Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for guerilla open access.
[00:00:39] The best in Bitcoin made Audible. I am Guy Swan and this is Bitcoin Audible.
[00:01:03] What is up guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about Bitcoin than anybody else. You know, we've got a great read today. We are kicking off the week with one. In fact, somebody posted this on Noster and I had been Aaron Swartz. The story of Aaron Swartz is a really crazy and really sad story. It's very reminiscent of what happened to Ross Ulbricht. In my opinion. He was not only a key component, a key builder in a lot of foundational elements of the Internet and how not only like Reddit, but also RSS and the protocols of the Internet. He was a big part of making that, making that work and then also a big part of the activism and activist culture around free and open information.
[00:02:07] And somebody linked to his story, I think it's the anniversary of, I believe, his death actually, because he committed suicide. And we'll get into the details of this in the guy's take to follow because he was so grossly and wrongly prosecuted to, I mean, just an insane degree. It really, really is reminiscent of Ross Ulbricht and the whole, you made a website, but we're going to charge you for, you know, conspiracy to traffic and human trafficking and, and drug trafficking and money laundering and every damn thing under the sun. Like, I don't think there was human trafficking in the thing, but it was like 15 charges that were all absurd exaggerations and extensions of basically saying that he moved all of the. Basically every single ounce of marijuana or any drug whatsoever that was available on his website, that he basically trafficked it all, even though of course he never touched literally any of it. And then literally the guy got worse sentences than pretty much every mass murderer like mafia boss, I mean, you name it. The number of people who have committed dozens of murders and did not get the sentence, the double life sentence plus 40 years that Ross Ulbricht got is just insane. And there are a lot of mirrors to Aaron Swartz's situation and how they went after him, especially considering the conditions or the elements of exactly what he did and the information that he quote unquote stole, which he didn't actually steal. But again, we'll get into it afterward. But I just wanted to share his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto because it's very much in the spirit of like this was the culture that I grew up in on the Internet was the, like, I'm a pirate, the sharing culture, information freedom advocacy world, I guess you could say. And there were actually a lot of kind of branches of this culture as well, which embraces the cypherpunks, the privacy advocates. You know, we've read the cypherpunk Manifesto, we've read the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto by Timothy May. And because I really, I genuinely think that we're going to have a rebirth of the technology and the culture of the early 2000s in the sharing culture with the new wave of decentralized and peer to peer technologies. I think it's really valuable to cover these perspectives and also to know the history that got us here. So with that, let's get into today's article and it's titled the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto by Aaron Swartz.
[00:05:06] Information is power, but like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.
[00:05:14] The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.
[00:05:28] Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reid Elsevier. There are those struggling to change this. The open access movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away, but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
[00:06:04] That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues scanning entire libraries, but only allowing the folks at Google to read them. Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the first world, but not to children in the Global South. It's outrageous and unacceptable. I agree, many say, but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights. They make enormous amounts of money by charging for access. And it's perfectly legal. There's nothing we can do to stop them. But there is something we can do something that's already being done. We can fight back. Those with access to these resources, students, librarians, scientists, you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not, indeed, morally, you cannot keep this privilege for yourselves.
[00:07:03] You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
[00:07:13] Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends. But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It's called stealing or piracy. As if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn't immoral. It's a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.
[00:07:49] Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it. Their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. There is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time to come into the light and in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. We need to take information wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for guerilla open access. With enough of us around the world, we'll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge, we'll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?
[00:08:58] Aaron Swartz July 2008 I want to give a quick shout out to Fold and the Fold card and then also just the fact that they have tons of gift cards available which you can buy not only with the dollars on your Fold card and get sats back, but you can also purchase with Lightning and Bitcoin. I specifically bring it up because they are doing higher SATs back higher rewards on larger amount gift cards like $500Amazon gift cards and the like for the holiday season. And now you can also gift gift cards to other people in the Fold app. I don't know how many years now, but I've basically tried to do every bit of my holiday shopping with the. Not, not just with the Fold card, but literally with Fold gift cards. And it is a fantastic way to stack sats. So anybody who's listening to this show, I think it's like a year and a half or maybe close to two years ago now that I finally pulled out all of my Fold rewards, which I think was in the $16,000 range. I can't remember exactly how many SATs it was at the time. And my goal was to invest it in Pear Drive and start building that project. And today I have a little over $7,000 worth of sats received or sats back from again just using my Fold card as my main debit and banking. As someone who is on a bitcoin standard, literally this is an indispensable part of my setup. But I mention all of this just because it's a really great, great way to stack sats during the holidays. And I have an affiliate link along with a lot of other services that I use all the time right down there in the show Notes. There are also some discounts on like Huddle up, which is a really, really fun game. It's also a super secret way to teach somebody about bitcoin without them knowing and have a lot of fun in the process. But check out if you want to support this show, you can use the affiliate links and check out the tools and services and products available right there in the show Notes. Got some great bitcoin board games, got a discount on the cold card and like one of the best bitcoin hardware wallets in this space Fold app for a Bitcoin standard discount on the really fun games from free market kids, including Huddle up, the Liberty Classroom homeschooling program. If you don't want to teach your kids stupid propaganda or for that matter, you just want to learn real economics. And all of it is also a great way to support my work. You'll find it all right in the description of this episode.
