The Digital Utopian Vision of Marshall McLuhan and Stewart Brand Is Cracking

It appears to me that the original vision and promise of the Internet, referred to by many as Digital Utopianism, is at severe risk of deteriorating into a “balkanized”  and severely impaired World Wide Web.

Internet barriers, censorship, protectionist Internet policy, and ubiquitous surveillance seem to be the emerging new reality.  Notable digital luminaries the likes of Vin Cerf and Bill Gates have been questioned on this point, and both have expressed no major concern about deterioration of the freedom of the Internet or with the original Utopian vision.  The argument is that the World Wide Web cannot be effectively blocked or censored.  Google would probably respond that their “loon balloons” could simply be launched to counter censorship. As a long time Silicon Valley high tech executive, I understand this optimistic view, but the facts on the ground are now providing serious evidence that the Internet is under attack, and may not survive unless there is a significant shift in these new trends.

This week alone, Turkey’s Erdogan has tried to block both Twitter and YouTube to prevent Turks from viewing evidence of his corrupt government. This morning’s New York Times reports Edward Snowden’s latest revelation.  While the U.S. government and media were investigating and publicly reporting on Chinese government Internet espionage and Chinese network equipment manufacturer Huawei, the NSA, the British GCHQ and Canada’s  Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) ,  were all collaborating, doing exactly the same thing. The hypocrisy and irony of this is not lost on either the Chinese or the Internet community. CBS 60 Minutes reported on the Chinese espionage, but has been essentially silent on NSA’s own transgressions. 60 Minutes even broadcast a report that NSA metadata was essentially harmless, which has now been shown to be false. The 60 Minutes objective reporting problem is the canary in the coal mine of the corporate takeover of media and the Web.  Protectionist policies in various countries targeted against Google, Microsoft and others are emerging. One of the many negative effects of the NSA revelations was the announcement this week that the United States was giving up control of the International Committee for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which essentially sets Internet traffic policy. Finally, this week, Netflix spoke out forcefully against the “peering agreement” it was blackmailed into signing with Comcast to insure “quality of service” (QOS) for Netflix programming to the edges of the Web.

Read more: NSA breached Chinese servers

Read more: Netflix Thinks Peering Should Be A Net Neutrality Issue

I recently came across Professor Fred Turner, Professor of Communication at Stanford. It has been a revelation for me.  His book, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture’ is an acclaimed milestone work. Turner has articulated the World I lived in the counterculture of the 1960’s and in the early Silicon Valley. His work explaining the evolution from the “counterculture” of the 1960’s to the emerging new “cyberculture” of the late 1980’s and 1990’s is an excellent record of that time in northern California.  This was the World of Steve Jobs at that time and his personal evolvement to a digital Utopian.  It is detailed in Jobs biography, and in Jobs wonderful Stanford University 2005 commencement speech, in which he also acknowledged the importance of Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog.  This was also my countercultural World as a Communications student at San Jose State at that time, in the heart of the Silicon Valley, and subsequent high tech career, beginning at Intel Corporation.  But even Professor Turner has expressed his own ambivalence about the future direction of the Web, though only from the standpoint of less worrying lack of diversity of Web communities. My concern is much more deeply based on current evidence and much more ominous.

Fred Turner, Stanford Professor of Communication – Counterculture to Cyberculture

Stewart Brand, the father of the Whole Earth Catalog and the original digital utopia visionary, has been rethinking its basic concepts. Brand has come around 180 degrees from environmental Utopianism based on “back to the land,” and is now embracing the future importance of urban enclaves. While this new urban view is now a widely held idea by many futurists, it can also be viewed as another facet of the end of digital utopia.  This TEDTalk by Brand lays out his new vision.  Where we go from here is anyone’s guess.

Harlem Shake, Gangman Style May Spell End of Telecom Monopoly

Could Apple, Google and Intel  Save Net Neutrality? 

Something potentially very important may be happening for the future of the Internet and Net Neutrality: online video broadcasting: participation and interactive television. It could portend an end of the current Comcast and Time Warner monopoly behavior, attempting to consolidate control, and essentially to censor content, by controlling both the carrier pipe and by prioritizing their own content, to the detriment of others seeking access to “the pipe” to broadcast their own content.

