The Boy Who Could Change the World (24 page)

P
eople who didn't know Aaron remember him for his tireless work on behalf of a variety of public causes. They usually don't realize that this work went together with a myriad of private kindnesses. I got to know Aaron as an extraordinarily intelligent commentator on Crooked Timber, an academic blog that I contribute to. At first I didn't know about the other great things that he had done; he didn't talk about them unless he was pressed. He just wanted to get involved in conversations with other people who were interested in political inquiry and social justice the way he was.

He also wanted to help. When we had major technical difficulties because our audience was outpacing the capacities of the server space we had leased, he suggested, without any fuss, that he would be very happy to take over our technical responsibilities and provide us all the facilities we needed. He privately helped many other people in equally unfussy ways. Rick Perlstein, the political historian of the rise of the right, is now famous. Before he was well known, Aaron came across his work, realized that he didn't have a website, and offered to make one for him. Rick was a bit nonplussed to receive so generous an offer from a complete stranger, but he quickly realized that Aaron was for real. They became good friends.

We asked Aaron to guest-blog for us for seminars, but we also just published his work when he had something to say and asked us if we were interested (we said yes, and for good reason). He brought many worlds together. His activism went hand in hand with a deep commitment to the intellect and to figuring out the world through argument. This could discomfit other activists, since it meant that he often changed his mind. He had the profound intellectual curiosity of a first-rate scholar, without the self-importance that usually accompanies it. If he could be accused of arrogance (and some people did so accuse him), it was a curiously egoless form. He simply expected other people to live up to the same
exacting standards that he imposed upon himself. But he could also take a joke. When the
New York Times
ran a story on him with an accompanying photo that portrayed him brooding and backlit behind the screen of his MacBook, I teased him about it, and he was clearly delighted to be teased.

It's hard to face up to what we've lost. He wasn't just an activist, or a programmer, or an intellectual. He was a builder of bridges between many different people from many different worlds. Only after he died did I begin to realize how many people he corresponded with. When I write now, it is often in an imaginary dialogue with him, where I imagine his impatience with this or that plodding sentence, too far removed from the real concerns of real people. That imaginary dialogue is no substitute for the real thing. He was smarter than I am, and always capable of surprising me. I miss him very much.

—Henry Farrell

MEDIA

L
ike Aaron, I go around a lot and talk to people about stuff that I think is of burning importance: questions about whether the Internet will be a tool for unimaginable surveillance, control, and censorship, or whether it will be a tool for unprecedented democratic deliberation, collective action, creativity, and self-expression.

When it's over, inevitably someone will ask me how I think it'll all turn out. After all, I'm a science fiction writer. Isn't that a bit like being a futurist?

But being a science fiction writer is nothing like a futurist. Or shouldn't be, anyway. A science fiction writer who believes he can predict the future is like a drug peddler who starts sampling the product—it never ends well. The point of science fiction is to talk about the present—to build a counterfactual world that illustrates some important fact about the present that is so vast and diffuse that it's hard to put your finger on.

When you go to the doctor with a sore throat, she'll swab it and touch the swab to a petri dish that goes into a cupboard for a day or two. When she gets it out again, the stuff that was on the swab will have multiplied into something that is visible with a conventional microscope, ready for diagnosis. Science fiction writers do that to whole societies. We pluck a single technological fact out of the world around us, and we build a world in a bottle where that fact is the totalizing truth. Through a process of fiction, we take the reader on a tour of this thought experiment that gives him the power to intuit the way technology is flexing our reality, making the invisible visible.

The important fact about the petri dish with your throat gunk on it is that it is not an accurate model of your body. It's an incredibly simplified model of it, inaccurate in a specific and useful way. So it is with science fiction—its value is not in prediction but in description, in making the invisible visible.

Who wants to be a predictor, anyway? If the world was predictable, it would be foreordained, and what we do wouldn't matter. A world on rails is one in which everything we do is futile. Why, if you saw what Dante did to the fortune-tellers in Inferno, you'd—

So then they say, “Fine, fine, you're not a predictor. But what about optimism? Are you optimistic about the future or pessimistic?”

