Inside Job

Documentaries can admittedly be rather boring, particularly if technical details comprise most of the content. This applies also to a film of historical fiction based on true events, such as The Challenger Disaster (2019), which focuses so much on technical details (albeit set in arguments) that the narrative itself may not be strong enough to hold an audience's attention or interest. In contrast, the documentary, Inside Job (2010), provides such alluring "inside the beltway" (i.e., known only to U.S. Government insiders and their outside partners) information that the details themselves can capture and hold interest.  

The full essay is at "President Obama and Goldman Sachs."

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

To Aaron Swartz, the subject of the documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy (2014), the major concern in his day regarding the internet was not the ability of a person to create a blog or use social media; rather, the problem was in the trend of the power of the gate-keepers, who tell you were on the internet you want to go, concentrating. In other words, the issue concerned what commands our attention. More specifically, who gets access to the ways people find things on the internet. “Now everyone has a license to speak; it’s a question of who gets heard,” he said.  Although he was a computer wiz, he also had political aspirations; both of which were on display as he lobbied against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was introduced in Congress in October of 2011. Unfortunately, the combination of his computer and political skills got the attention of the FBI, which engaged in a relentless pursuit of him until, under the pressure, he committed suicide at the age of 26. His short life was one of idealism that should not have been squashed by an unstoppable criminal-justice system, especially when influenced by political pressure from corporations and politicians. Lest the overzealousness of law enforcement obscure a vision of Aaron’s idealism, it can be viewed as public access being restored to the public domain in terms of the internet.

Tim Lee, the founder of the internet who notably did not cash out but rather kept the web open, influenced Aaron. Although he bristled at the constraints in working at an internet company, he was also not primarily motivated by money. Instead, he was motivated by fairness as it applies to the public good. Whereas high-tech firms are oriented to their own private good, the public good implies public access—something about which Arron felt strongly. In other words, he detested the privatization of the public internet by private gate-keepers. “The public domain should be free to all, but it is often locked up” by corporations, said Brewster Kahle of The Internet Archive. Aaron’s motivation and activity hinged on the question of how public access could be brought to the public domain. This was “one of the things that got him in so much trouble,” said Kahle.

Pacer, a company that made about $120 million a year charging for access to the public records of courts, caught Aaron’s attention. By law, the courts could charge only what is necessary to run Pacer. As that company was interested in charging “customers” much more, hence narrowing the public’s access, Aaron downloaded 20 million pages of court documents. This was not illegal, and yet the FBI began staking out his parents’ house. Once able to analyze the documents, he discovered “massive privacy violations.” Yet is was the restricted public access, caused by wealth disparity, that really caught his attention. As Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media asked rhetorically in the film, “The law is the operating system of our democracy and you have to pay to see it?” Put another way, the privatization of the public domain can be viewed as the onslaught of plutocracy, the rule by wealth, over democracy.

Besides access to common law, knowledge is vital to a republic. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson agreed on this point. Aaron looked at the gatekeepers of academic articles—private companies like Jstor—which were charging substantial fees for public access (whereas scholars working for universities could access the articles for free). Such gatekeepers can be distinguished from the journals/publishers of the articles. Although a journal rightfully charges for a copy, if a public library (or government-sponsored university) has purchased one, shouldn’t the public have access to the issue? Should libraries have to pay substantial fees to the gatekeepers?

At MIT, Aaron downloaded articles on Jstor. It is not clear what he would have done with them. He had downloaded databases simply to analyze their content rather than make it public. MIT found his computer in a computer closet and gathered evidence to build a case. At the time, he was working at Harvard. If he didn’t have a status at MIT and thus had to hack into the system, MIT had a case. After all, people should not be allowed to unilaterally plug their laptops directly into computer systems. Even so, that police assaulted him on his way home and that U.S. Secret Service, which under the Patriot’s Act, can investigate “schemes using new technology,” took over smacks as going too far, especially if the police were MIT’s own. This would suggest too much power having been given to the university administration whether by its board or the government of Massachusetts. Having its own police power, a university administration can find itself charged with the taint of abuse of power sans accountability. After all, a university is more like a business than a government, hence democratic safeguards are not necessarily in place.

Looking at Aaron’s downloading itself, Carmen Ortesz of Massachusetts’ district attorney’s office says in the film, “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data, or dollars.” Aaron’s attorney retorts, He wasn’t stealing; he wasn’t selling what he got or giving it away.” When he had been a student at Stanford, Aaron had downloaded the Westlaw database to find relationships between sponsoring organizations and favorable research results. He didn’t release the documents. So the criminal prosecution of Aaron for downloading Jstor articles was as a commercial violation yet no evidence of motive existed; it could not be assumed that he would sell or otherwise make the articles available to the public. The problem was that he had put his name to a blog post, “Gorilla Manifesto,” in which open access is advocated.