A number of online journalists and bloggers have been writing recently about the potential for the Silicon Valley Big Three to change the Internet monopoly game. Let’s hope that they are right.  Posts going back to 2012 have rhetorically asked, “Could Google Save Net Neutrality?“ This week Mark Suster has posted on TechCrunch: “Participation: The Trend That is Bigger Than Harlem Shake.”   Both of these writers are potentially on to something big, IMHO. Suster even cites Harvard Professor Clayton M. Christensen‘s book,  The Innovator’s Dilemma, to make the point that the Net Neutrality battle may be at an Andy Grove strategic inflection point that could be shifting in favor of net neutrality.

The key development may be Psy, Gangman Style, The Harlem Shake, and the entry of Apple, Google and Intel into the streaming multimedia space, as providers of interactive, participatory content.  Comcast view these players as threats to their monopoly dominance. The telecom mindset lives in a parallel universe that cannot even imagine what Apple, Google and Intel are planning.  Fortunately, in my mind, we have the right three Twenty-First Century players, with very deep pockets, prepared to do battle with the Nineteenth Century telecoms, to insure that the future of the Internet evolves as we all know that it should.

I have been thinking and stressing about Net Neutrality and the power of the giant telecom monopolies for some time. Yale University Law Professor Susan Crawford has also written a book, subtitled “The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power In the New Gilded Age.”  Having heard Professor Crawford speak, and having posted her remarks here on this blog, her arguments are compelling. My own experience with the domestic telecom industry over the years only adds to my concern.  The new telecom monopoly of the Internet, following after its free and open roots, reflects the current dominance of Wall Street and its apparent disregard for democracy: a New Gilded Age of Monopoly, harking back to the age of Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller. Ironically PBS American Masters this week broadcast a retrospective biography of Rockefeller and Standard Oil, just in case we have forgotten after 100 years.

Read more: http://mayo615.com/2013/02/12/why-net-neutrality-is-so-important-the-telecom-industry-and-monopoly-power/

 

Eric Schmidt Nailed It: China’s Military Is Hacking Us Silly

On the evening of February 6th, I delivered a guest lecture to the local chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). During the course of my lecture I referenced a very recent quote from Eric Schmidt on cyber security concerns about China.  I have great respect for Schmidt, as I worked with him when he was Sun Microsystem‘s Chief Technology Officer, and I was with SunSoft, the division responsible for Sun’s version of the UNIX operating system.  The cyber security issue  is an area that has concerned me since I first began working in China, representing P-Cube (acquired by Cisco Systems), and its advanced Internet traffic policy engine.

I think it is fair to say that Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, has been one of the first to openly and vocally declare our national cyber security threat from Chinese hackers. Just two weeks ago, on February 1st,  Wall Street Journal blogger, Tom Gara, posted an exclusive article describing his review of early galley proofs of Schmidt’s new book, planned for release this coming April.   Apparently, Schmidt is quoted from the proofs, writing that:

“China is the world’s most active and enthusiastic filterer of information” as well as “the most sophisticated and prolific” hacker of foreign companies. In a world that is becoming increasingly digital, the willingness of China’s government and state companies to use cyber crime gives the country an economic and political edge.”

Read more: http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/02/01/exclusive-eric-schmidt-unloads-on-china-in-new-book/

In late January, shortly before the WSJ blog post, we learned from a blog post by Eric Schmidt’s daughter Sophie, that Schmidt had also just returned from a surreptitious visit to North Korea with former New Mexico Governor, Bill Richardson.  Schmidt described the other worldly cyber world of North Korea. had access to North Korea’s mobile network, which allows international calls but has no data service. Schmidt got a look at North Korea’s national intranet, which Schmidt described as “a walled garden of scrubbed content taken from the real Internet.”

Clearly, China and North Korea have become major topics of interest for Schmidt and Google. Something is up.

All week this week, National Public Radio‘s Morning Edition, has featured a series of stories on our military’s growing concern and focus on cyber attacks, and the development of both defensive and offensive cyber strategies.

Sunday night on CBS 60 Minutes, Janet Napolitano, Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security, revealed that China was at the top of of her cyber threat list, also listing Iran and Russia.

