Notes from the frontline of the war in cyberspace
"The police are trying to claim the area," Mercedes says. By "area", she means the internet. "Just like in the cities. They gentrify the downtown, move all the poor people into ghettos and then start trolling the ghettos, stopping and frisking people. They're saying, 'Look at what we can do to you on your own turf. This is not your space. It's our space, and we're letting you exist here.' People socialise on Facebook because where do you go to loiter in New York any more? The internet is our space and they're trying to take it, and it's not going to happen because it's the internet."
"And you know more about how it works than they do?" I ask.
"Fuck them," she says. "They're idiots. If you understood medicine in Massachusetts at a certain time, you were a witch and they would burn you. There aren't a lot of people these days who can get past Facebook. So explain to them how a router works and you're a magician. You're a dark wizard. 'We need to lock them away for ever because we don't understand how else to stop them.'" She pauses. "Part of the reason all these kids have become experts on the internet is because they don't have power anywhere else. Skilled trade is shrinking. That's why they went there. And then, holy shit, it blew up."
..Back in January, the young tech entrepreneur Aaron Swartz killed himself. His body was found in his Brooklyn apartment. He was facing prison for downloading a mass of copyright-protected academic journals belonging to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was hardly the crime of the century, and he'd probably have got not much more than a warning had federal prosecutors not intervened. But they did. They announced their intention to send him to jail for up to 35 years. It was like drawing battle lines between the old world that valued copyright protection and privacy of information, and the new world that valued the opposite. Swartz, who had suffered from depression for years, hanged himself. He was 26. He left behind him, among other innovations, Reddit, the open-source social media site, which he helped build.
After his death, I became aware of lots of other Aaron Swartzes out there – hackers and pirates and activists facing prison for their ideology of internet freedom. It felt like a concerted worldwide prosecutorial effort to subdue a movement. So I began approaching them. I decided to contact only those people facing imminent imprisonment or trial. What in their lives had led them to that moment? How were they dealing with it? Some of them ignored me. I suppose if I were facing prison, paranoid that prosecutors would be scrutinising my every careless word, I'd have ignored me, too. But Andrew Auernheimer emailed me back right away.
Now he stands up. Judge Wigenton asks him if he has anything to say. "I didn't come here today to ask for forgiveness," he begins. "The court should be making amends to me for the harm and the violence inflicted on my life. Many governments that have tried to restrict the freedom of the internet have ended up toppled."
Seventeen days earlier. I'm eating lunch with Andrew. He's telling me a story. "I had a friend," he's yelling. "He was one of the most brilliant engineers I knew. He stepped into an alley and got beaten up by four black dudes. He got brain damage. This guy, who was shrewd and brilliant, is not going to be shrewd and brilliant any more. I understood then that I would be totally OK with 100,000 people dying to preserve my one friend who was brilliant."
Considering Andrew's bleak future, I thought I'd take him somewhere fancy for lunch while I interviewed him. So I chose the elegant, wood-panelled Cafe Sabarsky on Manhattan's Upper East Side. I have come to regret this decision because of his propensity to say incredibly offensive things in a very loud voice. Fellow diners are glancing at us.
"Wow," I whisper. "You'd be fine to let 100,000 people die to preserve one especially clever person?" I'm talking in a pointedly quiet way in the hope that he gets the message and adapts his voice accordingly. "Where does that come from?" I whisper. "It's completely irrational." "It's not completely irrational!" he shouts. "Society is driven forward by a very small number of innovators. I don't care about people who have nothing but contempt for innovators. I have no sympathy any more for the dregs of society. I don't care if they live or die."
Andrew Auernheimer was born in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas in 1985. He grew up in a "crappy house in rural Missouri", hence, he says, his sanguine attitude towards prison. "Aaron was this wide-eyed, naive, liberal kid," he says. "I think that's why it hit him so hard. He thought he was from a special class of people that this just doesn't happen to. I've always known the government is out to get people like me. I'm poor and white and disaffected." As Swartz entrepreneured, Andrew trolled. He actually calls himself atroll, which is rare for trolls. "Not many people are happy to refer to themselves as trolls," I say. "What does the word mean to you?"
"Trolling," he says, "is the use of rhetoric in a divisive manner. It's something very deeply connected to the western tradition. What did Socrates do? He asked fucking questions that were intended to inflame. And they killed him for it. And he's a hero of history."..
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