For his part, Aaron points out that sharing knowledge with friends is not stealing; rather, doing so is a moral imperative because corporations act as gatekeepers to make money—essentially clipping away at the public domain. This is none other than “theft of public culture,” he says in the film. It is interesting the police felt the need to assault him and yet the thefts by the powerful gatekeepers were somehow legal. He told his girlfriend, “I’ve been arrested for downloading too many academic journals,” as if acquiring knowledge were a crime worthy of the perpetrator being held in solitary confinement as he was. Even Jstor must have viewed the criminal justice system as going too far, for the company dropped the case, saying it had been the government’s decision to prosecute. In fact, Stephen Jeymann, the politically-aspiring assistant district attorney of Massachusetts who interestingly kept the case for himself, told Aaron that he still could face 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. This raises the ethical question of whether an individual should be made to suffer inordinately to serve as a deterrent.

If the public good is the reason why, then what then of the for-profit companies that were essentially privatizing parts of the public domain? MIT, which had moral authority, was mute when the defense asked for assistance. The university characterized this stance as neutral, but Aaron’s lawyer said it was actually pro-prosecutor.

In the film, David Sirota points to the problem of selective deterrence from political ideology. He points out that the Obama administration did not prosecute the financial institutions and individuals for crimes that led to the financial crisis of 2008, yet while devoting resources to prosecuting selective deterrents, including Aaron’s case. It is no coincidence, Sirota claims, that Obama left office as a billionaire, which he had not been when he was a legislator in Illinois’ government and law instructor at the University of Chicago. I would add that Goldman Sachs’ $1 million contribution to Obama’s ’08 presidential campaign is also relevant. Clearly, Obama’s “Wall Street Government” was doing the bidding of the powerful rather than standing up for public access of knowledge.

Aaron hit his stride in spite of his pending trial when he put his computer skills to use in lobbying against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which initially had many co-sponsors in the U.S. Senate. Specifically, he wrote software making it easier for people to contact Congress. The bill was ostensibly against online piracy of music and movies, but, according to Aaron, the legislation was really about the freedom to connect. A company could cut off a website from the internet or force Google to cut links to the site; a claim of copyright infringement, without due process (i.e., a trial), would be all that would be necessary. In the film, U.S. Senator Wyden of Oregon says the bill poses a threat to freedom of speech and civil liberties. “It makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the internet to combat piracy,” he points out. In a particularly revealing “macro” comment, the senator points to the power of private powers in the American democratic system. “Typically, the legislative fights in Washington are fights between different sets of corporate moneyed interests—all duking it out to pass legislation. The fights that are the closest are when you have one set of corporate interests against another set of corporate interests and they are generally financially matched in campaign contributions and lobbying. The ones that aren’t even fights typically are those where all the money is on one side—all the corporations are on one side—and millions of people are on the other.” In other words, under the rubric of popular sovereignty (i.e., representatives representing their respective constituents as a group), the interests of private concentrations of wealth (i.e., corporations) essentially own the Congress and the White House.

In this case, constituents spoke up and their representatives in Congress noticed. Suddenly all but a few of the myriad co-sponsors (sponsored in turn by powerful private interests) dropped their support. People boycotted GoDaddy for its pro-SOPA support. Obama reversed his support, which interestingly suggests that he had been siding with the corporate interests rather than the People even though he was purportedly for “real change,” including greater democracy. Obama was going after Arron’s community, including not only hackers, but also democracy activists because they are able to make trouble for those who are already in power, corporate and governmentally. Obama’s administration went after Aaron in order to scare as many in his community as possible so they would not make trouble. Secrecy serves those who are already in power. Aaron was a threat because he was working toward open access to the public square even though reasonable people can disagree as to what rightly goes in there. Interestingly, Aaron had warned of the inordinate NSA spying.

SOPA didn’t pass. In fact, it was withdrawn. Aaron’s community won. Interestingly, the federal government charged Aaron with nine additional counts. Eleven of the thirteen total charges were for violating the terms of service of sites. Orin Kerr, a  lawyer, says in the film that such a type of indictment is unfair. Bryan Stevenson of Equal Right Initiative laments the excessiveness that had taken hold in the American criminal-justice system such that by Aaron’s day, “Anything we are angry about instinctively triggers a criminal justice intervention.” Even looking at a security guard the wrong way can trigger his “need” to call the local police, who have come to be prone to “overkill” in over-estimating degrees of threat. The impulse to “observe,” intimidate, threaten, indict, and prosecute has come to be triggered by people who are merely mad at something. The impulse, in other words, had become too sensitive even by Aaron’s time. Unfortunately, countervailing accountability on the occupants of that system has been hard to come by. The People en masse can pressure governments to contain even the passive aggression inflicted on citizens—particularly those who object. Though this is unlikely, considering how much energy it takes to stimulate a large number of people such that their elected representatives take notice. With regard to the People squeezing in where the corporate-governmental axis is dominant (hegemonic), the corporate lobbyists and the beneficiaries of corporate campaign contributions depend on the illusion of public accountability even as publicly they pay homage to the strong American democracy for and by the People. 