But the most important event occurred this evening, when the New York Times published a Breaking News Alert on a story written by three of the best NYT investigative journalists.  The four page detailed article, “Chinese Army Unit Is Seen as Tied to Hacking Against U.S.,” provides extraordinary detailed evidence.  The breadth and depth of the cyber attacks on the United States go back as far as 2006, and the article describes attacks on numerous industries and hundreds of U.S. companies.  Most concerning, there is now compelling evidence of near-miss attacks seeking means to disable our critical infrastructure.  There has been much talk about our vulnerability, but until this NYT article nothing has so explicitly exposed our risk to cyber attack from the Chinese military.  For me, one of the more interesting details was that the source of the attacks was a PLA building in Shanghai.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/technology/chinas-army-is-seen-as-tied-to-hacking-against-us.html?pagewanted=4&emc=na

(Since I first posted this story on my blog, virtually all major national and international media outlets have exploded with their own stories: BBC, Canadian Broadcasting, PBS Newshour, NBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and dozens of others.  Tuesday, February 19th is the day that President Obama’s Executive Order to strengthen U.S. government resources, strategy and tactics in the growing cyber war go into effect.)

So it would now appear that the proverbial cat is out of the bag, and we can expect considerably more discussion about this and policies to counter it.  Some may argue that Stuxnet worm attack on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges marks the opening of a covert new war. The consensus seems to be that we have no choice now but to respond.

As I spent more and more time in China, and spoke with my colleagues at TDF Ventures in Shanghai, and as we met with officials of IBM Global Services in Beijing, I developed this subjective impression that Shanghai was much more politically conservative, patriotic, and aggressive with foreign companies. Just something about Shanghai that I couldn’t put my finger on.  Shanghai has also historically had a kind of separate local culture with the Shanghainese dialect, which is unintelligible to Mandarin speakers. Shanghai locals seem to pride themselves on their differences with Beijing.  More recently, others I know who have familiarity with Shanghai have concurred with my sense that the place is the conservative center of China. I can distinctly remember meetings with computer and Internet experts in Shanghai that left me with a very uncomfortable sense of their motives. They also did not seem to be particularly shy about their motives.  During my first visit to Beijing in 1999, for the 50th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China, I was deeply impressed by the event, and the obvious patriotism.  But as I continued to visit China on business, I became increasingly uncomfortable with what I was seeing and hearing.

It now seems that my gut concerns were well placed.

U.S. Ranks Lowly 8th in Global Internet Race: Sweden #1

Further evidence that Yale Law Professor Susan P. Crawford is right about a telecom monopoly in North America that is throttling the Internet and endangering our economic competitiveness. Read Ms. Crawford’s book, “Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.” Professor Crawford is also being promoted to succeed Julius Genachowski, as FCC Chairman. I wholeheartedly endorse her.

 

Gigaom

Sweden was the first country to launch an LTE network, and it retains plenty of bragging rights. According to a study by U.K. network-testing firm OpenSignal, Sweden has the fastest 4G networks in the world, averaging download speeds of 22.1 Mbps.

The U.S. was the second country to deliver commercial LTE networks on the world stage, but it ranks far lower in terms of 4G bandwidth delivered. OpenSignal found that networks in Hong Kong, Denmark, Canada, Australia, South Korea and Germany all performed better. The U.S. placed eighth, averaging downlink speeds of 9.6 Mbps.

Why the low scores? It probably has to do with the configuration of U.S. carriers’ networks. While most operators around the world secured 40 MHz of spectrum with which to launch their new 4G networks, U.S. carriers have been working with smaller swatches of airwaves. Verizon(s vz)(s vod) and AT&T(s t) are using 20…

View original post 182 more words

Why Net Neutrality Is So Important: The Telecom Industry And Monopoly Power

Yale Law Professor, Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly, and Unfair

If you think that the U.S. and Canada are global leaders in Internet broadband development, think again.  Despite recent improvements in broadband connectivity, the US and Canada still lag behind when compared to other developed nations. To quote FCC chairman Julius Genachowski, “We are at risk in the global race for economic leadership …curtailing Canada and the US from earning top positions in the global bandwidth race.”   Many other countries, notably South Korea and in Europe, France, Finland and the Netherlands are far ahead of us in terms of providing World Class Internet connectivity.  Genachowski has declared a Gigabit to the City campaign to dramatically upgrade domestic connectivity by 2015.  Regrettably, this is similar to Genachowski’s pronouncements on what he has termed, “Super-Wifi“, which I have explored in my earlier post on this blog.   It is the enormous monopoly political power of the telecommunication industry that is blocking the public interest and U.S. global economic leadership. Read more: http://mayo615.com/2013/02/08/urban-legend-of-free-wi-fi-for-the-masses-devil-in-the-details/ 

In the video interview with Bill Moyers, Ms. Crawford graphically makes the point that in Hong Kong and Seoul it is possible to get 500Mbit Internet connectivity via fiber link for $25 per month. Competition is so fierce that it is normally installed in one day.  By contrast, I ordered 100Mbit service from Shaw Cable here, which was priced at $100 per month.  Despite adding the charge to my monthly bill, Shaw was unable to demonstrate that they could deliver anything greater than 53Mbits, for which I now pay $50 per month.  Hong Kong offers 10 times the bandwidth at half the price.