And that's when I really start to channel my inner Aaron. Because that's exactly the wrong sort of question to ask. Of course I'm pessimistic about what would happen if the forces of reaction triumph and the Net is irreversibly used to wire up a system of totalitarian control that combines Orwell (surveillance) with Huxley (ubiquitous corporate messaging) and Kafka (guilt by Big Data algorithm).

But so what? The fact that I'm still doing something tells you the answer to the optimism/pessimism question. If I didn't think there was any hope of salvaging things, I wouldn't be out there kicking at the walls and shouting from the hilltops. Is that optimism?

I don't know. Call it hope instead.

And on second thought, even if I was convinced that nothing I did mattered, I'd still be out there. Because this world is people I love—my wife, my daughter, other family members, friends, some of you reading these words. And just as I wouldn't stop treading water if I was trying to keep my daughter afloat in an open sea, not until my last breath was gone and my legs wouldn't kick another stroke, even if I knew it wouldn't make a difference, I'd still keep kicking. If I weren't capable of another stroke, I'd still keep advocating for Net freedom even if I knew my efforts wouldn't make a difference.

Don't ask yourself whether the future will be good or bad. Don't ask yourself whether you are an optimist or a pessimist. Ask what you can do to make the world better. Live as though these are the first days of a better nation. Never give up.

—Cory Doctorow

The Book That Changed My Life

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany

May 15, 2006

Age 19

Two years ago this summer I read a book that changed the entire way I see the world. I had been researching various topics—law, politics, the media—and become more and more convinced that something was seriously wrong. Politicians, I was shocked to discover, weren't actually doing what the people wanted. And the media, my research found, didn't really care much about that, preferring to focus on such things as posters and polls.

As I thought about this more, its implications struck me as larger and larger. But I still had no bigger picture to fit them in. The media was simply doing a bad job, leading people to be confused. We just had to pressure them to do better and democracy would be restored.

Then, one night, I watched the film
Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media
(I think it had come up in my Netflix queue). First off, it's simply an amazingly good film. I've watched it several times now and each time I'm utterly entranced. It's undoubtedly the best documentary I've seen, weaving together all sorts of clever tricks to enlighten and entertain.

Second, it makes shocking points. I didn't understand all of what it was saying at the time, but I understood enough to realize that something was severely amiss. The core of the film is a case study of Indonesia's brutal invasion of the country of East Timor. The U.S. personally gave the green light to the invasion and provided the weapons, which allowed Indonesia to massacre the population in an occupation that, per capita, ranks with the Holocaust. And the U.S. media ignores it and, when they do cover it, inevitably distorts it.

Shocked and puzzled by the film, I was eager to learn more. Noam Chomsky has dozens of books but I was fortunate to choose to read
Understanding Power
, a thick paperback I picked up at the library. Edited by Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel, two public defenders in New York, the book is a collection of transcripts of group discussions with Chomsky.

Chomsky lays out the facts in a conversational style, telling stories and explaining things in response to questions from the groups, covering an incredibly wide range of topics. And on every single one, what he tells you is completely shocking, at odds with everything you know, turning the way you see things upside-down. Mitchell and Schoeffel know you're unlikely to believe these things, so they've carefully footnoted and documented every claim, providing block-quote excerpts from the original sources to establish them.

Each story, individually, can be dismissed as some weird oddity, like what I'd learned about the media focusing more on posters than on policy. But seeing them all together, you can't help but begin to tease out the larger picture, to ask yourself what's behind all these disparate things, and what that means for the way we see the world.

Reading the book, I felt as if my mind was rocked by explosions. At times the ideas were too much, and I literally had to lie down. (I'm not the only one to feel this way—Norman Finkelstein noted that when he went through a similar experience, “it was a totally crushing experience for me. . . . My world literally caved in. And there were quite a number of weeks where . . . I just was in bed, totally devastated.”) I remember vividly clutching at the door to my room, trying to hold on to something while the world spun around.