[00:11:40] So Aaron Swartz got super screwed. And I 1000% think it was an ideological lynching. The whole idea was to punish him for his activism. The government was attempting to make an example out of him. And they had every intention and made it clear throughout the entire process that their goal was to destroy his life so that he was an example, so that anybody who followed in his footsteps would see the damage and the pain that he had to suffer in order to uphold his ideological stance. Now, for those of you who don't know the background, I'll give you the bird's eye view of the whole situation. So Aaron Swartz was a pretty prominent figure in both just building of major Internet tools, and then also, of course, in the Freedom of Information movement, I guess you could call it. And likely the project that he was most well known for is Reddit. He was essentially a founder in Reddit. He it's not quite that straightforward because Reddit was a separate project, but the underlying thing that he was building ended up merging with Reddit and becoming the Reddit that we know of today. So in a sense, he was basically the architect and it was also what made him wealthy. That was like one of his big success stories. However, he was also instrumental in building out RSS of Just. And this is something that he did in so many different contexts. Like one of the things that he was prolific at, and the thing that he ended up being prosecuted for and ultimately destroyed his life, or ultimately the government destroyed his life over, was the pulling of information from as many different places as possible in order to aggregate it into a feed, in order to make it accessible and available and to spread openly and easily throughout the Internet. And in doing so, he essentially built rss. And again, I don't think he did this alone, but he was instrumental in the fact, like this podcast feed that you are listening to right now, email, RSS feeds, newsletters, all of these things that you think about as being able to easily get a notification and aggregating that information into some feed of things, which ended up also basically becoming the foundation of social media in general of nostr. NOSTR is just kind of a different way to implement a feedback by a user who has a key and they sign for everything in the feed and it is in chronological order. And then you can aggregate, collect and pull them together, consolidate and filter them however you like. It's the same idea. Aaron Swartz was foundational in making that possible, in making that a norm of the Internet. And he was also a big player, a prominent figure in the quote unquote piracy culture, in the sharing culture of the Internet. And I refer to it as piracy, even though that he hated that word. But, you know, as like a young, you know, quote unquote rebellious figure in middle school and high school, it was more fun to be like, yeah, I'm a freaking pirate. So that's how I ended up associating it in my mind. But it's funny that Aaron Swartz actually argued pretty aggressively as to how horrible that framing was and how the legacy system was constantly trying to Equate something that was completely unique, something that was very clearly not the equivalent of the real world scenario to something that was terrible and immoral in the real world. Piracy being a great example of the idea that because I shared something with you online, that we are not going to equate it with what might be the very obvious thing that it would mirror in the digital world, that I made you a copy of my music cassette or CD or I made a copy of my book or I let you borrow my book or something like, obviously that's far closer to what has actually happened if you download something from me online, but instead to literally equate it with, you know, holding a ship hostage, stealing all of their stuff and murdering everyone. And I think the culture basically adopted that framing or accepted that framing out of sheer defiance, like, yeah, we are pirates. Suck it. Very much. Like what? You know, bitcoin maximalism was like, Bitcoin maximalism started as a pejorative by the Ethereum crowd. And then a bunch of people were like, yeah, I'm a bitcoin maximalist. What are you talking about? Of course bitcoin is the only thing that is of any value. You're all just copycats and scams and the only monetary, the only actual value here is in monetary value. And you're all trying to compete with a more trustworthy, more reliable, more consistent and stronger money. And you're all going to fail. And you're all just a joke. Haha. We are bitcoin maximalists. Suck it. This is basically the same thing that happened with quote unquote, pirate culture, with sharing culture. When you make an exaggeration, just an absurdity of their characterization, it becomes a defensive mechanism or a natural thing when you feel like you are in the right to just adopt their insult and just be like, this is ours now. And it also helps that it infuriates the person who's trying to insult you if you just take it and make it your own. But it's funny that Aaron Swartz actually really disliked or talked about how that was such an unfair, like an abuse of just language to try to make it appear and basically put people in these boxes that if they do something, which is arguably a moral imperative, as he talks about in the Guerrilla Open Access manifesto, that you would share something with someone who it would benefit when it doesn't take anything away from anyone else. And here's the big idea is that who's the victim? Where, where can you find a victim in any of this? Copying is clearly not this. Like I don't care what you think about it. And again, this is all. It's also important to consider that this is not about copyright. This is not about taking an author or a movie, a person, a director's or filmmaker's movie, and then sharing it out with everybody a billion times, and they never actually get any return from it and that they're not allowed to make it. Limited access, like this has nothing to do with that. This is about public culture and knowledge. This is about science of the past being siloed and charged for by publishers who never had anything to do with the discovery or the information to begin with. This is like putting Isaac Newton's work in a, in a university silo who got government grants to collect the shit and work basically off of government issued debt to students anyway. So an enormous amount of this is public funding. And then they put it behind massive paywalls and limit it so that people can't actually benefit from it. They're literally taking our forefathers scientific knowledge, the things that they contributed to the world, things that they would be so furious about that some publisher 150 years from now is literally making someone pay to get access to this thing that I did for the betterment of humanity. Like, go F yourself. Who do you think you are? This is the kind of abuse and monopolization or restriction of clearly public information that he was railing against. And you know, it's one of those things that is very much why the copyright industry had to make an enormous shift. Like people forget that the copyright, the shift of the copyright industry was really about making information or making media and data available to people in the form and on the devices and in the way that the consumer wanted that media.
