that our mental health system has
taken -- devaluing psychotherapy because drugs are cheaper for the
consumer and more profitable for corporations. Recent scientific
questions about the efficacy of SSRI antidepressants and ever-more evidence
for the real power of talking to someone will not, I am sure, stop the
expansion of drug-based treatment at the expense of therapy. Nothing will
stop it because the market is blind to the externalities it is creating.
They've even widened the market for the atypical antipsychotics --
extremely powerful drugs -- to include five year olds who throw temper
tantrums. Let me be clear: I'm not against medication in principle, and my
mother wasn't either. She was a practical person and believed in using
whatever method would make someone better. She was on an antidepressant
when she died. But the idea of depression as a chemical problem that can be
fixed with the right pill is wrong. My mother's death was not really
because of neurons gone haywire. It was meaningfully connected to the
conflict between her positive ideals and the insane priorities of our
society.
The insane priorities of prosecutor Carmen Ortiz, and the clueless idiots
who wrote the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and JSTOR, and MIT and everyone
else involved in pushing Aaron up against the wall very clearly contributed
to whatever inner struggle he was facing. These actors, too, were slavishly
devoted to a ridiculous market logic of enclosure and blind to the
externalities involved. There is no reason, given the success of the open
access model, why every journal article should not be free to every human
on Earth. These people should be ashamed. I do not think we should explain
away Aaron's death and their guilt with the idea of depression as a
disease. Suicide is not an act of selfish cowardice nor is it just the
result of an illness. It is a desperate refusal to suffer the world as it
is or seems to be. Perhaps it can be the final act of defiance in the life
of a person who has long since taken up arms against a sea of troubles,
ready to oppose and end them. The Tunisian fruit-seller who touched off the
Arab Spring was not merely a sick person. Aaron wasn't either.
For all of us who are making the Internet, along with the law and norms
that go with it, let this be a reminder that this isn't a game. I'm with
Jim Gilliam; a target=_blank href=
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4WKle-GQwk;the Internet is my
religion/a. For me, the fight to stop enclosure logic from ruining the
Internet is directly connected to the struggle to keep that same logic from
destroying the environment and civilization itself. The network, the law,
government, society as a whole -- they are all one big machine that's made
of people. We cannot free ourselves from its problems as individuals. (If a
genius like Aaron cannot escape them, what chance do I have?) However, we
who make the Internet and its culture, we at the frontier of change, have
an opportunity to rewire the workings of the machine -- to create the
architecture of human solidarity or lack thereof. We can influence whether
the network enables collective solutions to our problems and supports the
flourishing of every person -- or instead locks us into a giant game of
prisoner's dilemma that pits us against each other and appropriates our
gains in productivity for a narrow few. We need to take this seriously, and
we need to include a broader constituency of people in our work. We also
need to build institutions and take care of each other. We can't let the
burden of our social responsibility rest solely on the shoulders of
extraordinary individuals like Aaron.
Playfulness is an essential part of our culture of innovation, but with
respect to the moral implications of our task, the time has come to put
away childish things. Silly techno-libertarian ideas about the inherently
liberatory nature of the current shift are, well, silly. Information
doesn't want to be free; people do. But I don't think the eco-doomers are
right either. We are not guaranteed salvation nor are we condemned;
instead, the adventure is on to build a machinery of love to replace the
machinery of enclosure and exploitation. That's what I believe Aaron was
doing. If what you are making now is not the machinery of love, stop. Make
something else. When you remember Aaron, remember that only revolution is
revolutionary.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 6:40 PM, Anivar Aravind anivar.arav...@gmail.comwrote:
Academics, please put your PDFs online in tribute to @aaronsw. Use
#pdftribute. This is happening Check out - http://pdftribute.net/ ;
It'll soon be a huge collection of pdf links to academic articles .
share widely
...
--
Luke Smith
http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/~smith/
luke.thomas.sm...@gmail.com
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