For weeks afterwards, everything I saw was in a different light. Every time I saw a newspaper or magazine or person on TV, I questioned what I thought I knew about them, wondered how they fit into this new picture. Questions that had puzzled me for years suddenly began making sense in this new world. I reconsidered everyone I knew, everything I thought I'd learned. And I found I didn't have much company.

It's taken me two years to write about this experience, not without reason. One terrifying side effect of learning the world isn't the way you think is that it leaves you all alone. And when you try to
describe your new worldview to people, it either comes out sounding unsurprising (“Yeah, sure, everyone knows the media's got problems”) or like pure lunacy and people slowly back away.

Ever since then, I've realized that I need to spend my life working to fix the shocking brokenness I'd discovered. And the best way to do that, I concluded, was to try to share what I'd discovered with others. I couldn't just tell them it straight out, I knew, so I had to provide the hard evidence. So I started working on a book to do just that. (I'm looking for people to help, if you're interested.)

It's been two years now and my mind has settled down some. I've learned a bunch more but, despite my best efforts, haven't found any problems with this frightening new worldview. After all this time, I'm finally ready to talk about what happened with some distance and I hope I'm now able to begin work on my book in earnest.

It was a major change, but I wouldn't give it up for anything.

The Invention of Objectivity

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/newobjectivity

October 19, 2006

Age 19

Big media pundits are always wringing their hands about how upstart partisan bloggers are destroying the neutral objectivity our country was founded on. (If there's one thing pundits love to do, it's hand-wringing.) Without major papers giving everyone an objective view of the facts, they insist, the very foundation of the republic is in peril.

You can criticize this view for just being silly or wrong, and many have, but there's another problem with it: it's completely ahistorical. As Robert McChesney describes in
The Problem of the Media
, objectivity is a fairly recent invention—the republic was actually founded on partisan squabblers.

When our country was founded, newspapers were not neutral, nonpartisan outlets, but the products of particular political parties. The Whigs had their paper, the Tories theirs, both of which attacked their political opponents with slurs that would make even the most foul-mouthed bloggers blush. This behavior wasn't just permitted—it was encouraged.

You often hear the media quote Jefferson's comment that “were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” However, they hesitate to print the following sentence: “But I should mean that every man should receive those papers, and be capable of reading them.” In particular, Jefferson was referring to the post office subsidy the government provided to the partisan press.

In 1794, newspapers made up 70% of post office traffic and the big debate in Congress was not over whether the government should pay for their delivery, but how much of it to pay for. James Madison attacked the idea that newspaper publishers should have to pay even a token fee to get the government to deliver their publications, calling it “an insidious forerunner of something worse.” By 1832, newspaper traffic had risen to make up 90% of all mail.

Indeed, objectivity wasn't even invented until the 1900s. Before that, McChesney comments, “such notions for the press would have been nonsensical, even unthinkable.” Everyone assumed that the best system of news was one where everyone could say their piece at very little cost. (The analogy to blogging isn't much of a stretch, now is it? See, James Madison loved blogs!)

But as wealth began to concentrate in the Gilded Age and the commercial presses began to lobby government for more favorable policies, the size and power of the smaller presses began to dwindle. The commercial presses were eager to be the only game in town, but they realized that if they were, their blatant partisanship would have to go. (Nobody would stand for a one-newspaper town if the one paper was blatantly biased.) So they decided to insist that journalism was a profession like any other, that reporting was an apolitical job, based solely on objective standards.

They set up schools of journalism to train reporters in the new notion. In 1900, there were no J-schools; by 1920, the major ones were going strong. The “church and state” separation of advertising and reporting became official doctrine and the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) was set up to enforce it.

The entire foundation of press criticism was rebuilt. Now, instead of criticizing papers for the bias of their owners, press critics had to focus on the professional obligations of their writers. Bias wasn't about the slant of a paper's focus, but about any slanting put in by a reporter.

So that was the line of attack the house press critics took when the world of weblogs brought back the vibrant political debates of our country's founding. “These guys are biased! Irresponsible! They get their facts wrong! They're unprofessional!” they squeal. Look, guys. Tell that to James Madison.