[00:20:02] All of the major record labels refused, vehemently and viciously refused to allow people to buy individual songs and then listen to it on multiple devices. Like that was one of the big fights. And also they refused to sell it at a price that wasn't relevant to the infrastructure costs. Because obviously it's a whole lot cheaper to just put it on a server and allow people to download it than it is to print it, to literally laser print it onto a disc, ship it, like print out a cover and a case and everything, put it into packaging, put it into boxes, and then shipping it to retail centers all the way across the country and all the way across the globe so that people could go up into those retail centers and purchase it. Clearly there is a significant cost to the physical infrastructure of delivering these things. Same goes for books and information and knowledge. So it would make sense that an aggregator that has an ongoing cost of holding the material would then be able to charge a cost for it. But an enormous, enormous part of that cost, the overwhelming majority of the cost disappears when this is just available online. And specifically, there is no cost when I am just offering it up for free so that you can access it. And yet that is illegal, and yet that gets prosecuted. And again, we're not talking about the latest blockbuster that's about to come out in a week. That's clearly at least a unique situation in how it is that we set up markets and the right of someone to protect their information. Like they, the person who makes the movie owns the movie now if they want to release it to the public. There is a significant question as to what the morality or the ethics of then ripping that movie and making it available for free to millions of people really is. Although there have been MIT studies that have actually shown that there's. There's legitimately an indication that it may actually benefit the movie to be more available to people. Because the legacy or establishment thinking is that if you downloaded the movie, it meant that you did not then go to the theater, or you did not then rent or get it off the streaming service or whatever it is. When a couple of major studies, one MIT study in particular that I had I've got saved somewhere in my giant data horde on my computer, actually demonstrated two really significant findings. One is that there was no correlation between what people expected to go see and when it was available for whether or not they actually saw it, meaning the theory that they are. The hypothesis that they were going after, which I believe they did a pretty good job of proving or giving a strong evidence of this. And in my own experience, I feel like this is actually. This falls in line with my own experience my way and how I thought about, quote, unquote, piracy and downloading things online in my past is that often you would download the things for free that you weren't sure you were actually going to go get or see. It just allowed you to watch something. It allowed it, exposed it to an audience that otherwise weren't customers and that you were actually more likely to have someone go out and buy the DVD or then go to the theater because they actually enjoyed the first 30 minutes of it and hated that it was a cam or it was like low quality and so they actually wanted to go see it with friends. And I found this in my own experience that I wanted.
[00:23:47] The idea was about getting the media in the way that I wanted the media to be able to consume the media. Because I was already, even when it was not common, when all of the devices sucked, like, just were terrible, I was already in the. I want a computer hooked up to my TV to watch all of my media on. So I built my own little world of that. I had these little things called Western digital live devices. Some of you may know that if you grew up in my era. And I would download, I would specifically download two different types of movies. One, movies that we've already purchased on DVD because I didn't want to have to carry around a bunch of DVDs with me, or two, movies that I wasn't sure if I was going to buy or if I wasn't sure I was going to go to the movie theater to watch. But just out of curiosity, I was like, I would like to see this movie. I'd like to see if this was actually any good. And the study in question actually seemed to align with that. That was the most common reason that people downloaded stuff. Of course, there were people who probably who might have gone to the theater or might have bought the DVD and didn't because they could just download it. But the study suggested that the net for films that were available everywhere, this is another big thing that they discovered was more likely to be positive rather than negative. The one caveat to that, where it actually seemed to be a net negative, was when they released it in one country and refused, or waited, you know, six months to release it in another in another country, that it would actually have a measurable effect on the people who went and watched it at the release, and that this was actually really easy to mitigate, is that stop giving exclusive access to one group and not to another group, just release it worldwide at the exact same time. In other words, the big limitation, or the quote, unquote big, the only measurable, quote, unquote damage to a profit margin, that piracy, that online file sharing seemed to actually be able to confidently say was a net negative, was actually easily, very easily mitigated without any prosecutor, any prosecution or legal action or new laws, just by changing the policy of how they released films by the industry itself, in simpler terms, it was artificial and they could easily have fixed the entire problem. So that's a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to address that because Aaron Swartz wasn't talking about copyright, even though that is still a unique situation. You know, if I steal your car and drive it around. Well, you now don't. You had a Car. Now you don't have a car and now I have that car. I'm getting the value of something that you earned and paid for. However, if I make a copy of your car and drive it around, you still have your car. In fact, you wouldn't have the slightest clue that I made a copy and was driving it around at all, unless I specifically told you or you had some sort of a way to track the fact that I copied your car. So using legacy or using the physical world limitations and the ideas of stealing and piracy, there is no way, in my opinion, to intellectually to like logically equate these things in any sense that isn't just flatly absurd. So if it wasn't copyright, what was it that Aaron Swartz actually got attacked over? Like, why was he prosecuted? There were two situations that I think got, or at least from my digging into this, that got Aaron Swartz to become a target of the government and then ended up being prosecuted about the situation at mit. And one of them was about something referred to as pacer. This was a government database, a publicly available source of knowledge. Journals, scientific papers, articles, all sorts of stuff from a historical public database, a huge one, in fact, that they were charging 8 cent per page in order to access. Aaron Swartz thought this was bonkers. Like, this is insane. Not only is that a ridiculous price for something that is not information that they own, like, this is not an institution that came up with this knowledge and then is selling access to it. This is literally public domain. This is public information, public knowledge, our cultural and intellectual history that is then being aggregated and put behind a giant paywall and people are restricted from accessing it. But even dumber is that this is public money. The government is using taxpayer dollars to aggregate this information. They're not even doing it themselves. We are paying for it and then they are charging us for the access. I completely agree with Aaron Swartz. That is bonkers. That's so unbelievably stupid. And that is itself unethical. This is specifically why I think the government should never be allowed to actually hold patents or actually restrict the access to any information or knowledge because we paid for it. Like the whole idea, like all of the stupid platitudes about government, like we are the government and this is public access and stuff, and then the fact that it's going to be monopolized and we're going to charge, they're going to charge access to get something that we have paid for, it flies in the face of anything Even remotely centered around common sense on top of the fact that it makes every single platitude