any sense of the other side of the argument. “What drove the prosecution was the sense that Swartz was dedicated not only to breaking the law but nullifying it,” former federal prosecutor and George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr says. “Giving access to the data in a way where the toothpaste couldn’t be put back into the tube. Then Swartz’s side would win.”

The film could have been that much more powerful if it had explored how Swartz grew up too fast to appreciate the “at any cost” part of his willful lawbreaking, of uncapping that toothpaste tube. To Knappenberger’s credit, the film takes an opportunity to focus its anger on the wider-spread problems of American over-prosecuting: “Anything we’re afraid of, like the future of the Internet and access, and anything we’re angry about, creates a criminal justice intervention,” said Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Rights Initiative, “but usually, the people targeted and victimized by incarceration responses are poor and minority.”

Perhaps the filmmakers felt that Swartz’s case was lopsided enough against his favor; why not a film that tells the story from the other extreme? Indeed, its most powerful moments don’t suffer a bit in spite of bias, particularly a scene in which Swartz’s ex-girlfriend (and Wired freelance contributor) Quinn Norton admitted to sharing potentially damaging information with federal prosecutors.

“In that moment, I regret that I said what I did,” Norton said. “But my much larger regret is that we have settled for this—that we are okay with a justice system that tries to game people into little traps so that we can ruin their lives.”

The film closes by embracing the same attitude Swartz had in public life in his final days: making calls for action and championing grassroots efforts to promote the freedom of information (along with any legislators united in those efforts). Those stories of active, engaged masses versus a confused old guard, told clearly and quickly with a lot of context and very little obnoxious hand-holding, rise above the film’s missteps, ultimately making this one of the best tech-obsessed documentaries in recent memory. Even better, the film closes with a slew of very interesting Swartz interviews about American Internet policy, from the SOPA debate and beyond, and their takeaways are still relevant today.

He may have been an obnoxious collaborator and a picky eater, but between his efforts and films like this, Swartz will not soon be forgotten.