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  • The Idealist

  • Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet
  • By: Justin Peters
  • Narrated by: Corey Brill
  • Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
  • 3.7 out of 5 stars (3 ratings)

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The Idealist

By: Justin Peters
Narrated by: Corey Brill
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Publisher's Summary

A smart, lively history of the Internet free culture movement and its larger effects on society - and the life and shocking suicide of Aaron Swartz, a founding developer of Reddit and Creative Commons - from Slate correspondent Justin Peters.

Aaron Swartz was a zealous young advocate for the free exchange of information and creative content online. He committed suicide in 2013 after being indicted by the government for illegally downloading millions of academic articles from a nonprofit online database. From the age of 15, when Swartz, a computer prodigy, worked with Lawrence Lessig to launch Creative Commons, to his years as a fighter for copyright reform and open information to his work leading the protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) to his posthumous status as a cultural icon, Swartz's life was inextricably connected to the free culture movement. Now Justin Peters examines Swartz's life in the context of 200 years of struggle over the control of information.

In vivid, accessible prose, The Idealist situates Swartz in the context of other "data moralists" past and present, from lexicographer Noah Webster to eBook pioneer Michael Hart to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In the process the book explores the history of copyright statutes and the public domain; examines archivists' ongoing quest to build the "library of the future"; and charts the rise of open access, copyleft, and other ideologies that have come to challenge protectionist IP policies. Peters also breaks down the government's case against Swartz and explains how we reached the point where federally funded academic research came to be considered private property, and downloading that material in bulk came to be considered a federal crime.

The Idealist is an important investigation of the fate of the digital commons in an increasingly corporatized Internet and an essential look at the impact of the free culture movement on our daily lives and on generations to come.

©2016 Justin Peters (P)2016 Simon & Schuster

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An illuminating look into the world of Open Access

The book, while sometimes overly verbose to the point of esoteric obscurity, successfully plumbs the depth and history of the dissemination of information, both across the USA and the world at large. It paints a very balanced picture of the current state of information consumerism and why existing power structures seek to preserve the scarcity of information.

The history of Copywrite - the prononents, critics and martyrs alike - makes for a very eye opening encapsulation of something that should concern us all.

Swartz's narrative is successfully woven throughout and handled without bias - a man ahead of his age, ahead of our time and perhaps not belonging to the current cultural zeitgeist he found himself in, Swartz's contribution to 21st century freedom of speech is palpable and his loss a great tragedy.

Next stop, Chomsky's Understanding Power.

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