经济学人164:悼念艾伦·施瓦茨

　　Obituary 1

逝者

Aaron Swartz

艾伦·施瓦茨

Aaron Swartz, computer programmer and activist 3, committed suicide on January 11th, aged 4 26

艾伦·施瓦茨，计算机程序员、活动家，1月11日自杀身亡，享年26岁

SMALL, dark, cluttered 5 places were important in the life of Aaron Swartz. His days were spent hunched 6 in his bedroom over his MacBook Pro 2, his short-sighted eyes nearly grazing the screen, in a litter of snaking cables and hard drives. In the heady days of 2005 when he was developing Reddit, now the web's most popular bulletin board, he and his three co-founders shared a house in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he slept in a cupboard. And it was in a cupboard—an unlocked wiring cupboard, where a homeless man kept stuff—that in November 2010 he surreptitiously placed a laptop, hidden under a box, and plugged it directly into the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

狭小、幽暗、凌乱的空间，在艾伦·施瓦茨的生命中担当着重要角色。他会成天抱着自己的高端苹果笔记本猫在卧室里，身边全是缠杂的线缆和散乱的硬盘。由于近视，他的眼睛几乎快要贴到屏幕上，于是他曾问自己：笔记本的屏幕为何不与眼睛在同一水平线？2005年是让他沉醉的日子：现在网上最热门的公告板Reddit，就是他和其他三位创始人一道在那年开发的。那时，他们在麻省的萨默维尔市合住一套房子，而施瓦茨就睡在一个板柜里。2010年10月，同样也是在一个板柜里，他偷偷地在一个盒子下面藏了一台笔记本：那是一个没有上锁的配线柜，被一名流浪者当作了储物间；从这里，施瓦茨的笔记本径直接入了麻省理工大学的电脑网络。

His aim was to download as many pages as possible from an archive of academic journals called JSTOR, which was available by paid subscription 7 only to libraries and institutions. That was morally wrong, he thought; the knowledge contained in it had to be made available, free, to everyone. And it was absurdly simple to do that. He already had access to the library network; no need to hack 8 into the system. He just ran a script, called keepgrabbing.py, which liberated 10 4.8m articles at almost dangerous speed. MIT tried to block him, but time after time he outwitted them; and then, as a last resort, he plugged in the laptop in the cupboard.

他的目的，是要从学术期刊存储系统JSTOR上尽量多下载些内容。JSTOR只对付费图书馆和院校机构开放，而这在他看来有违道义：毕竟其中的知识往往都是公共资助的成果，所以必须向所有人免费开放。而且，开放这些信息的方法简单得离谱：他已能进入图书馆的网络，因此没有必要使用黑客手段；所以他只是调用了一个名为“keepgrabbing.py”的脚本，就让480万篇文章脱离了JSTOR的禁锢，如此骇人的速度令该系统几近崩溃。麻省理工曾试图阻止他，却被他一次次地智胜。随后，他将藏在柜中的笔记本接入了网络，以此作为最后一着。

He had form on this; lots of form. In 2006 he got hold of the book cataloguing data kept by the Library of Congress, usually steeply charged for, and posted them free in the Open Library. In 2009 he wormed his way into a free-access trial of the PACER system, which contains all electronic federal court records, in certain public libraries; he downloaded 19.9m pages of it, then uploaded them to the cloud, before anyone could stop him. Again, it was easy: using a small, elegant language called perl, the documents fell into his hands.

他在这方面有过“前科”，而且次数不少。2006年，他拿到了国会图书馆的书目数据；这些信息往往需要高额费用方可获取，但却被他免费放到了“公共图书馆”上。2009年，他又在几家公立图书馆中，设法进入了PACER系统的免费试用服务；该系统存有所有电子版的联邦法庭记录，他下载了其中的1990万页，并在有人可以阻止之前，上传到了云网络。这次行动同样易如反掌：他只用了精巧的Perl语言，就将文档拿到了手。

He seemed to have been doing this for ever, writing programs to liberate 9 information. At 12 or 13—a plump, bookish boy with a computer-company executive for a father and a very early Mac in the den—he set up theinfo.org, a sort of Wikipedia before the fact, which was going to contain all the world's knowledge on one website. A mere 11 year or so later he was working with Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the world wide web, to launch the Semantic Web to improve data-sharing, and developing RSS 1.0 to distribute videos and news stories. He helped set up Creative Commons, too, which made copyright licensing 12 simpler.

编写程序，以让信息自由——这似乎就是他一直从事的工作。十二三岁时，施瓦茨还是个胖乎乎的小书虫，有个在电脑公司当老总的父亲，还有小屋里的一台古董苹果机。那时，包罗世间知识的维基百科还未问世，他就已经创建了一个同类网站：theinfo.org。仅约一年之后，他又联手互联网之父蒂姆·伯纳斯·李，发起了“语义网”项目来促进数据共享；同时，他还开发了用于视频和新闻传播的RSS 1.0规则。此外，他还协助创立了“知识共享”，这一项目同样简化了版权的授权。

All this could have made him a fortune, but he had no interest in that. He wanted a world that was better, freer and more progressive. He dropped out of high school, then out of Stanford, educating himself instead by reading prodigious 13 numbers of books, mostly philosophy. He made friends and fell loudly out with them because they couldn't be as perfectionist as he was. At gatherings 14 he would turn up messy-haired and half-shaven, the shy nerd's look, but with the intense dark gaze and sudden, confident grin of a young man out to turn society on its head.

