His actual crime was that he was a prominent and talented advocate against the government and surveillance industrial complex’s hostile takeover of the internet to be used entirely as method of propaganda and control.
Reddit was distinctly more libertarian (the Penn Jilet kind not the psycho kind) before he died. All the anti government stuff and the positive community vibes that were fostered on the site before all abruptly stopped when he died. It very visibly changed and I can remember the exact point it happened followed by the staff that were half-decent all quitting the company one by one.
Agreed. I don’t think it was his death per se, but it did feel like it represented a totemic shift at the time.
In the years of his harassment, grand jury, and eventually death you had Reddit becoming an independent subsidiary instead of being under Conde Nast, it being able to remake not just the site but their corporate structure, staff, and board of directors, the Digg migration that made it much more visible and mainstream, and some major early landmarks in it being used as a political tool like the AMA of Obama. Reddit still ostensibly opposed things like SOPA, but it was mostly due to concerns about being liable to the copyright whims of people like the MPAA.
This is a little more but I’ve always wondered if the infamous RedditFindsTheBostonBomber disaster was an early experiment to test not just the idea of Reddit as an OSINT/surveillance analysis tool, but also as a test of its potential for information warfare in reaction to live events.
Liberals in particular love to point to Ajit Pai being an early Trump appointment in 2017, the fact is that the state’s battle against net neutrality had been building for years, kicking into high gear around Aaron Swartz’s last year’s and the movement and general culture against it weakened considerably after his death.
Reddit was distinctly more libertarian (the Penn Jilet kind not the psycho kind) before he died. All the anti government stuff and the positive community vibes that were fostered on the site before all abruptly stopped when he died. It very visibly changed and I can remember the exact point it happened followed by the staff that were half-decent all quitting the company one by one.
Agreed. I don’t think it was his death per se, but it did feel like it represented a totemic shift at the time.
In the years of his harassment, grand jury, and eventually death you had Reddit becoming an independent subsidiary instead of being under Conde Nast, it being able to remake not just the site but their corporate structure, staff, and board of directors, the Digg migration that made it much more visible and mainstream, and some major early landmarks in it being used as a political tool like the AMA of Obama. Reddit still ostensibly opposed things like SOPA, but it was mostly due to concerns about being liable to the copyright whims of people like the MPAA.
This is a little more
but I’ve always wondered if the infamous RedditFindsTheBostonBomber disaster was an early experiment to test not just the idea of Reddit as an OSINT/surveillance analysis tool, but also as a test of its potential for information warfare in reaction to live events.
Liberals in particular love to point to Ajit Pai being an early Trump appointment in 2017, the fact is that the state’s battle against net neutrality had been building for years, kicking into high gear around Aaron Swartz’s last year’s and the movement and general culture against it weakened considerably after his death.