And They Called Him Aaron

For those with knowledge of holy books, Aaron was known as elder brother of Moses and first high priest of the Israelites. When Moses went to challenge Pharaoh, it was Aaron who spoke for him to both the Israelites and to Pharaoh. He was considered wise and well-spoken, though in the end, he suffered the same fate as Moses, in being unable to enter the land of his people at the end of their long journey. He would not see the world he had worked so hard to bring his people to.

It should be fitting then that Aaron Swartz was named after the holy Aaron of ages past, for he, too, was endowed with great wisdom, spoke for the right of his people to be free to pursue the quest for knowledge as they wished, and devoted himself to their liberation, and in the end, would not live to see the completion of his work.

I did not know the man; you probably did not either, at least not directly. If you have this blog -- or any one -- linked to a news reading program through the RSS protocol, that is Aaron. If you read, use, or edit the site Reddit, that is Aaron. If you publish the data you create to the Internet using the Creative Commons license, that is Aaron. If you joined Demand Progress in fighting against SOPA -- the Stop Online Piracy Act -- to keep the Internet free from censorship and spying, that is Aaron. So you and I may not have known him, but he has touched our lives and continues to do so every day.

Aaron Swartz was, to all accounts, brilliant, forthright, fun-loving, inquisitive, and took action where most of us feared to. It was this combination that drove him forward, to not only seek to improve the quality of and access to information on the Internet, but to prevent other forces from seeking to lock the Internet down and dilute its power. This drive to preserve the freedom to use the Internet brought him to cross intellectual swords with the law.

He suffered, as many of us do, from depression, that bugaboo that seems to creep into our lives at inopportune moments, either allowed in by the vicissitudes of life or unbidden from the depths of the brain. Grappling with this personal demon at the same time he was being oppressed by the Federal government's attempts to clap him in irons for daring to free information for all to use, drove the man to suicide on January 11th, 2013. He was only 26. In the brief span of his life, he had accomplished more than most of us will in a lifetime, and as with many, it can be said that there was so much more ahead for him and for the world he graced had he lived.

Eulogies and remembrances are many, and will continue to in the days to come. But after he has gone back to the soil of the Good Earth, the void his absence creates must be filled. It is not enough that he falls and we look back -- it is better that we embrace and move forward. Aaron Swartz, in his time, showed us the way. Let us honor his memory by picking up his staff and continuing his journey.

Blackout In The Age Of Information

If you are reading this today, January 18th, 2012, then you are lucky. These words, saved on a server somewhere, accessible by typing a name into or clicking a link on your web browser, which sends a request to that server for the information over the various interlinked computers that comprise the Internet, are being displayed before you for your perusal, having survived an arduous journey at incredible speeds through various and sundry networks and via any number of different types of wires or conduits. To you, the user, the reader, it is virtually instantaneous, and you are left unaware of the sequence of events that must transpire for this information to reach your eyes.

As Arthur C. Clarke once noted (paraphrasing), any sufficiently advanced technology would appear as magic to us. No doubt, the Internet and all the things that are on it, appear to arrive magically at the window that sits before you now, with just a few mouse clicks or keystrokes or swipes of a finger on glass. Not unlike a car, the mechanics of what transpires do not enter in to our minds when we turn the key on the Internet. It is just there, ubiquitous, waiting for us.

What if it that were not so?

Anthony Weiner's Bad Day

A lot has been written and said and repeated and trumpeted and blathered about in regards to the shenanigans of Representative Anthony Weiner. I was trying hard to resist writing about the incidents involving him, believing that there was little more I could add to the general cacophony. Yet, as days have passed, as new information has come out, and as the import of the events that have transpired has sunk in, I am left wondering: what does it all mean?

I come to the unalterable conclusion that this is the ultimate teachable moment for our society in regards to many things: morality, the Internet, government, humanity, duty, honor. Within the tangled skein of these events, lie the truths we seldom wish to confront or take action toward. It is a tableau of the virtues and vices that both ennoble us and plague us simultaneously.

I won't pass judgment on Rep. Weiner. As the Biblical admonition from Jesus goes, "may he who is without sin cast the first stone." I may not be a public persona, but I have done many things of an indiscreet nature that I am not proud of. Many of us have, and whether we admit it or not, we know it in our heart and our soul.

I have no reason to believe that we can populate our government with angels and saints; we will have to accept that fallible humanity will be led by fallible leaders, and that hopefully personal failings of honor are not symptomatic of deeper failings of morality and duty toward humanity. We must take each of us as we are, and hope that those we elect to represent us can truly represent our best interests, as well as those of our state, our nation, and humanity as a whole. we cannot ask of them to become paragons of virtue, though we would wish them to, perhaps to salve our own conscience.

So let this moment be a warning to us: the world is more complicated by leaps and bounds than it ever has been, and our personal failings are magnified by the environment we now inhabit. We must turn away from our sanctimoniousness and turn toward each other, if we are to survive. Let that start now, and let Anthony Weiner have been the one to lead us in the right direction.