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Interview with Aaron Swartz Activist, Writer and Programmer
22 year old Aaron Swartz is the co-founder
of Reddit.com, RSS 1.0, Jottit.com
and the Progressive Change Commitee.
www.aaronsw.com
A: Yeah, so I cofounded a group called the Progressive Change Campaign Commitee
and what we're trying to do is we're trying to organize people
over the internet who care about Progressive politics
and moving the country in a more progressive direction.
To kind of come together, join our email lists,
join our campaigns and help get progressive candidates
elected all across the country.
I think one of the things we found is that
if you want to run for office,
you know, basically there's a path for doing it
but it's a very corporated controlled path
you hire a bunch of big money consultants,
you talk to a bunch of big money donors,
you go around the major corporations, speak with their executives,
and persuade them you like the things they do.
And the result is that most of the people in congress,
you know, are very business friendly, very corporate funded candidates,
and what we want to do is build a pipeline to get more progressive,
more activists, more individual people to act in the congress
so they can start making real social change.
Q: And how do you know you're being effective in that work?
A: I think it's kind of nice
that we have this focus on elections because you know,
elections are very clear,
there's a deadline, there are two candidates,
you know, one year supporting, one year opposing, right?
There's a date when you find out which one do you want.
And so you really can't fool yourself with elections.
You can say, well, we got 90% of the way there,
and at the end of the day either your candidate is in office or he isn't.
And you can see exactly how much you accomplished and how many votes you needed to go.
And so, one of the things I like about it is it gives us that constant sense
of exactly what we're achiving.
How close we're to getting there and what more we need to do.
Q: Why do you do what you do?
A: It's a good question.
I mean I, you know, feel very strongly that
it's not enough to just live in the world as it is
to just take what you give in,
and follow the things that adults told you to do,
and your parents told you to do and that society tells you to do.
I think that you should always be questioning,
I take this very scientific attitude that everything you've learnt is just provisional.
That it's always open to recuntation or refutation or questioning,
and I think the same applies to society.
And I fell at growing up slowly had this process of realising that all the things around me,
that people had told me were just the natural way things were,
the way things always would be, were not natural at all,
they were things that could be changed, and they were things that, more importantly,
were wrong and should change
and once I realised that there was really kind of no going back
I couldn't fool myself into saying
"No, I'm just going to work for a business and ignore all that"
Once I realised that there were real serious problems,
fundamental problems, that I could do something to address,
I didn't see a way to forget that,
I didn't see why not to [work on it].
Q: How did you go about getting active?
A: You know I've always been one into getting active
like even when I was in school I was very frustrated with school.
I thought the teachers didn't know what they were talking about
and they were very domineering and controlling
and the homework was kind of a sham and it was just like you know,
a way to put students together and force them to do busy work
and I started reading books about the history of education
and how this educational system was developed and alternatives to do it
in ways that people can actually learn things as opposed to just regurgitating facts
that teachers tell them
and that kind of led me down this path of questioning things.
You know, once I question the school I was in,
I question the society that built the school,
I question the businesses the school was training people for,
and I question the government that set up this whole structure.
Q: What are the projects or campaigns that you first got involved with?
A: Like I said, I got interested in educational stuff.
I don't think I really got involved in a political campaign.
I spent a lot of time after that, wondering what is it that I could really affect.
I did a lot of writing and a lot of reading, but a lot of the stuff I read about
social change seemed to come from this model in the revolutions
in the 60s people thought "oh, if we just get
enough people together who are angry then all of the sudden, magically,
this revolution will happen and it will take over the country".
And you know, it just didn't make sense to me.
I think now that I have more background, more contacts,
I think it came out of this experience watching of the soviet union.
Because the soviet union was so underdeveloped and you know,
there were many political structures in place. It was true, there were small groups of people
getting a bunch of people angry who could take over the whole country
and I just don't think that could happen in developed countries like the US or Ireland.
So I began wondering,
"what is it that you can do in developed countries?".
Everything seemed so inefective and so powerless
and it wasn't until just recently that I started thinking:
ok, the internet provides this oportunity now to raise money,
to get candidates elected,
there used to be that there was just no way for a small group of people to go
up against the power of big money
but one of the things we see in the future per se is that
there's just a couple of us who work there
and in the past year using nothing basically, computers and in our apartments,
we've got 300 000 people that joined our lists, and raised 1.25 million dollars.
I mean, that's just 3 people who were able to make a huge difference like that
and that I think that it means the internet really provides this chance
so we can start taking on big corporations.
Q: As you over the last few years or as you've developed your interests in social activism,
have there been any people or ideas or resources or organizations
that really inspired you? any particular good big thinkers?
A: The thing that, you know, really got me thinking along this lines was,
right before I went to collegue I read two books,
I read a book Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall
which is a study of how corporations work
and it's actually a fascinating book,
this sociologist, he kind of picks a corporation at random
and he goes and studies the middle managers,
not the people who do any of the grand work, and not the big decision makers,
just the people whose job is to make sure that things day to day get done
and he shows how even though they're perfectly reasonable people,
perfectly nice people,
you know, you'd be happy to meet any of them,
all the things that they're accomplishing are just incredibly evil, right?
So you have, these people, this average corporation,
they're making decisions to blow out the workers in the factories' eardrums,
to poison the lakes and the lagoons nearby,
to make these products that are filled with toxic chemicals that poison their customers.
Not because any of them are bad people that wanted to kill their workers,
their neightborhood and their customers
but just because that was the logic of the situation they were in.
Another book I read was the book "Understanding power" by Noam Chomsky,
which kind of took the scent of that analysis and applied it to a wider society.
We're in the situation were, you know, may be filled with perfectly good people,
but they're in this structures that cause them to continually do evil.
To invade countries, to bomb people,
to take money from poor people and give it to rich people,
to do all these things that are wrong.
And these books really opened my eyes about just how bad the society we're living in is.
Q: Is there any key message that you'd give to anybody
watching this interview or listening in.
Any key points you'd like to encourage people,
to keep in mind when they're thinking about the issues that affect them
or the issues that they might want to take action on?
A: Yeah, I think the most important thing is to realize that you can accomplish something.
I know sometimes you feel... you just feel powerless,
that you're one small person in this world of big corporations
and big evil people and big media companies and so on.
There's just nothing you can do.
But the fact is a lot of the reason it seems like that
is because people feel powerless,
people are afraid to do anything.
You know for a long time I felt
I watched the news and all I saw was this corporate propaganda,
and this kind of anti-activism attacks and I thought
that the news media was just inevitably biased against us.
That there were just no hope,
that the only solution was to create alternative news streams.
Now the picture I found, is not that the news media is inevitably biased against us,
it's that you know, reporters like all of us are just kind of lazy.
They report the stories that people give them,
and there are huge companies that are willing to write up stories for them
and hand them to them on a silver platter so that all they have to do is to take them up.
Of course they're going to do that.
And it turned out when we did the same thing,
and we started writing press releases and we started going to reporters
and pitching them stories,
they were just as happy to write about us as they were about Coca Cola.
And so, because I have believed so long that change was impossible
it precluded me from taking any actions that could have caused that change.
And so I think the first step for everyone out there is just
to believe that you can accomplish something,
because once you believe that, you're half the way to actually doing something.
www.aaronsw.com .
www.aaronsw.com YOU can change the world.