So it has been pointed out to me that Aaron Swartz made a blog post, in his blog Raw Thought, about The Dark Knight in November of last year called What Happens in The Dark Knight. I will talk about some key points in his post, but I would really encourage you to go a read it for yourself, it is extremely insightful into what the Dark Knight is all about.

I really want to talk about what Aaron says at the end of his post about the Joker. In the final paragraph he says

“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.”

A few weeks ago I made a post called Joker Philosophy, and in this post I talked about how these people who “want to watch the world burn”, like the joker, are the people who keep Anonymous from becoming the very thing that it is fighting against. You can go back and read the post to find out exactly what I’m talking about.

If you combine what I said and what Aaron said it comes out something like this. The lulz people are like the Joker, and the political activists in anonymous are like Batman. By what Aaron said, the Joker and Batman essentially worked to together to take down crime in Gotham without knowing it. The Joker even says to Batman at one point “You complete me.”, and how true of a statement that really is. Anonymous works because it has these two sides; because it is so loosely organized. The political activists take the fall for what the lulz group does, but they keep the group in tact. These two sides of Anonymous work together like yin and yang; they complete each other.

I also wanted to point out that he ended this post with “Thus Master Wayne is left without solutions. Out of options, it’s no wonder the series ends with his staged suicide”. And it was just that, that most likely caused Aaron to tragically take his own life this January. This was the last post on the blog. We can’t ever forget this Aaron Swartz’ life. His life and death carry meaning, and we can’t ever let that meaning fade away. He was a hero.