The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #2

Synopsis: The story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz's help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz's groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26. Aaron's story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties.
Director(s): Brian Knappenberger
Production: FilmBuff and Participant
  4 wins & 3 nominations.
 
IMDB:
8.1
Metacritic:
72
Rotten Tomatoes:
93%
NOT RATED
Year:
2014
105 min
$48,911
Website
772 Views


"How could you ever have such a terrible idea?"

Me and my other brother would be like,

"Oh, you know, yeah Wikipedia is cool, but..."

"we had that in our house, like, five years ago."

Aaron's website, theinfo.org,

wins a school competition

hosted by the Cambridge-based

web design firm ArsDigita.

We all went to Cambridge when

he won the ArsDigita prize

and we had no clue what Aaron was doing.

It was obvious that the prize

was really important.

Aaron soon became involved with

online programming communities,

then in the process of shaping

a new tool for the Web.

He comes up to me and is like, "Ben, there's this

really awesome thing that I'm working on."

"You need to hear about it!"

"Yeah, what is it?"

"It's this thing called RSS."

And he explains to me what RSS is.

I'm like, "Why is that useful, Aaron?"

"Is any site using it?

Why would I want to use it?"

There was this mailing list for people who are

working on RSS, and XML more generally,

and there was a person on it named

Aaron Swartz who was combative but very smart,

and who had lots of good ideas, and

he didn't ever come to the

face-to-face meetings, and they said,

"You know, when are you gonna come out

to one of these face-to-face meetings?"

And he said, "You know, I don't think

my mom would let me. I've just turned fourteen."

And so their first reaction was: "Well, this person,

this colleague we've been working with all year

was thirteen years old while we were

working with him, and he's only fourteen now."

And their second reaction was:

"Christ, we really want to meet him.

That's extraordinary!"

He was part of the committee that drafted RSS.

What he was doing was to help build

the plumbing for modern hypertext.

The piece that he was working on, RSS,

was a tool that you can use to get summaries

of things that are going on on other web pages.

Most commonly, you would use this for a blog.

You might have 10 or 20 people's blogs you wanna read.

You use their RSS feeds, these summaries of

what's going on on those other pages

to create a unified list of all the stuff that's going on.

Aaron was really young, but he understood

the technology and he saw that it was imperfect

and looked for ways to help make it better.

So his mom started bundling him on planes

in Chicago. We'd pick him up in San Francicso.

We'd introduce him to interesting people

to argue with, and we'd marvel at his horrific eating habits.

He only ate white food, only like steamed

rice and not fried rice 'cause that wasn't sufficiently white

and white bread, and so on...

and you kind of marveled at the quality of the debate emerging from this,

what appeared to be a small boy's mouth,

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Brian Knappenberger

Brian Knappenberger is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, known for The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz, We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, and his work on Bloomberg Game Changers. The documentary film We Are Legion (2012) was written and directed by Knappenberger. It is about the workings and beliefs of the self-described hacktivist collective Anonymous.In June 2014, The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz was released. The film is about the life of internet activist Aaron Swartz. The film was on the short list for the 2015 Academy Award for best documentary feature.Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press was released on Netflix in June 2017, after debuting at the Sundance Film Festival. It follows professional wrestler Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker Media, and the takeover of the Las Vegas Review-Journal by casino owner Sheldon Adelson.Knappenberger has directed and executive produced numerous other documentaries for the Discovery Channel, Bloomberg, and PBS, including PBS' Ice Warriors: USA Sled Hockey. He owns and operates Luminant Media, a Los Angeles based production and post-production company. more…

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Submitted on August 05, 2018

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