about what the government even is supposed to be or how they are supposed to be providing a service to us. It makes that such an absurdity. And the fact that people can see things like this happen and still believe that bullshit just shows the power of teaching kids this when they're 6 years old and how deeply seated that idiocy becomes in the culture and the conversation. Because there is no sensible way, no realistic way to describe that as anything other than stealing someone to pay for the cost of something and then charging them for access. If taxpayer money funded what gave a grant is running the infrastructure of, is allowing the access to in any way of anything. It should be publicly available. That's the whole point of public things. Imagine building a public park with taxes and then charging a $20 a month subscription to go to the park. All you did was socialize the costs and privatize the profits. That is unbelievably immoral. If public funds contribute to it in any way, it should be false. That should be a law. That should be in the freaking Constitution. In my opinion, there should be a constitutional amendment that if public money, if taxpayer money touch this in any way, then it has to be false. And I think it's perfectly fair to do it in the most extreme sense that if it costs you $100 to fund this, and one of those dollars is from the US Government, that you have to open source it. I think that's the only way to make this not gameable and not subjective or stupid or end up creating its own corrupt, stupid system of law fare and lawsuits and just this legal apparatus of complexity and idiocy is that if you received any government funding at all, it will just succeed in keeping government funding out of it. Unless people are okay with making knowledge accessible to everyone. Because that's what it should be anyway. So anyway, back to pacer. So this was a system that was available in this way and they charged access to it. And then for a short period of time it was. They did like a kind of like a promotion thing. A this is now openly available. This is free for everyone. Come check it out. I guess as a calling attention to it and making it more available for a temporary period. And what did the activist and you know, ever vigilant Aaron Swartz do? Well, he took that opportunity to download like 20 or 40 million articles and journals and everything off of the website while it was free. He created a script, a system to automatically do this. And he just ran it and downloaded everything from it based. Now, he was not prosecuted for this, but they clearly hated him for it. This is not how we wanted this to be used. And that's what I think really made him a target. Now, the thing that he actually got prosecuted for, I think there is an element here, actually, that's a little bit, because I've seen the video in question, like the security footage of the situation. This is in reference to something called jstor. It was a journal store, which again was a university accessible, that if you had a registration with a participating university at MIT Harvard, I'm pretty sure it was Aaron Swartz had a Harvard access, if I'm not mistaken. I can't remember exactly how it worked out, but there was just some sort of an element there. But it was available to all of them, to academic students and teachers and all of this stuff. Anybody within the bubble had completely free access to it, but anybody out in the public, you could not access it. And again, this is not new scientific knowledge, this. I mean, granted, some of it might be recent, but this is more specifically about a library of the past that is being charged and siloed inside of this specific community. Now, a lot of people say that, you know, there's no indication of what he was going to do with it. He didn't share it online before, you know, all of this went sideways. We don't know he was going to share it online online. I think it's perfectly safe to make the assumption that, yeah, he was trying to share it online and he probably would have scrubbed anything that did have, did have copyright, but the overwhelming majority of it was in the public domain. It wouldn't have been hard to scrub copyrighted stuff. And it would have been perfectly, in my opinion, within his right and should have been already in the public domain. It should have just been openly available. And if someone is hosting it, it should be seen as a way to get someone looking for that into their platform in order to actually sell them copyrighted stuff or to fund new materials and new science and new journals, et cetera. But if they want to host it because people actually want access to it, it should be a quote, unquote, loss leader, which it's hard to even call it that because it wouldn't be much of a loss. It would be like me hosting the white paper on my page so that if anybody searches the white paper, they'll find Bitcoin, Audible and the fact that you can also listen to it on a podcast feed and you have all of these other articles and all of this great stuff. Search for the white paper, find Bitcoin, Audible. Maybe that's a reason that you come to that website. And then I'm able to get support in some other way or through sponsors or whatever it is on the website, advertisements, blah, blah, blah. This would be the equivalent what MIT has done. This would be the equivalent of me digging up the white paper and then charging people a dollar to go view it on my website. It's not mine. What is wrong with you? Anyway, so what he did is he went into a quote, unquote restricted area. So he went into a networking closet, essentially, no locks. But clearly it's like, this is only for maintenance. This is only for personnel at the university. Also no locks or anything on the actual devices. They just, the. The rack was just there and you could plug into anything. He did not damage any of it. He just plugged his computer directly into the terminal and then proceeded to run a script that downloaded all of the material from the database. And the reason he did it this way is so that A, it wasn't connected to his account and B, he actually had the bandwidth to do this easily rather than trying to download offline. He could download this directly, which would take way, way less time. So it's important to consider he didn't break any locks and he actually had access to this already. This was available to him through his registration. He could have just done this remotely. He chose to go in and do it directly so that he could basically get a bigger pipe to get all of the material. But the overwhelming majority of this stuff was already public domain. Now, there is an argument to be made that he did things that he wasn't supposed to do. I 100% think it could have completely stuck. And I probably would have felt that there was a legitimate defense to this charge if they essentially got him with a misdemeanor breaking and entering. Because arguably, you know, if you just go busting up into somebody's office because it's unlocked or, you know, some maintenance closet, and then, you know, connect into something in a way that is not the direct access, the access that a student is given, I think it's completely fair to say that, okay, he's a little bit up to something that he definitely shouldn't be up to. Like, you don't want just students coming in and plugging into the WiFi, like plugging directly into the device and then going around the login in order to get access to stuff. So 100% there was an argument to be made there, and it perfectly aligns with his guerilla open access manifesto. The guy was trying to be a gorilla. This was about vigilance in the fight for open access. But you know what a misdemeanor for breaking and entering without threatening anybody or doing any damage is? That's like community service, I think. You know, like, if it's like third degree breaking, enter, entering, it's like one year in jail in like the most serious, or one to five maybe. I think in the most extreme situations. And if it was first degree burglary, like you came in with a gun and you put a gun to somebody's head and threatened them, and you were literally stealing value from people. You are stealing their money, you are stealing, stealing their belongings. The sentence is like 15 years. This is something that he already had access to. This is something that was perfectly free for all of the people in the university. He did not break a lock. He did not threaten anybody. He certainly wasn't a threat to somebody's health. He did not break or destroy anything. He did not download any malicious Trojan horse or virus onto their computer. There was arguably no victim in this case.
