A Supposedly Fun Website I've Never Used Before

“Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.” - Yukio Mishima

I can only think of three explanations for why we don't talk about Aaron Swartz anymore. A computer prodigy who, for sharing JSTOR files for free, facing thirty-five years in prison with millions in fines, committed suicide. Despite his story’s drama, it’s not a smooth enough ball for media ping-pong. By this I mean that Swartz doesn’t fit easily into any current narratives. Whatever you’re seeing on the news is never a full account of what’s happening. You’re probably looking at the least clear cut part. This is because the unclear part has two sides to discussion. 
While a lot of Americans agreed with Donald Trump, that’s not the reason he dominated the screen - just look at Bernie Sanders, he had similar grassroots support but nowhere near the reporting. Instead, Trump got the most coverage because his comments were just on the edge of acceptability. He started debates about whether what he said was acceptable. It starts a conversation - which is more than what you can say about pretty much any other politician, unless they’re making a mistake. He didn’t become president because the left hated him. He became president because some of the right hated him. 
Swartz didn’t do this. The founder of Reddit, his presence was that of a radically centrist information Robin Hood. The slightly-conspiratorial, definitely-hippy British Left have canonised Corbyn, Swartz just didn’t have that staying power. Sometime around the mid-2010’s, the ‘apolitical’ circuitboard princes changed. The never-voting, sometimes-upvoting, always online new aristocracy split in half. Either, they came up with patriotic justifications for a Billionaire trying to overturn a democratic election - or, they started hating their dads and changing the pronouns in their Twitter Bio every six months. The internet’s rules changed. Whereas before, the idea of a netizen was trolled into you. Seemingly overnight, politics began. What felt like a Grecian Public Forum had Tiananmen Tanks rolled in on the orders of McCarthy.  I don’t want to bore you, because discussing this change is the bread and butter of substack and, frankly, it’s overdone. A lot of people say this shift was caused by Trump. I disagree - I think 2014 was its nexus. But the minutiae don’t matter. If you’re not convinced that there has been a change - consider this: after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, drawings of Muhhammad circulated the front page of Reddit. Could that happen today?

The second reason we don’t talk about him anymore is that Aaron Swartz is deliberately being scrubbed from history. If you’re skim reading, here is a fact that will make you slow down: Reddit has more active monthly users than Twitter. I didn’t believe it at first either - I'll give you a second to double check a source that isn’t a seventeen-year-olds blog. 
While the structure of Twitter gives each individual user more control of the website's culture, Reddit’s technocolour stream of content means that you are a lot more passive consuming it. Point one assumes culture is a tennis match between the meta and micro; that the individual and the conglomerate both have their parts to play in culture. While this might be true elsewhere on the internet, Reddit is different. Reddit has mods. More specifically, Reddit has six mods which control the top ninety-two most used subreddits. Reddit has mods which take their salary in the form of bribes from weapons contractors, financial firms and world leaders who are desperately trying to convince the world they are indifferent about Muslims. Reddit has mods who edit comments criticising them. Reddit has mods who are due to be sentenced for their involvement with sex trafficing to Little Saint James, an island owned by Jeffery Epstein. And, finally, Reddit has mods who were caught deleting posts about Swartz. 
While specific posts aren’t enough to convict, the site had to (eventually) admit that they skewed it’s algorithm so that posts about Trump would appear less frequently. It’s not hard to imagine a weighting of discussion against Swartz could happen as well.

The third reason is the reason which terrifies me the most. Because the third reason is that people just… moved on. Swartz, no doubt a prodigy in life, had nothing to give in death - so we stopped talking about him. Martin Luther King Jr. died for equality, and Christ died for our sins. Swartz died for… what, exactly? To protest internet privacy bills which passed anyway? It’s strange to look back at photos of the 2010’s and have the camera quality invoke nostalgia - I can tell a shot from an iPhone 4. The element of history becomes an immutable characteristic of the man. Instead of being timeless, Swartz has started to rot, which is sad, because he can diagnose a problem of today better than most alive. He can diagnose a cancer that he created. And he can do so in his own words. Well, sort of.

It’s hard to find an analysis of Infinite Jest’s ending without seeing Swartz’s name mentioned. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was a funny coincidence - child computer prodigies aren’t famed for their abstract artistic analysis. You’d be forgiven, but you wouldn’t be right. One of the first publicly recorded slicings of the footnoted Gordian Knot is on Swartz blog, Raw Thought.
As a quick aside, I want to give a quick summary of Infinite Jest for the uninitiated - even if you’re still planning to read the book, carry on with the article. It does spoil a plotline, but in one-thousand pages, David Foster Wallace packs in about a dozen more. The ending of Infinite Jest is so complex, the author forgot to include it in the novel. He claims that the reader should be able to infer the ending from the set-up of the book. Indeed, after the last chapter, the previously staticky first comes into focus.  Hal Incandeza being interviewed for a tennis scholarship into Arizona State University. He tries to speak, but all that comes out is incomprehensible screams. His attempt at heartfelt communication is horrifying to the university board. He begins to convulse on the floor. It’s all supposed to be a metaphor for sincerity. During his seizure, he remembers digging up his grandfather's head to find ‘Infinite Jest’. I have no idea what this is supposed to be a metaphor for.

