The Internet’s Own Boy: The Sto­ry of Aaron Swartz

This por­trait of prodi­gy, hack­er and activist Aaron Swartz comes at a time when the dark edges of the world wide web are creep­ing into the pub­lic sphere, from Edward Snow­den expos­ing the NSA’s spy­ing to back­lash protests in San Fran­cis­co over fears that Sil­i­con Val­ley is forc­ing out all but the 1 per cent.

Swartz com­mit­ted sui­cide in 2013 at age 26 as he was being aggres­sive­ly pur­sued by the Oba­ma administration’s jus­tice depart­ment for try­ing to down­load as much aca­d­e­m­ic mate­r­i­al as he could from the servers at Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy. Nei­ther the uni­ver­si­ty nor the dig­i­tal library he was tap­ping pressed charges, but fed­er­al author­i­ties saw Swartz as dangerous.

The Internet’s Own Boy, from direc­tor Bri­an Knap­pen­berg­er, takes us back to the begin­ning to show Swartz as a pre­co­cious kid who taught him­self to read at age three and loved teach­ing every­thing to oth­ers. In footage of a Swartz as a tod­dler, he demon­strates how to say the alpha­bet back­wards. Once he gets his hands on a com­put­er, things snow­ball. His younger broth­er recounts how Aaron would explain to him that pro­gram­ming was mag­ic and with it you could accom­plish things that nor­mal human beings couldn’t.

The young wiz­ard built a pre­cur­sor to Wikipedia. At 13, he was help­ing devel­op RSS — the code that allows inter­net users to track web sites in news read­ers. When his col­leagues learned their com­bat­ive col­lab­o­ra­tor was actu­al­ly a 13-year-old boy, any sense they felt of being deceived imme­di­ate­ly turned into a desire to meet this kid. He co-found­ed Red­dit, whose sale to WIRED magazine’s own­ers Conde Nast turned him and his part­ners into young mil­lion­aires. Aaron turned his back on mak­ing mon­ey and we see him defi­ant­ly wear­ing a FIRED t‑shirt after he stopped turn­ing up at the office.

But while oth­ers might have wor­shipped Steve Jobs, Swartz’s hero was Tim Bern­ers-Lee, the father of the Inter­net who rather than build­ing a for­tune decid­ed the inter­net had to be free and open so every­one could par­tic­i­pate. The film traces Aaron’s jour­ney through the tes­ti­mo­ny of those he worked with includ­ing Bern­ers-Lee, Cory Doc­torow and Lawrence Lessig, with whom Swartz helped build the archi­tec­ture of Cre­ative Com­mons licensing.

Copy­right, we learn, was Aaron’s true pas­sion. It also led to his undo­ing. As some­one who was always ques­tion­ing, it made no sense to Aaron that court doc­u­ments — which were pub­lic by def­i­n­i­tion — had to be paid for if they were acces­si­ble at all. Mean­while aca­d­e­m­ic research, much of it tax-fund­ed and notion­al­ly cre­at­ed to increase knowl­edge, was locked away so it could be commodified.

Work­ing through these con­tra­dic­tions might not seem sin­is­ter, but his work at MIT soon led to inves­ti­ga­tions by the FBI, the Secret Ser­vice and ulti­mate­ly the US Attorney’s office. When he com­mit­ted sui­cide, Swartz was under a 13-count felony indict­ment that had him fac­ing a pos­si­ble 35-year prison term and a $1 mil­lion fine. His friends say his only crime was tak­ing too much out of the school library. The pros­e­cu­tors declined to be inter­viewed for the doc­u­men­tary. The case nev­er made it to court. But made in the month’s fol­low­ing his untime­ly death, The Internet’s Own Boy offers the urgent case for the defence.