这一切原本可以让他发笔大财，但施瓦茨对此并无兴趣。他想要的是一个更加美好、更加自由、更加进步的世界。他没有念完中学，此后又从斯坦福辍学。他的自学途径是阅读大量的书籍，多半是哲学书。他结交了一些朋友，又和他们吵得面红耳赤，因为他们无法像他一样追求完美。他会带着乱蓬蓬的头发和没刮净的胡子出现在聚会上，看上去像个痴迷技术的书呆子；但深邃的目光，以及突然绽放、充满自信的笑容，却正是一个试图倒转乾坤的青年所有。

A lot of money came his way when Reddit was sold to Condé Nast in 2006, but relocation to an office made him miserable 15. Google offered him jobs, but he turned them down as unexciting. Political campaigning became his passion. He wanted to see everything available online, free, with nothing held back by elites 16 or big money, and nothing censored 17. Information was power, as he proclaimed in his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto 18 of 2008, and war was needed “by stealth”, “in the dark”, “underground”, for the freedom to connect. In 2011 there was no fiercer voice against the Stop Online Piracy 19 Act, and in 2012 no one prouder to proclaim it dead.

2006年，Reddit被康泰纳仕集团收购，施瓦茨从中获利颇丰。不过，搬到办公室后的生活让他苦闷不已。谷歌邀请他加盟，但他以工作乏味为由拒绝。政治运动成了他的热爱：他希望看到，所有信息都可以在网上免费获取，没有什么能被上流人士或企业财阀阻隔，也没有什么会遭到审查。正如他2008年的《开放存取的游击宣言》一文所言，信息即是权力，网络互联的自由需要“暗地里秘密的地下”斗争。他的声音，在2011年抵制《禁止网络盗版法案》的运动中最为激烈，而在2012年宣布该法案“倒毙”时也最为自豪。

The JSTOR business, however, got him into deep trouble. When he went back to the cupboard for his laptop, police arrested him. He was charged on 13 counts, including wire fraud and theft of information, and was to go on trial in the spring, facing up to 35 years of jail. The charges, brought by a federal prosecutor 20, were hugely disproportionate to what he had done; MIT and JSTOR had both settled with him, and JSTOR, as if chastened by him, had even opened some of its public-domain archive. But theft was theft, said the prosecution 21.

然而JSTOR一事，却让他深陷困境。在回去取配线柜中的笔记本时，他被警方拘捕。一位联邦检察官对他提起13项指控，其中包括电信欺诈和信息窃取。此案原本定于今年春天开庭，届时他将面临最高35年的牢狱。但与他的行为相比，这些指控实在过重。况且，麻省理工和JSTOR都已同他和解，而JSTOR甚至开放了部分公共领域的内容。然而检方表示，盗窃毕竟是盗窃。

Darkness to light

从黑暗通向光明

All this added to a weight that had oppressed him for many years. “Look up, not down,” he urged readers of his weblog; “Embrace your failings.” “Lean into the pain.” It was hard to take that advice himself. He kept getting ill, several illnesses at once. Migraines sliced into his scalp; his body burned. And he was sad most of the time, a sadness like streaks 22 of pain running through him. Books, friends, philosophy, even blogs didn't help. He just wanted to lie in bed and keep the lights off.

因为这一切，本已抑郁多年的施瓦茨更是不堪负重。虽然他曾恳请自己博客的读者要“振作起来，不要灰心”、要“拥抱失败”、要“不畏痛苦”，但自己却很难接受同样的建议。他不断地生病，同时饱受着几种病痛的折磨：偏头痛有如刀割，身体也像着了火。而且他大多数时候都很忧伤，这忧伤就如阵阵病痛，侵蚀着他的全身。书籍、朋友、哲学甚至博客都无济于事；他只想躺在床上，关上所有的灯光。

In 2002 he posted instructions for after his death. To be in a grave would be all right, as long as he had access to oxygen and no dirt on top of him; and as long as all the contents of his hard drives were made publicly available, nothing deleted, nothing withheld 23, nothing secret, nothing charged for; all information out in the light of day, as everything should be.

2002年时，施瓦茨就在网上为自己安排了身后事。在他看来，寄身墓室没什么大不了，只要可以接触氧气，只要没有污泥覆顶，只要自己硬盘上所有的内容都向公众开放—没有丝毫删节，没有丝毫保留，没有任何秘密，也没有任何资费。所有信息都坦露于天光之下，一如世间万物应有之态。