[00:38:39] They tried to get him for 35 years in prison and a million dollars in fines. And during all of this nonsense, they refused to even consider a deal in which he did not go to prison for years. His charges were wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Importantly, that was written in 1986. And this, I think, was the real crux of the problem is that they went after him. Not only did they go after him for ideological reasons and they were trying to make an example out of him, but they did so by abusing laws that had nothing to do with the reality of the situation. These laws were written in 1986 where nobody actually had any idea how the Internet was going to be used, how information was going to be accessed. And everybody's framing, everybody's mental framework for how any of this stuff worked was extremely analog. It was, okay, I have information at this place. Therefore, if you took it, you broke in and stole it from me. And in a time in 2011 when it was so clear that this did not properly apply to anything in this situation, not only did he have free access to all of this stuff, not only did the whole fraud thing was about him going around the normal registration, like the logging in ui, because he plugged directly into it. This was a multiple years in prison per charge offense. For an analogous situation, you have an article from Some or just a database that is provided by some website, but they require you to register and then punch in your username and password in order to get in so that they know which user is actually accessing it. You, however, are very clever and you know your way around it. So you open up the inspector and you just, you delete the popup that makes it so that you have to log in to get it. And then lo and behold, you can still access everything. This is the equivalent, this is essentially what they did, to say that because he went around that access, that specific access granted to him, that this was a form of fraud, which is anybody who has a few warm brain cells left clearly retarded. And it's also interesting to point out that JSTOR themselves refused to prosecute. Like, they did not push for him to have these charges and they did not want to go forward with it. So the government just went entirely around. Like, even the supposed victim of this situation didn't even want to continue and prosecute and attack him for this. But the government decided, well, we're going to do it anyway and we're going to see, we're going to destroy his life. We're going to absolutely, completely destroy his life, even though no one actually wants to do this. If you didn't hate your government enough, you should now. I highly recommend a documentary called the Internet's Own Boy about Aaron Swartz, about this whole. I mean, really just about Aaron Swartz, but then also the debacle and, you know, the government prosecution and a lot of that stuff as well. It's been a really long time since I watched. I think it was, I think it came out like a decade ago, but it was about a year and a half, ish, two years of them doing everything they could to just attack him and do as much damage as possible and drain him specifically. They. There are even like records of them talking about how they were successfully draining him of resources and destroying his life, even outside of him being convicted of these things, just the simple act of charging him and prosecuting him. And then in 2013, he took his own life, I guess, seeing no way out. And he also suffered from depression, just more generally. So this was just the piling on of a general problem that, you know, was just catalyzed and exacerbated in a profound, profoundly unfair and immoral way. And I guess the government got what they wanted and they dropped everything. And obviously none of it went forward without him being alive. But I wanted to share this piece just because I think I mean, this is very, very close to my heart as a philosophy and as a way of looking at the world. And I think he was such an important figure and bringing this into making sense of this argument and pushing for this and pushing back against the idiocy of the establishment and the kind of government system that was supporting and defending these antiquated concepts of who owns what and the idea that someone could monopolize information that wasn't even theirs, that someone could take another person's scientific journal and then restrict access to monopolize it and restrict access to it. That information should be open for all. That the knowledge of the world, that the knowledge of everyone who came before us, that's the whole point of society, is to benefit from each other, is for this to be available. There is only a net gain to be had by giving and sharing knowledge and information with everyone. And I also think this is actually relevant to Bitcoin, specifically to the idea of sound money. Because when you live in an inflationary world where everyone is fighting to get the money as fast as possible so that they can buy up, the assets that ever go forever go up in price, you actually have this very critical and very persistent scarcity mindset of we are trying to get the things that are worth value as fast as possible so that we can own them and that we can rent, seek off of them. Real estate is such a good example that you would want to own real estate because it is just, the debt is just going to be bled away. You're not going to have to actually pay the value for it if you can get debt because the interest rates aren't real and everybody's, the government's just going to be constantly printing trillions and trillions of dollars. And so you're going to get something at like a 6% interest and then its price is going to double in five or six years and you're never going to have to pay back the legitimate value of that loan. You're basically going to get the house at a 50% discount over a six year period. And over a 15 or 20 year period you're going to get it at like a 75% discount. You're basically taking resources, taking critical value and assets from the economy because you get the advantage, the privilege, the monetary privilege of not having to actually pay it back, of not actually having to having to return the amount of favors, the favors that you redeemed from the economy. It is a parasitic relationship, it creates a parasitic kind of dog eat dog environment. But sound money does the exact opposite is it once when you release something, if you have Bitcoin, and then you release some software that makes literally everyone's tools, everyone's economy better, that can expand it to more people, that can allow more people to do more things, what you actually do is you increase the value of Bitcoin by making that available, by spreading the knowledge and making the whole of society more valuable and lead to prosperity for everyone. It literally makes you more prosperous. Prosperous at the exact same time, because Bitcoin savings goes up in value because you made society more valuable. All money is, is a reflection of the value of society. And when you have sound money, you are actually aligned with the growth of society rather than fighting it. And I think that is a significant reason that our monetary system is a significant, significant reason for why we have lost that basic truth.
