Opening with the news of the untimely death of Internet “hacktivist” Aaron Swartz at the age of 26, The Internet’s Own Boy follows the rise and fall of a tech prodigy. Interviews with his friends and family paint a portrait of Swartz as a freedom of information martyr and hail his fight for the public’s right to tax-funded academic and scientific research that culminated in a personally devastating two-year federal lawsuit.
After developing RSS technology at the age of 14, Swartz has been embraced by technology leaders in their fields, including Cory Doctorow and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig. Affable and baby-faced, Swartz was a frequent speaker at conferences and participated in academic studies at leading universities during his teenage years. As the co-founder of Reddit, one of the largest social media and news aggregation sites on the web, he has established himself as a force to be reckoned with. Despite a lucrative job offer from Condé Nast, Swartz rejected a corporate culture that favored a democratic internet to share information for profit.
Swartz, an avid researcher who has had access to other private databases, “acts in the great tradition of civil disobedience … explaining against this private theft of public culture,” using MIT computers to access tax-funded The research, otherwise kept secret by the for-profit publisher, many viewers may recall events that made national headlines a few years ago. Although neither MIT nor the Swartz Digital Archive had access to the indictment, U.S. prosecutors stepped in and charged Swartz with 13 felony counts, fined him more than $1 million, and threatened a sentence of up to 35 years imprisonment.
The case drew unwanted media attention to Swartz, portraying him as a hacker and pirate rather than a liberator of information and defender of the civil liberties family whose employees were revered. Keen to tackle social issues and heavily influenced by World Wide Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, who chose to share the web freely over profit, the film portrays Swartz as a maligned activist who falsely Showing the public a criminal effort to release information to the public.
Despite the defense of his peers, the events sent Swartz into a two-year cycle of withdrawal and depression. The film examines technology’s impact on society’s access to information, the extent to which for-profit corporations and governments control access to information, and ultimately questions whether Swartz’s efforts proved him a failure or a triumph at the end of his life. Either way his influence on the open access movement is undeniable.
Directed by: Brian Knappenberger