Anne Frank Remembered

While studying at Yale, I took a seminar on documentaries following two other, more pertinent film courses on narrative itself. I even took a preaching seminar on story-telling. The documentary choice was off my trajectory. The opportunity cost was large, considering that I was otherwise taking courses in Yale’s better-reputed humanities fields of philosophy of religion, theology, and history. Now perhaps my excursion into the documentary genre can bear some fruit, for I analyze here the documentary, Anne Frank Remembered (1995). The strength of this documentary I take to be its reliance on witnesses even at the expense of narration to tell the story. People could say with definiteness what had happened to Anne Frank since she and her sister and parents left Amsterdam. Their journey evinced the mentality of the Nazis as one not just as dehumanizing the Jews, but as treating them worse than livestock. Even when Nazi Germany was losing the war, the Nazis foreswore the use-value of the Jews starved or gassed.

The eye-witness account of the Franks’ train trip from Vesterborgh, a transfer camp in The Netherlands, to Auschwitz in southeast Poland. The trip for the 1,019 “passengers” began on September 3, 1944 and lasted three days. The Jews onboard were in cramped livestock cars that uncomfortably held forty to fifty people. The “passengers” had to sit mostly, though some had to stand even while “sleeping.” Urination and defecation make the trip worse still. The Jews felt completely powerless. “We felt the end would not be good,” the eye-witness said. Even so, “we refused to imagine the worst.”

The worst was Auschwitz. The Nazis there told the new arrivals that they would die there. “Our brains functioned differently,” the eye-witness from the train said. It was a matter of survival. Crucially, she added, “We were less than beasts—less than animals.” This is reflected not only at the camp, but in the train ride as well. At least animals would have been fed en route. At Auschwitz, the food consisted of a piece of bad bread.

On October 28, 1944, the two Frank sisters were sent to Bergen Belsen Camp in Germany. New buildings were under construction, so the Jews had to spend the upcoming winter cramped in unheated tents. On November 7, a fierce storm destroyed some of the tents. The Jews were being deliberately starved, frozen, and racked with disease even though the medications were not far away. In this sense too, the Jews were not only dehumanized, but also treated less well than beasts. After all, who would starve an animal that could otherwise be of some use? Both Margret and Anne succumbed to disease late that winter. The subsequent publication of Anne’s diary vindicated her potential “use-value” to German society as a notable writer, yet she was intentionally starved and not treated.

Without a doubt, being at a death camp triggered changes to the occupants’ minds so they could adapt to survive in a context in which survival was forbotten. So too, the minds of the men who decided to treat certain humans worse than animals must also have been warped. The variability of the human mind is perhaps here the real culprit. Specifically, that a mind could find meaning in a situation that was essentially a slaughter house, and another mind could think of other people as having worth less than that of livestock, tell us that this species, homo SAPIENS, cannot safely rely on its mind as a safeguard or reality-tester. Especially as time passes, the documentary may hopefully become more and more estranger in the sense of being not only foreign, but strange as well. The mentalities discussed from up close may be so far from those of the viewers that the inescapable inference will be that the mind itself cannot be trusted; it can treat as valid some of the most horrendous notions and related ways of treating other people. Even the way the brain seeks to preserve its sanity in an awful situation attests to the mind’s willingness to leave reality behind. In the documentary, even the Jews themselves who were in the Holocaust look back at how their minds changed and remarked at how strange (and dramatic) the change was. Watching the Israeli court’s coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 can give the viewer an eerie sense of the mentality on the other side, which, in being preoccupied with making the trains run efficiently, merely assumed that the living cargo was less than animals. It is the mind’s presumption to being right when it was so utterly wrong that was perhaps really on trial. 

The Big Short and Concussion: A System on Sterroids

Watched one after the other or, more realistically, a day or two apart, "The Big Short" and "Concussion" provide an excellent picture of American business and society. As much as the revelations in the films are shocking, I'm more shocked that the American people just take things as they are. "Oh, that's just the way things go in the world," they might say as if this serves as a defense. In other words, we will doubtless get "same old, same old," at the ballot box in November. The disjunction between people's reaction to the substance of the films and the way the people vote is nothing short of astonishing to me. How can people be so shocked at Wall Street and the NFL, and yet continue to vote for the same epigones? We continue to use the same big banks and watch football as if the films were somehow really fictional. I suppose we get what we deserve. 

The key to understanding both films is actually made transparent in another film of the same sort. If you see "Spotlight," pay attention to the chief editor's point that the system, including all the parts..meaning people doing their jobs...was at fault...not just Cardinal Law. Hence, in "The Big Short" and "Concussion," we can reasonably extend the culprits even to the business ethics scholars who said nothing at the societal level about the rating agencies and the conflicts of interests in the big banks, as well as about the NFL. When you have a system wherein everyone is just doing his or her job, and yet is an accomplice, assigning blame to a particular part becomes artificial. It is the system itself--of business, government, and society--that is deeply flawed and thus in need of fundamental change.