Susan Crawford, former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation, and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, joins Bill Moyers to discuss how our government has allowed a few powerful media conglomerates to put profit ahead of the public interest — rigging the rules, raising prices, and stifling competition. As a result, Crawford says, all of us are at the mercy of the biggest business monopoly since Standard Oil in the first Gilded Age a hundred years ago.

“The rich are getting gouged, the poor are very often left out, and this means that we’re creating, yet again, two Americas, and deepening inequality through this communications inequality,” Crawford tells Bill Moyers.

Susan P. Crawford (born 1963) is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. She has served as President Barack Obama‘s Special Assistant for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (2009) and is a columnist for Bloomberg View. She is a former Board Member of ICANN, the international organization that regulates the Internet Protocol, the founder of OneWebDay, and a legal scholar. Her research focuses on telecommunications and information law.

Susan Crawford, “Captive Audience, the Telecom Industry and monopoly power in the new gilded age.

Tubes, A Journey to the Centre of the Internet, byAndrew Blum

from BillMoyers.com. Video interview via Vimeo. Bill Moyers & Company

Bill Moyers. com

Julius Genachowski, FCC  global race

 

Big Data, The Cloud And Smart Mobile Are Actually One Big Thing

ToDaClo is a current buzz word of sorts for “touch-data-cloud,” (or Big Data, The Cloud and Smart Mobile)  which appears to have been coined by a writer for Forbes magazine during a talk in Paris in May 2012.  The speaker declared the death of the previous buzz word, SoLoMo (social-local-mobile). ToDaClo does not seem to have caught on beyond France as most of the writing and blogging about it is in French.  SoLoMo had a following for some time, and even has an online manifesto, vaguely implying location based services, which have been a major mobile feature for some time in Asia, but not here.  I think the bottom line is that both of these acronyms are trying to communicate the concept that Big Data, The Cloud and Smart Mobile are inter-related.  I actually think of them as One Big Thing, even The Next Big Thing, or perhaps “Ne-Bi-Ng”  (Nebing) as some may prefer, though I doubt Nebing will ever catch on.  Sanjay Poonen, President & CEO of SAP also views them as One Big Thing.

Reblogged from Gigaom

The secret to tackling mobile, cloud and big data? Treat them as one.

by Sanjay Poonen

Sanjay Poonen, President & CEO of SAP AG

SUMMARY:It’s no secret that mobile, big data and cloud computing are transforming IT. Sanjay Poonen, president of SAP’s mobile division, says companies need a single unified strategy to tackle them, not three separate ones.

There is widespread agreement—across the globe and in every industry—that mobile, big data, and cloud computing are the three cornerstone issues of tomorrow’s business environment. In fact, a strong organizational response to each of these issues is already critical to competitive survival.

As a result, CIOs, business strategists and IT leaders are working furiously to make sure their businesses have plans in place to stay ahead of these challenges. But there is one subtlety that is frequently overlooked: When it comes to mobile computing, big data and the cloud, what we have is not three problems but one.

Rising in unison

It’s not a coincidence that the profile of these three business challenges rose in parallel. Mobile, big data, and cloud are not siloed concerns easily addressed in isolation. They exist in an overlapping matrix, where the importance of each issue increases because it leverages (or helps solve) an issue raised by one of the others.

For example, in the days before mobile computing, business users typically did all their work using just a handful of applications. Today, the average smartphone has 41 apps installed on it. And each of those applications sparks a need to consider security, since it generates data each and every time it is used. And because these devices are often connected to service provider networks – rather than directly with corporate servers – a great deal of that business app data requires secure cloud storage.

Thus the proliferation of mobile devices exacerbates the big data problem, which in turn precipitates the demand for cloud.

In short, they are all part of a single, converged and symbiotic trend. And to address them optimally requires a holistic perspective on all three.