[00:47:06] And in addition, I think the technology is going back there. This is why I created the pair report and because I've been just digging into that sort of, I mean, anybody who's been following for any, any length of time, I think nostr, I think the pair stack, pubkey and what synonym is doing is very much aligned with this exact same thing. And anybody who has been following me knows that I've been investing a ton of capital into Pear Drive, which is not at all unrelated to this entire problem and the thinking around how and what information, how information should be shared and what should be available to people. And I think, I think I might have something to share this week. We still probably intend to do a quote unquote private alpha, but it seems like as of this morning, we have gotten past the last bug that has prevented kind of closing the loop on all of the core functions, the main system of the application, and we essentially have a UI to build and we can do that very, very fast. That is not really the problem in any of this. And I built this for basically my situation and my setup and all of the problems that I have had over the years in access, in accessing and utilizing data that was available to me, data that was on one device with another device. So it's, it's really built around the, the simple, simpler concept of just building a private network of my own things, but then being able to extend it out to public networks and to just have generic drives and collections of data and memes and files that are just available for people to contribute to or to access essentially by building just a very simple set of primitives. And I'm going to have an episode specific just about this to break down the idea, and I'll probably have hope on the show with me just so we can talk about how it works and how to think about building with it. Because the idea is to basically abstract all of this away so that people can have very, very simple and like very small amount of code necessary to integrate with this so that you can scan a QR code and basically get access to a data drive and then display it in any way that you want. Because one of the things that we want to be able to do with this is to open it up to other people to build on top of, so that you can build very easily and very quickly. Build peer to peer networking, single purpose tools, single purpose apps that enable very simple, very low maintenance, peer to peer functionality. One of the things that always got me about peer to peer technology and just bittorrent and stuff in general is that it was so clunky and unintuitive to use that I feel like the only major use for it was piracy. But the only reason I think that was is because it was quote unquote, it was kind of like the highest value use case for a very frustrating problem. But it was never really applied properly in my thinking or in my experience to a bunch of other problems where I think it actually would have applied really well. Like, I never. There were so many like little tools that were all almost got there. Like bittorrent Sync was one that I used between my devices quite a bit and I loved it, but it still just wasn't quite there. It was almost there and then it just totally went proprietary enclosed and charged for and all of this stuff. And I was just like, really? It seemed like we were so close to actually having some of these tools that I have always wanted. And not even just once, but multiple times in which I was like, this is almost there. Like nextcloud is pretty good, but the only way to connect to it remotely is over Tor and it's garbage. It's so slow. And it's also really unintuitive. I mean, it's not entirely unintuitive in the sense that like nextcloud is very obvious in the fact that, you know, you put it on one computer and then you connect to it and then you can just look at the stuff. But it's still too. There's too much friction in how you use it and how you upload stuff and what you have to do in order to make sure that stuff actually uploads or get to one gets to one device or another. And there's just too much friction. It should be pushed into the background. It should just work in a couple of simple functions and by default, in a way that is beneficial to having a handful of devices that don't. That you don't want to have every single piece of every single file and media thing on specifically because you have limited storage. Like, that's the whole point of storage. Like that. Like, there's a bunch of different services that will like. Icloud is a great example of doing a really kind of next level in attempting to make the service and setup work so that you can limit how much information you have to have on any one device. Like, as my MacBook actually fills up, everything that I have on icloud will automatically limit itself to not having a local storage, except that it tries to make it so that I don't have control over it. I have my. So that my Obsidian Notes are available on all of my devices.
[00:52:55] I have my main Obsidian Notes folder in icloud in my icloud folder. But I'm not even joking. I have to right click on it and this is it. It's notes. We're talking about maybe a few megabytes worth of stuff. In fact, I can just check right now. It's just not that big. I even have other stuff. Okay, so 14.7 megabytes. So 15 megabytes, that's nothing. That's like five typical images. Like if you take pictures with your iPhone, which, you know, the. All the latest ones, I think kind of found a happy medium around like 12 megapixels. And so a typical image with the amount of optimizing that they do just naturally in the OS these days, I think is probably like 2 megabytes, 3 megabytes. So we're talking about a tiny amount. There is no reason for icloud to overly optimize this amount of information. But every time I open up my Obsidian and I go to one of my notes, it's blank. And it took me a really long time to figure out that it was because icloud is automatically deleting it from my local storage automatically. And I am having. And I finally solved the problem. I finally figured out the problem. I had this problem for two years, by the way, without ever being. I couldn't search it. I asked LLMs. I had no idea why this was happening. And it would take like two minutes, sometimes like a minute or two of me constantly opening of having to close the application, open it back up, because randomly things would just be empty and I have to close it and Basically force my computer to request the information again for it to load locally. And I didn't realize that's what was happening, that it was because it was in my icloud. And that's also why it was so unbelievably difficult to search this problem, because nobody else was having it. But as I run out of space on my computer, on my MacBook, which I do all the time, which is why I have been so angry and like, oh, I gotta solve this freaking problem. It deletes the information automatically to free up space. And I finally solved it when I went to the thing and I saw that there was a cloud thing next to it. And I was like, oh my God, this isn't locally on my computer right now. That's why this is happening. And I went and clicked on the note that I had open that was blank. It was a note that I had tons of notes in and details and description and like my whole episode format and all of this stuff. And it was just blank, sitting open on my computer in Obsidian. And I was like, why does this keep happening? And then I just went to the actual folder and I saw the little cloud button next to it and I hit right click, download now. Instantly, instantly popped back up in my Obsidian. Everything was there. And I was like, oh my God, two years, not even an exaggeration. Two years I tried to figure I could not troubleshoot this problem and understand icloud is kind of the best that I've ever had for actually trying to make it intuitive and managing it behind the scenes. But in doing so, it took my control away. So now when I will download it to get it locally, to get it locally, but I still only have like 10 gigs left in my 2 terabytes of hard drive space. After about an hour, it's gone again and I have to redownload it. And I'm sure there is something deep in the settings that I could fix, but I'm always in a hurry. I'm always in the middle of work and I don't want to stop and troubleshoot and go down some rabbit hole of some other problem or icloud, you know, deep settings crap. And so I never deal with it because it's too easy to just right click and download. But the reverse, the problems that I have with other things like Dropbox or anything that is.
