Putting profit before people has led to decades of poisoning our air, our water and our soil. Some of this abuse has resulted from privatization of public resources. Blind allegiance to profit has also led to torturing of gifted individuals who have tried to reverse privatization by making what was public, public again.
The Internet’s Own Boy, the story of Aaron Swartz, an internet innovator, who stopped SOPA (the first attempt to privatize the internet), who laid the foundation for a fourteen year old to develop a test for detecting pancreatic cancer, and who later committed suicide at age 26 after threats of decades in prison and total loss of access to computers, reveals the torture Aaron, his family, and his friends suffered for his effort to make public papers public again.
My takeaways from this story:
- Privatization of public resources always puts profit before people.
- Effectively opposing the abuse of citizens from privatization puts you on a hit list of law enforcement agencies controlled indirectly by the oligarchy.
- If you commit an ‘illegal’ act because you want to make the world a better place while also unraveling a bad law, you will be prosecuted to discourage putting people before profit.
- If you commit an ‘illegal’ act because you want to make yourself excessively wealthy while abusing others, prosecutors, working for the same oligarchy, will look the other way and let the abuse grow.
- Imprisoning publicly funded research papers in JSTOR for profit is abusive in the same way imprisoning citizens for drug use that harms no one. Both destroy valuable human resources that could make the world a better place for all.
- In the case of trying to imprison Aaron Swartz and pushing him to suicide, the loss to the world is great based on what Aaron had already given us by putting people before profit.
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