No bottom in sight

With global demand for mobile computing at the heart of this escalation, it makes sense that IT strategists would be keenly interested in the trend lines for mobile adoption. Today, 87 percent of the world’s population owns a mobile phone; 60 million Android devices were sold in the second quarter of 2012, and now 1 million new Android devices are provisioned daily, according to Google. As of last month, there were likely more smartphones on the planet than humans, according to Cisco.

So the question is whether there is a saturation point on the horizon that could help curb this cloud/mobile/data demand? Surprisingly, no. The average number of mobile devices per employee worldwide has already reached three to five, and adoption rates continue to grow as consumers add tablets and ever-more capable smartphones to their mobile arsenals.

But consumers’ ceaseless enthusiasm for new form factors and functionality is not the whole story behind the world’s bottomless demand for mobility. Today, businesses themselves – rather than consumers – are adding fuel to the fire.

Not just a BYOD issue

As industries finally crest the hump of transforming their workflows to leverage mobile device availability, they drive new demand – not only for mobile devices, but for new scalable infrastructures that deliver more actionable intelligence from their big data.

Finance Consumer banks, operators and retailers are widely deploying mobile commerce capabilities, which, in addition to automating traditional transactions, must include on-demand access to unstructured data, such as check images.

Manufacturing  Mobile devices on the factory floor automate manual processes, thereby feeding more rapid information into the system. This makes it possible to detect and respond early to issues that take a toll on quality or productivity, such as supplier errors.

Retail  Retailers are giving regional store managers mobile app access to daily and even real-time sales performance data on the floor, allowing them to optimize displays and customer service to sell more of the most popular items.

Health care Thanks to new mobile apps and devices, the details of every patient interaction is now entered into the system nearly instantaneously. This provides a basis for a more efficient and orchestrated care response, and in some cases leading to more rapid or accurate diagnoses.

The internet of things

As mobile technology embeds itself into more and more objects, vehicles, buildings, sensors and machines, the heterogeneity of actionable business information will only grow. “Annual global IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte threshold by the end of 2016,” reports Cisco. “In 2016, global IP traffic will reach 1.3 zettabytes per year or 109.5 exabytes per month.” (As we already know, there are currently at least 2.7 zettabytes in storage globally).

Smart equipment and vehicles will upload data to service provider networks as well as private networks, and organizations will need a plan to normalize data in many forms and from many sources. The scalable infrastructures we design today to store and structure such varied data are critical to the enablement of the business innovations we will need in the future.

The effect of this convergence is already apparent, especially in the area of business intelligence. Mobile business intelligence makes it possible for organizations to provide analytics on key performance metrics to a wider variety of employees – not just for executives. Once employees get a taste for how mobile apps fuel greater effectiveness in their job duties, they will push for more dashboards and more data. And these big data stores can’t be undertaken without cloud, to facilitate real-time performance, nor mobile devices and apps, to deliver data into the field where it’s put to good use.

Embracing the Entanglement

The interdependence of mobile, big data and cloud is undeniable, and will only multiply as data growth and mobile use continue. Yet our strategic thinking lags behind the evidence. As we have learned from IT revolutions of the past, a partial strategy is worse than no strategy at all, as you can end up with an inflexible, tactical implementation that requires a ‘rip and replace’ approach.

Organizations that manage to avoid a false start with a siloed strategy will create a network design better aligned with where IT will be in five years. In short, the most successful organizations recognize the secret alliance of mobile, big data and cloud early, and develop a holistic strategy considering all three in concert.

IEEE Seminar, February 6th, 5PM, EME 1151

 

 

