The Tragedy of Aaron

The Study hive is my personal interface between my offline studies through both public and college libraries - though I have yet to make good use of any college library I have the choice to access.  My presence here is as a 21st Century learner, but today I begin with mourning a great loss of a 21st Century thinker called Aaron Schwarz. 

Scharwz got himself caught in the government's cross-hairs by engaging what he viewed as a political statement, but unlike Edward Snowden and Julian Assange who fled to Russia and Ecuador respectively, Schwarz as a teenager, and perhaps more naive about the full repercussions of his actions, ended up in a tonne of legal trouble.

The government having got a high profile individual in their custody, threw the entire book of law at him and it is here where over-reach became the tragedy, and that over-reach is in my opinion not knowing when prosecution has become persecution.  So heavy handed the treatment of Aaron Schwarz, that this brilliant mind committed suicide rather than face the rest of his life behind bars. The video below is a you-tube link that has been translated to Spanish subtitles. Clearly there are folk on You-Tube who consider this story worth wider dissemination, but personally for me, this is a learning about the limits of freedom we have in the 21st Century and why the loss of Aaron Swartz is so egregious and a fundamental loss of a mind that we need.  For sure we have great minds like Lawrence Lessig who can engage in the heavy lifting of creating a world better suited to handling the rights and means of the emerging knowledge economy and the 21st Century form of networked intelligence - Swartz was a leading thinker in this area and his contributions will be deeply missed.The greatest tragedy that the suicide of Aaron Swartz reveals is that we are not living in time of great enlightenment, but at a time when every Aaron Swartz we find needs to be front and center in the changes required to make the expression 21st Century, actually 21st Century.  Otherwise we continue to live in the past, driven by dinosaurs who are huge by size of profit and whose mentality is viscous and ruthless.  These are qualities that we can move away from, because the less we are slaves to the industrial age, the more we can think of how we can free in the knowledge age.  Otherwise this is still the dark ages and this is really the digital industrial age.

Yet in this age of darkness we live in, exemplified by that pressure and ruthlessness that drove a young man the 21st Century needed to hear from and learn from to an early death.  It is more than just a cruel waste of a human life, but it is indicative of a system that values its products more than people - and this has not just been true of the 20th century but the very moment that mankind's baseline was a mindset that accepted slavery.

There are pockets of freedom but they are only pockets and it is those pockets I am now looking for - because these pockets are about my own learning because in some cases the powers to be will not change their ways because they are fixed in their ways, but the generations that are being born now are not going to be fully converted into the cult of the industrial landlord, there is more and more information that counters the scripted media message, as well as an education system that operates with draconian rules that have also not adjusted to 21st Century realities.  For that adjustment to take place, we cannot afford to lose people like Aaron Swartz and so we continue to live in these dark ages for as long as we do.

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