[00:56:31] It's not nextcloud is not the one that I did it. That did it. It was, or maybe it was nextcloud. It was something that I had, I believe, on my Start nine or my umbrella. It was one of the ones that I downloaded to hopefully solve this problem and the default setup and I couldn't figure out the obvious way or a simple way to change this was that everything was synced on all of my devices. And I was like this again, this defeats the purpose. The reason I want a cloud drive is not so I can not just so I can have access stuff on my MacBook, my Linux and my phone. It's because I only have like 512 megabytes. Or maybe I think I have a terabyte. It's because I only have a terabyte on my phone, but I have 64 terabytes on my Linux machine. I want it all to go to my Linux machine so that I don't have to think about losing it. A, if I ever lose my phone and B, if I delete it from my phone, it doesn't delete from everything. That was another thing that I found all the freaking time, is that if I deleted something, it was like always a master delete, there was always an admin delete and I would just delete the file from my entire next cloud setup. And it's just. Do these people not know? Like, are these people just not building this for themselves or do they use this? Do they actually have a mobile phone and a computer? Because it seems like the obvious thing would be to set one device that has the most storage as the one to automatically and permanently download and keep everything. Unless you went in some very specific or advanced functionality to yes, I want to delete this from the network as opposed to delete it from the drive. And any normal drive deleting just. Or local deleting only deleted it from the device you deleted it on. It was just local. You're just making a local change. So that if I just put like a thousand images into my file app, into my PEAR drive app on my phone, well then it automatically is mirrored on my Linux machine. And then if I just delete them from my phone in PEAR drive, it just deletes it from my phone so that I still have it if I need it. And if I want it while it's offline, if I want it locally on that device and I'm worried about not having Internet access or it's just really important to me. So I want, I want to make sure that I have a copy of it because maybe something happens to my Linux machine. Well then I keep it locally and if I delete it, it stays in the network, it stays with everybody. Else who's ever used it or deleted it, I mean, or downloaded it. Any of my other device devices in which I have accessed it on. And it works like BitTorrent. So if five other devices have it, well then I can download a little bit from every, from all five devices and if any one of them is online, I have access to it. And that these core functions just work. They work. They're really easy to quote, unquote, call to build into any ui. And then you can then take those drives and do whatever you want with it. You can make it a folder of audio books and you can stick it into the book player app and it downloads the master list of all of the audiobooks that you have that I have on my computer. And if that peer, if my Linux machine isn't available for some reason because I don't have the Internet, well, then it just shows them all grayed out. It says these are in the network, but you don't have access to them right now. Ask your peer to come back online or I'm on a plane. I only have access to the ones that I specifically downloaded because I knew I wasn't going to have Internet. There's no reason that something like that needs some elaborate setup, that you need some central server and you need to register with your email address or some crap like it's 2024. You should be able to easily and hassle free share device, share files and all of your data between all of your devices. Why can't we? How have we gotten to this point? The Internet's been around for like 35 or 40 years in earnest. The Internet browser, the Mosaic browser, was released at the very beginning of 1993, I think, so 31 years. And this problem still has to have a rent seeker in the middle of it is still unbelievably frustrating, still requires multiple uploads and downloads and file hosting with some service middleman that I can't just send a link to Johnny, my producer, to download this episode from me, even though all of my devices are online right at this moment and I can easily have this file accessible. How is, how did we not solve that problem yet? And how fundamental is that problem to the open access problem? Like this is the only reason it's so easy to monopolize and put the knowledge, human knowledge behind these silos is because it's not easy to get 30 people together and make a joint drive of sharing the stuff that they have, the stuff that they need and need access to without Google Drive in the middle And I think if you fundamentally change the ease of use of the technology, the way that you can access these things and you obscure away what's happening under the hood and you make it very simple and intuitive for the interface, for how you interact with it. I think you fundamentally also like that change in technology and in the tools are how you change the conversation around it too. Because you change what's normal. You change, if you, if you fundamentally change what is possible, you force them to require an invasion into your control and your sovereignty in order to try to artificially recreate the reality that they believe is the proper reality, which is this one that's limited, restricted, and where they get to tell you what you can do, what you can say and how you can communicate with other people. And it is no longer by default that they have the benefit of the doubt. It's default that you have the benefit of the doubt because you don't need to do anything in order to get a direct peer to peer, simple way to share things between devices and people that, you know, that is the concept. I mean that's, that's a big overarching concept. I have no idea if this is going to be successful, but this is why I have put so much into this project and what value I think it is going to provide. But regardless as to whether or not Pear Drive does this, I think we are in the era in which technology finally solves this problem. Whether I have anything to do with it or not. I mean, I didn't build Hypercore and Hole punch and any of this. I have nothing to do with the pair stack, I'm just building on top of that and trying to make it. I'm hiring someone else to build on top of that and working with them to design something that I hope is going to make it even easier for other people to utilize it without having to understand how it works. That's the point of this. And because of my deep like PTSD level frustration and anger in the troubles that I have had in trying to get files from my MacBook to my Linux machine that are literally right now sitting two feet apart. And if you tell me, if anybody ever tells me again, just use FTP, I am going to, I'm going to reach through this microphone and the Internet and all of the digital communication and the RSS feed and I'm going to slap you in the face because that is the, the exact opposite of simple and user friendly. And I even thought I had, I thought halfway through this ridiculous project I found something. I found A tool called Space Drive, which looked like so much of what we were trying to do that I almost got like really disheartened. Like I was, I was like, I was at the. Simultaneously excited and then also like, yep, that was it. That was my stupid foray into trying to build an application that was going to do this. And of course somebody else did it much better than I could and it's already out there. And they raised millions of dollars now I booted it up and my Linux machine showed up with my MacBook and I dragged and dropped one file to it and then it disconnected and I was like, what?