IEEE Okanagan Subsection
Presents
Mr. David Mayes
Faculty of Management, Global Internet Group, LLP
Big Data, the Cloud, and Smart Mobile: Big
Deal or Not?
Time & Date: 5pm-6pm, February 6, 2013
Location: EME 1151, UBC Okanagan campus
Talk Abstract: We are hearing regularly in the media about so-called “Big Data.” Is Big Data so
transformational that it will change our everyday lives, or is it just another evolutionary advance
that may improve productivity but not much else? The same arguments may apply to the concept
of “The Cloud,” and “Smart Mobile,” the other two major trends. I say that the three, taken together,
are coalescing into the most important new force in information technology in decades. They will
drive further innovation and productivity enhancements into the foreseeable future. The talk will
explore all three trends and pose questions for the future.
Speaker Biography: Mr. David Mayes is a full-time Lecturer in entrepreneurship, communication,
negotiation, IT and strategic management at The University of British Columbia, Faculty of
Management, and Master’s degree program. Mr. Mayes was founder and spokesperson for the Intel,
Microsoft and Compaq initiative for high speed consumer “universal” DSL Internet access. Mr.
Mayes also led a number of other major industry initiatives: Vendors’ ISDN Association, V.92
modem consortium. Mr. Mayes joined with Microsoft as an author of the IETF security protocol
PPTP (point to point tunneling protocol), creating secure “virtual private networks” across the
Internet. Mr. Mayes formed solar energy company, Sola Renewable Energy Ltd., and was
Executive Director and Chairperson of the Okanagan Environmental Industry Alliance (OEIA),
which works directly with local, regional, provincial and federal Canadian government groups.
Mr. Mayes began his career at Intel Corporation in California, Oregon and Europe. He left Intel
while based at Intel’s European HQ, to form his first entrepreneurial venture, 01 Computers Group
Ltd., based in London. Its corporate clients included the BBC, British Telecom and Imperial
Chemical Industries. Recently, Mr. Mayes was Vice President of Business Development at P-Cube,
iBEAM Broadcasting, and Director of Business Development at Ascend Communications. Mr.
Mayes was directly involved in a variety of multinational venture investments, public, private
mergers, acquisitions, corporate partnerships, and sales, including Ascend’s acquisitions of NetStar
and Cascade Communications.
Pizza and drinks will be provided after the talk. For further information please contact:
Julian Cheng (email: julian.cheng@ubc.ca)

 

In Memoriam: Aaron Swartz, Internet Activist, RSS Pioneer, and Co-Founder of Reddit

Aaron Swartz, Internet Visionary Has Left Us

UPDATE

Tweet from (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee on the death of Aaron Swartz”  “Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.” And the web wept.

Today the blogosphere and media have lit up with tributes and obituaries to Aaron Swartz: not least of these include The Economist Magazine “Babbage” editorial page, and The Harvard Business Review blog

Read more, Babbage, The Economist:  http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/01/remembering-aaron-swartz?fsrc=nlw|newe|1-14-2013|4609454|34901933|NA

 Read more, HBR blog:   http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/01/aaron_swartzs_crime_and_the_bu.html

ORIGINAL POST

Only 26 years old, Aaron Swartz took his own life late last week.  Swartz was an Internet intellectual giant, recognized as such since his early teenage years..  We have lost a second generation Internet visionary..someone who could have helped us get to the next level of The Global Village..

At the age of 14, Swartz was credited with inventing RSS, known as “rich site summary,” a format for delivering to users content from sites that change constantly, such as news pages and blogs. We all use it.

The problem was that the powers that want corporate control the Internet did not like Aaron.. They want us to pay big corporations big bucks and they see the Internet as a threat to their power.  I personally view Swartz’ suicide as an existential act of immense courage, making the ultimate statement with his life, screaming at us that we need to “wake the fuck up”  as Samuel L. Jackson screamed at us in his viral video, during the US Presidential campaign.

Swartz faced trouble in July 2011, when he was indicted by a federal grand jury of wire fraud, computer fraud and other charges related to allegedly stealing millions of academic articles and journals from a digital archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

According to the federal indictment, Swartz – who was a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J Safra Center for Ethics – used MIT’s computer networks to steal more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service. JSTOR did not press charges against Swartz after the digitised copies of the articles were returned, according to media reports at the time.  So why did the US Attorney insist on driving Aaron to commit suicide?

Swartz, who pleaded not guilty to all counts, faced 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted. He was released on bond. His trial was scheduled to start later this year.  Many legal scholars who have studied the case,  have described the US federal prosecution as a travesty, and out of all proportion to the facts..

Most importantly, if the United States views the Internet as a strategic national security resource, they completely fucked up by forcing the suicide of one of its most important new geniuses. You can’t get more fucked up than that. 

On Saturday, online tributes to Swartz flooded across cyberspace. “Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill and intelligence about people and issues,” Cory Doctorow, Canadian blogger and science fiction writer, co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing, wrote on the site. Doctorow wrote that Swartz had “problems with depression for many years.”  Depression, mood swings and even bipolar disorder are commonly associated with extremely bright people.

We lost Steve Jobs.. Now we have lost Aaron as well.  He could have been our next generation Marshall McLuhan, showing us the way…. But it was not to happen.  I am so angry I could spit.