He’s with a very sad kid and they’re in a graveyard digging some dead guy’s head up and it’s really important, like Continental-Emergency important, and Gately’s the best digger but he’s wicked hungry, like irresistibly hungry, and he’s eating with both hands out of huge economy-size bags of corporate snacks so he can’t really dig, while it gets later and later and the sad kid is trying to scream at Gately that the important thing was buried in the guy’s head and to divert the Continental Emergency to start digging the guy’s head up before it’s too late, but the kid moves his mouth but nothing comes out, and Joelle Van D. appears … while the sad kid holds something terrible up by the hair and makes the face of somebody shouting in panic: Too Late. 

Don’t worry who Joelle Van D is - that explanation would take a couple paragraphs and a protractor. ‘Infinite Jest’ is a VHS so entertaining that, once you start to watch it, you wish to do nothing else. Multiple characters are found dead in a pile of their own excrement with the film still running on repeat in the background. Before we go any further, I want you to note that, when I type, I use Infinite Jest to refer to the book, and ‘Infinite Jest’ to refer to the movie the book is about. Understood? 
What dates the book is not that ‘Infinite Jest’ was played via cartridge - Wallace predicted Facetime, Netflix and a Right-Wing Media Personality President, so we’re giving him a pass - no, what dates the book is the idea that being so invested in a virtual world that you would soil yourself was played as a comic exaggeration. 
On /lit/ - the first website i’ve seen requests for “literature with the least amount of feminist themes” - Infinite Jest is ‘reddit’. To explain the crushing of the corporation into an adjective is hard, and pretty much something you have to play by ear. Imagine someone who takes superiority in which anonymous internet forum they use dislikes. That’s what it means to be reddit. To me, Reddit is a large part of the multiplanetary cyberspace that ‘Infinite Jest’ would resemble in real life. 
Moderators, perched upon soiled office chairs, is the kind of spectre Wallace could only imagine as death. A hothouse of cold connections - a world of upvotes, shares and giga-biting each other’s style is the reason he isn’t here anymore. It’s ironic. Schwartz is a part of the history of a novel which was the most succinct warning to what he would one day create.

I ran into an acquaintance after he had spent a couple months in university. He had changed. His greying skin made me think it was drugs, but the weird way he was talking suggested a discovery of his sexuality. I realised what had gone wrong when he showed me his Reddit roundup. At the end of the year, you get a breakdown of how you spent your time on the site. It softens the blow by telling you the equivalent of the length of how many bananas you’ve scrolled. It didn’t make my friend any less embarrassed to admit he had spent over one hundred hours on r/RedDevils, a subreddit for a team he didn’t support. Every time your face is posted on Reddit, you should brace for a terror-attack volume of creepy message. All of Reddit is ogling. It lets you step back in a way our parents could only do through binoculars. You can be anyone. This isn’t a good thing. You can be anything in a couple of keystrokes. This isn’t a good thing.

James Incandeza spends the book trying to destroy the entertainment. He can’t, so he commits suicide. The creator of fiction’s, and reality’s, infinite jest both dead by their own hands. One wonders what would have happened if the FBI ceased their prosecution of Swartz. While doing little for history, his death was a cultural earthquake.
I can’t overstate the impact of his death on culture. His funeral was attended by Elizabeth Warren, Quinn Norton, and Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the internet. While he was being prosecuted, the internet was ready to spend millions to pay his legal fees. He didn’t want to be a burden, so he didn’t accept money. Netizens took to the streets to protest on his behalf. SOPA, and bills like it, were all made into news stories by the internet. I wonder how those people feel today. I imagine they don’t feel good. If Swartz saw his creation being used to house r/DankMemes, he would have killed himself anyway.
Part of what makes Reddit the most effective digital heroin is that it adorns its labyrinth walls with mirrors. Layer one is any cutesy animal reddit. Its comments will be flared with ‘floofers’, ‘doggos’ and ‘chonkers’. People will read that and talk about how disgusting it is… on another subreddit. r/Redscarepod is thousands of pages of how shit reddit is. Maybe RSP shouldn’t surprise me, the only place you’ll see so much verbalised self-hatred is skinny white women which, considering the forum's demographics, doesn’t surprise me.

I can’t say I’m a fan of Wallace as a person - in my neighbourhood, we’d probably like the tracksuits and bandanas. Once we found out he was stalking a girl, her cousin would probably put a cricket bat through his window. Yet, I reference him in almost everything I write. I have to force myself to not use footnotes, so it looks like I'm ripping off Jonathen Franzen. 
I’m not anti-Reddit. Being honest, I can’t figure out how to use it. The extent of my knowledge about the website is knowing how to spam my blog on r/TheLastPsychiatrist. Almost every post leads to another ban; be it for bigotry, blogspam, or spamming my bigotted blog, I can’t seem to find a place on the site. Yet, I can’t help but look up to Swartz. As I'm sure you can tell from my blog's design, I've never been remarkable with computers. I remember as a child, my mother showed me The Internet’s Own Boy, a documentary about Swartz own life. I’m sure she just wanted me to start coding so she could have a big house one day. The story of a rebel with a cause was refreshing. I have enough self-awareness to not compare a gadly with his hand forced into suicide to Socrates, but there are certainly parallels. While, at least at this stage in my life, I find myself judging men mostly on the art they create, Swartz is a rare example of someone who does that through the act of living. And I don’t think we should forget that.

Gravedigger: “This same skull, sir, was, sir, Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester.”
Hamlet: “This?”
Gravedigger: “E’en that.”
Hamlet: Let me see. Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio—a fellow of infinite
jest, of most excellent fancy.

Now does that quote at the beginning make sense?