Barrett Brown Trevor Timm at Aaron Swartz Day 2018 - Sách nói Miễn phí

Trevor Timm: Could you tell us a little bit about what the theme is of your memoir…What are you trying to get across to readers?

Barrett Brown: There are a couple sort of

overlapping issues. One is that, these institutions that we’ve

inherited. We should not be surprised when they fail. They weren’t

invented by philosopher kings with unlimited resources and the ability

to implement their vision. They grew up haphazardly by very imperfect

people and are frequented and designed and maintained by certain subsets

of people that sometimes are outright psychotic. And other times, when

they are noble, have their hands tied.

So, we have these institutions crumbling and proving themselves to be

less solid than we once assumed them to be. That’s important.

The other important aspect of our age is that we can no

longer look back on the 80s and 90s or 60s or anytime prior to determine

what’s possible. To determine what’s viable or probable. The framework,

the environment in which human collaboration occurs has changed so

fundamentally and drastically in a historically short period of time

that we cannot base our course of action, or the experiments we

undertake, or the things we do on what others were able to pull off. We

just can’t. What we can do, is always keep in mind that all human

collaboration; Human collaboration is where all this comes from. All of

our states. All of our laws. All of our problems. And so when the means

change, and the possibilities suddenly increase in ways that we can’t

understand yet, we have to explore all of these options. And I think

it’s viable to really be able to do that in an effective way in the next

decade or so, with Pursuance and all of these other things that are

coming out.

Trevor Timm: Absolutely. (pause) With this being

Aaron Swartz Day, I’d love to hear from you; Did you actually know Aaron

personally? If you did or if you didn’t: How do you think about his

legacy?

Barrett Brown: I didn’t really know him. I think I encountered him once or twice online.

He (Aaron) once offered to do an FOI request on persona

management. One of my interests back then. One of these disinformation

propaganda methodologies that have come out of the intelligence contract

industries, and had been encouraged by various states. Something that I

think is very dangerous. So he offered to do his thing on that. To

explore the possibilities and see if we could get some information on

it. And the interesting thing about that is that I’d sort of forgotten

about it until very recently. I’m not sure where that was left. I’m not

sure if he got some results back. Someone asked me about it.

But it showed Aaron Swartz knew what was important. He agreed with me

on this one aspect of these propaganda methodologies being important,

and he also anticipated all of us in envisioning a different kind of

internet that we didn’t accept from last year, that we’d actually build

from the ground up according to our values…

(Yes, the sound mysteriously goes out for 15 seconds at the end, but

probably it was just operator error as there were many errors throughout

the broadcast – many apologies and I PROMISE we’ll have a professional

webcaster next year :,-(