Big Stories Need Human Stakes

He was indicted in 2012 for stealing over four million MIT documents (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) that were stored at the JSTOR network, computer fraud, unlawfully providing information and recklessly damaging a secured computer. JSTOR is an academic publisher, which you can only get access to via an University. Schwartz got in via a MIT account that wasn’t his.

Swartz was co-author of the “RSS 1.0” – specification for RSS, social news website Reddit and founder of the action group Demand Progress. “Big stories need human effort” means: sacrifice yourself for that bigger goal/story. Give everything you’ve got. In Swartz’s goal was: freedom and openness of information. Information needs to be available to everyone. Government documents must be made public and freely shared. Copyright is outdated. Creative Commons was launched in 2002 (Swartz spoke as a 15-year-old at the ‘launch’), whereby authors give permission in some cases to freely use their information and texts. This is new property.

With this project at Nieuwe Vide, that can be seen as a homage to Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide before his trial began, now five years ago, we ask ourselves: “ How do we deal with whistleblowers?” “What is the influence of technology giants as Google on public or private space”, “What is the influence on making documents and information public?”

To be seen in the exhibition is the video ‘Workers Leaving the Googleplex’ (2011) from the American artist Andrew Norman Wilson, in which Wilson points his camera at the work environment at the office of Google, the gatekeepers of the internet as Swartz called it, who define where you have to go as a consumer.

The big question which lies behind Aaron Swartz’ legacy and with that also in our exhibition : “How do you bring public access to the public domain?”. And what is needed for that?