[Photo by Jason Scott https://www.flickr.com/photos/textfiles/6301463398/]
The events of the last several days have made me think about the political processes through which people are made martyrs, and how the more interesting and complicated aspects of their humanity get rubbed away in the process. That in turn has spurred me to write about Aaron Swartz, not in implied comparison to anyone else, but in his own right. I wrote about Aaron a few years after his death. He was not a close friend but he was a good one. I didn’t know about his prosecution before he announced it, but in its aftermath he made it clear that he felt he could trust me to stick with him. I’m not able to to talk about him from the perspective of genuine intimacy, but I knew him well enough to talk about how he engaged with the world. And there was something valuable in that which is worth emulating.
In 2019, I did one of those Conversations with Tyler Cowen, where I flubbed the standard question. He asks most guests what their “production function” is: how they decide what is useful to do and then do it. I didn’t really prepare, and didn’t have anything interesting to say on the topic. What I should have said is that I try - usually not very successfully - to do what Aaron did, but that what he did best is not what most people know about. Aaron’s public persona and personal charisma overshadows the fact that much of his contribution was invisible to the world. He devoted a startling amount of energy and attention to easing the way for other people whom he found interesting or thought might be useful.
For example: before Rick Perlstein became a well known historian, Aaron had discovered him via his ramshackle personal website. Aaron offered to build him a new one (Rick didn’t know who he was, and found it all a bit startling). So too, for Crooked Timber, a blog that I used to help run: when we ran into some technical issues, Aaron came out of nowhere to offer to host us. So too again for the amazing, intellectually and politically diverse group of people, with whom Aaron corresponded, many of whom I only discovered after his death.
Aaron had made enough money (or so it seemed) after the launch of Reddit to spend his time doing interesting stuff in the world, so long as he did not hog out on luxuries. And for him, interesting stuff typically involved figuring out practical ways to help others, and to build connections. Someone with apparently similar inclinations recently remarked to me that the problem with anarchism is that no-one ever wants to do the dishes. Aaron did the dishes without making a fuss about it.
This is not to suggest that he was a saint. He spent most of his time trying to build stuff for and with other people. Still, he had a considerable ego, although he was perfectly happy to be teased about it. He was not patient. If something wasn’t working out, in his opinion, he would be quite ruthless in cutting it off and switching to another project that seemed more promising. I had conversations with people who were left behind after one or another of these about-turns. They felt aggrieved and unhappy; likely he could have treated them better.
Even so, it was striking how much came out of his willingness both to do the grind and to figure out how to help people with different views and perspectives than his own to do what they had in them. He was set on making the world into a more interesting place, with richer collective goods and better conversation. Whatever got in the way of that, he pushed to one side.
What I take from Aaron is that the best way to be truly productive on the margin, is to try to build for other people and connect them together. You don’t pretend to be indifferent to your own sense of what a better world would look like, and you need some degree of ruthlessness to work towards it. You have limited time, energy and attention, and at some point, you are likely to have many more people asking for these scarce resources than you can possibly help or satisfy.
Inevitably, your own ego is going to be implicated. Acts that you yourself perceive as relatively selfless will persistently curve back into your own self-interest, because that is the way that human cognition works. But exactly because this is true for everyone, small shifts on the margin towards collective good provision can have outsized consequences. If scenius is indeed much more productive and creative than individual genius, then you ought spend more of your time cultivating it - finding interesting people who might fit together in unexpected ways and figuring out how to connect them and build spaces where they can do their own stuff. And doing the dishes while you’re at it.
The most lovely and powerful lines that I’ve ever read are at the end of Middlemarch. George Eliot says of Dorothea:
Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
The greatest parts of Aaron’s life are those that are hidden behind his myth. My strong belief is that his unhistoric acts were incalculably diffusive in just the ways that Eliot describes. He is missed.
This is lovely
beautiful, thank you. So terribly sad what happened.