[01:05:13] And I've updated it like three times. This. This has been going on for six months. I still can't. I swear to God. They, this is a perfect example of a project that I don't understand how they think. Like how can you think that optimizing all of these, the ui, like how this thing looks and all of these extra features and organizing and all of this crap that you would optimize that before you actually got the basic networking to work, even on a lan, even on your home devices. Like, I have an SMB server, I should be able to connect on my LAN and constantly I will open up the finder and boom, there's my Linux machine. And then I boot it up and I try to open it and then it gives me an error and then it disconnects and then I just can't get it back.
[01:06:11] Ancient technology. Ancient. Like this has been around. SMB servers are. There's nothing even slightly new about them. It should just reliably work. Why does it not work? I have no freaking clue. Like that's the problem to solve the getting a connection and easily and high bandwidth. Getting the file from one device to another and easily and intuitively managing where the device is sitting and how to access it. That's the whole problem. All of this nice organizational crap. I can edit file names in Finder, I can do all of this other stuff in operating systems. That's what they're built for. Why would you spend money on that? Why would you have developers working on all of these other things when you haven't solved the most fundamental piece of the puzzle? Like I want that solved before. We just have a dumb interface with just some files. Like don't even give me a folder system. Just make it so I can dump shit in it. And then it goes and does the thing that I expect it to do. Like where they're. Again, are they using their own tool? I don't get it. I did not intend this to be a big angry rant about Pear Drive at the end of this and why I've spent. God, no, I don't even know, like $100,000 on this stupid thing. God, probably worse. Probably. Probably a good chunk more than that. I'm telling you, if you're not ready for the long haul, do not get into software development. You better have the passion and the anger to do an angry podcast rant at least once a week on the topic, because otherwise you are going to run out of steam way, way early and you are going to be hurting and bleeding of funds and think this was such a stupid waste of time and you will not finish it. Every single time I have considered just dropping this stupid thing and being like, I'm never going to get this done. This is stupid. I am just wasting bitcoin. Well then I run out of fucking hard drive space on my MacBook and I go through the process of trying to get it to my Linux machine and within an hour I am ready to open up my deep cold storage in, burn the whole Internet down to solve this problem. If it doesn't matter to you that much, probably don't do it. But I hope, I hope with a mitigation or a solution to my visceral anger about this problem, I also hope to be able to contribute to the open access idea of the Internet. That stuff is easy to get. Stuff like knowledge is easy to share. I would love to feel like I just had, if nothing else, even if I was just there while other people were building the things that mattered, then I contributed just a little bit. And maybe some block of code that we built or some piece of it was used by some other project that not even mine. Maybe my project and what we're building really just dies on. I mean, this is the first time I've even tried to do something as, quote, unquote complete, as concrete as this as far as a project and the idea that this would even be successful. I realized just from a probabilistic standpoint, you know, I would need to do a hundred of these before I had any expectation of one of them being successful. But maybe there's enough people out there with my same problem and the same philosophy, and there's enough bitcoiners and nostrilches who want this to be easy and want information to be free again, who want to bring back that old culture of the web and get out of these stupid silos and get around these ridiculous platforms and all of the Risks that come with them and own our little part of the Internet again, that we actually own what we have on this network. I think that's really what this is about. I think that's what Aaron Swartz was ultimately, the problem that he was trying and needing to solve is how do we make it so that our places on the network, our identities, our information, our ability to share and communicate with each other is owned by us because we found ourselves in a world where we don't own any of it. Everything is rented, and it's borrowed from somebody else's machine.
[01:10:52] But I think we can fix that. I don't. I've even slightly given up. In fact, I feel like we just got started and bitcoin was the fuel, was the gasoline on that little fire that seemed to be dying out, and that now we have multiple layers that we can use to rebuild these things and rethink about these problems. And we have an entire generation of success and failures to learn from that. I think we can fix this.
[01:11:26] I think we can fix this. I think this is our future. At least I'm hoping to push us a little bit in that direction.
[01:11:34] So thank you guys for listening. We'll close it out there to Aaron Swartz.
[01:11:40] Rest in peace, man. You're a legend.
[01:11:43] To everyone else, thank you for contributing. Thank you for caring about this stuff.
[01:11:48] Thank you for sharing this show out, supporting me any way that you can. I love the boost on Fountain, the zaps on Nostr. You keep me motivated and you keep this thing going, and it means a lot, and I appreciate it.
[01:12:04] I love this. I love what I do. And with that, I'll catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. Don't forget to check out my affiliate links and the resources that I have available for you guys right down in the show notes, and I'll catch you on the next episode of Bitcoin Audible. Until then, everybody take it easy, guys.
[01:12:36] The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.
[01:12:47] Tim Berners Lee.
