The Internet's Own Boy

The Internet's Own Boy depicts the life of American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. It features interviews with his family and friends as well as the internet luminaries who worked with him. The film tells his story up to his eventual suicide after a legal battle, and explores the questions of access to information and civil liberties that drove his work.

This movie is part of the collection: Community Video

Director: Brian Knappenberger
Producer: Brian Knappenberger
Audio/Visual: sound, color
Language: English
Keywords: Aaron Swartz; documentary; hacktivism; suicide; jstor; MIT; CFAA; Cory Doctorow; Tim Berners-Lee; Larry Lessig; internet; activism
Contact Information: http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy

Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

History, Terror, Time

"In our day, when historical pressure no longer allows any escape, how can man tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history—from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings—if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning; if they are only the blind play of economic, social, or political forces, or, even worse, only the result of the 'liberties' that a minority takes and exercises directly on the stage of universal history?

"We know how, in the past, humanity has been able to endure the sufferings we have enumerated: they were regarded as a punishment inflicted by God, the syndrome of the decline of the 'age,' and so on. And it was possible to accept them precisely because they had a metahistorical meaning [...] Every war rehearsed the struggle between good and evil, every fresh social injustice was identified with the sufferings of the Saviour (or, for example, in the pre-Christian world, with the passion of a divine messenger or vegetation god), each new massacre repeated the glorious end of the martyrs. [...] By virtue of this view, tens of millions of men were able, for century after century, to endure great historical pressures without despairing, without committing suicide or falling into that spiritual aridity that always brings with it a relativistic or nihilistic view of history"^[25]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_Return_%28Eliade%29