it's over bros
Aaron Swartz , a reddit founder, believed in this. He believed it so much he literally broke into databases and stole the entire contents of all scientific journals with intention to release it all. The man had real beliefs and he was willing to get dirty and do it himself and fuck the laws that are in the way.
In 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT.
He would have radicalised years down the line if the state hadn't hounded him until he killed himself. I genuinely believe he would have been one of us.
Sci Hub is blocked in the UK by court order btw. Have to VPN to get to it.
he literally broke into databases and stole the entire contents of all scientific journals with intention to release it all
Fwiw his legal defense rested on evidence that he intended to do a meta-analysis of climate change data to see if it was being suppressed compared to other subjects. But that could have easily been a cover. It’s not like he hadn’t made data public before either.
Either way, I would have followed Aaron to the ends of cyberspace. RIP, comrade
I believe he was everything that made reddit a success in its earlier years. Things like the massive anti-SOPA campaign absolutely would not happen today, it was clearly driven by him.
Early relationships with moderators, the real community that reddit had back then, the fostering of relationships and so on.. All Swartz in my opinion. Certainly some missteps with the free speech absolutism that led to reddit's early pedo controversies, but he was a half lib half ancap with real beliefs that were clearly connected to when the internet was COOL and run by pirates. 🏴☠️ He would have continued down that path.
Reddit would be completely fucking different today.
Damn. Just realized, was Aaron Schwartz the seed of all my current political views? Shit
It's kind of wild to think of what Reddit might have become if he radicalised over the years and the reddit CEO became a tankie or some shit.
The site would have continued on a trajectory of very tech stuff I think, with a big focus on open source. Reddit wouldn't have gone closed. Reddit wouldn't have bent the knee on piracy issues. It would have got very heavily involved in social justice movements as well. This would have trended it towards loud and proud support of BLM, and within that massive radicalisations could have occurred. Antiwork coup by liberals would have been supported by admins rather than largely ignored. Admins would probably still have a communicative relationship with moderators instead of the Kafka-esque opaque rules and radio silence.
I suspect they would have shut down Reddit if it started heading in that direction. Or it would have just become another Slashdot, maybe with a more explicitly "left" bent.
Or it becomes marginalized and instead of having to build Hexber, we'll just stick around at Reddit: the internet's tankie homepage.
I feel like retribution would have come no matter what. It's wild that he was suicided, but I guarantee if he had not flown that close to the sun that early, some other less dramatic shit would have gone down down the line. There is just no scenario where reddit blooms into a tankie site without getting coup'd or made irrelevant somehow. He's just one guy.
Honestly best case scenario here would be that he starts a podcast or something
i think you guys are deluded, he'd be a libertarian techbro with the occasional good twitter take
probably 90% of libertarians i've met have been against IP, it's the one thing where they end up agreeing with commies, though for totally different reasons
No, you should read his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto (https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt). Pretty sure he was never, and probably would never be a techbro.
But sharing isn't immoral — it's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
yea this is not the libertarian argument against IP, guy was legit
Pretty sure it was a suicide, brought on by the state harassing him relentlessly. There's a whole thing to it, but my memory is too fuzzy to explain it from memory now lol.
he was gonna go to jail for 30-something years for stealing research papers from JSTOR, so he killed himself
No, it was a real suicide. They tried to make an example out of him by prosecuting him relentlessly.
Liking or generally having an appreciation for Lenin and his theoretical developments is a litmus test for whether or not somebody has good politics imo. Always good to see Lenin. Never a bad time.
Like how the hell can anyone ignore that his work led to massive improvements to the material conditions of millions of people and one of the most socially progressive states of its time.
Honestly as close to uncritical support as I can have for someone.
Heterodox syndicalist here - Lenin's contribution to understanding Marx, understanding the forms of cooptation that are created by imperial structures, and specifically to the criticism of Kautskyism are incredibly valuable. Regardless of sectarian tendency, Lenin should be read by everyone.
Lenin should be read by everyone.
Absolutely, the two books I recommend most to people that really seem interested in getting into reading Marxist theory are State and Rev and Blackshirts and Reds
They're both fairly short and complement one another quite a lot almost to the extent of being in conversation with one another.
Even well intentioned libs I knew thought Lenin was the "good guy"
Copyright is a fuck download them all 1 trillion .zip
I remember someone here reposting Elbakian's rant about how great Stalin was. I have a friend who follows her escapades closely and the woman is a bit of an eccentric, to put it mildly.
The modern academic journal system and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
My research ethics class on Tuesday tried to drill into us that actually it’s good and right to not tell your student about a solution to their problem because you learned about the solution by peer reviewing a paper, and their right to confidentiality overrules the waste of time, labor, resources, and even animal lives.
I was literally the only one who said “Maybe this confidentiality thing is actually bullshit and we should just share the info?” And everyone acted like I was fucking insane.
That's insane. If someone's student were working on a problem I'd written about, I'd want the peer reviewer to share at least some of my thoughts with them. I suspect that it comes from the insane paranoia about getting "scooped" that all academics are forced to have in virtue of hiring/promotions/tenure being tied to publications, and publications being tied to "novelty." The way the system is organized is actively hostile to collective problem solving and knowledge sharing.
Me too!!! Make it so we don’t survive based on publications and “being first.” There should be exactly 0 expectation of confidentiality when it comes to research, the whole fucking point is for this shit to be public knowledge so other people can base their own research on the foundation you’ve added to.
Fascism runs deep in the academic field of science, from Women and POC having their research stolen from them, to data being flat out fabricated for political gain.
Imagine what kind of a future we could have if we could root out all that white supremacy and capitalist rentseeking.
You can recommend a paper without peer reviewing it, that argument makes no fucking sense or am I missing something?
In this hypothetical the paper hadn’t been published yet. The professor in the story reviews a shitty paper, gives feedback, and then her student comes to her saying she’s having an issue that would be solved by the exact thing used in the reviewed paper, and the questions were all variations of “Is it okay for the professor to share this information?” And making it very clear that the “correct” answer was a resounding no, which is insanity.
The implication is that the paper was not published yet, as it was undergoing peer review.
100% I wrote a booklet on the topic, which covers both the failures of for-profit publishing and a list of demand for academics and the public to organize around! https://socialistcanada.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/booklet-for-public-ownership-and-democratic-control-of-scientific-publishing-v4-1-1.pdf
That's fantastic! I'll definitely be sharing this with colleagues.
There are two tankies in this picture. I was the bird in the sci-hub logo all along!
remember; if you can't get access to a paper you want from scihub, try emailing the authors. They never see money from these paywall industries and are more than happy to share their research. If they actually profited from this, it would be one thing, but it's purely a leech industry.
Sci-Hub is a great example of building up dual power, but at some point, academics and the masses need to organize around expropriation of the scientific communication industry. In Canada, over $100 million CAD of public funds is spent on publishing articles and subscribing to those same articles. Not $100 million on the research or writing of articles but on the publishing and access to those publicly-funded articles. These paywalls sow distrust in science and diverts money from actual research. It allows for scientific perversion and sensationalism, where reproducibility plummets and retractions skyrocket. Publicly-funded and open article repositories like arXiv and bioRxiv cost less than $1 million a year and host more articles than any for-profit journal. And the peer review process that for-profit journals tout is provided by unpaid volunteers. Democratize and nationalize scientific publishing! We need science for the people not for profit! https://socialistcanada.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/booklet-for-public-ownership-and-democratic-control-of-scientific-publishing-v4-1-1.pdf
The about me section is a trip, especially the "why stalin is a god" part.
I just noticed the key in the crow's mouth has a hammer and sickle at one end. :meow-tankie:
