Aaron Swartz would have loved nostr.

Effectively the culmination of his life’s work.

1999: At the age of 12, he co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification, which is a format for syndicating web content.

2000: Swartz became a member of the Creative Commons organization, which aims to expand the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally.

2002: He founded the Infogami platform, which later merged with Reddit.

2005: Swartz joined Reddit as a co-founder after a merger with Infogami.

2006: He left Reddit and began working on various projects, including the development of the web application framework, "Open Library," which aimed to create a web page for every book ever published.

2008: Swartz was involved in the development of the "Demand Progress" organization, which focused on issues related to internet freedom and government transparency.

2010: He played a significant role in the campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), advocating for internet freedom. He also developed a tool that allowed users to download large amounts of data from PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), which was typically behind a paywall.

2011: Swartz was arrested for downloading a large number of academic journal articles from JSTOR with the intent to distribute them freely. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts pursued the case against Swartz, and he faced the possibility of severe penalties, including up to 35 years in prison.

2012: On January 11, Aaron Swartz tragically passed away at the age of 26. He allegedly took his own life due to the pressure of government prosecution.

In China, many social media users began using the meme "garbage time" (a sports terminology) to criticize the state of the economy.

As that meme grew here in 2024, China's central authorities began cracking down on it.

But many Chinese citizens are adept at moving around censorship. When desiring to criticize the current state of the Chinese economy, many of them will instead bring up historical examples of prior Chinese dynasties that made similar errors, and draw clear parallels to the present, while maintaining plausible deniability and difficulty of censorship.

Pretty interesting. My hat is off to the Chinese social media users working around top-down censorship with memes and historical analogies.

We have launched our new podcast, Mr Obnoxious, and our first episode is out - UAPs, Simulation Theory and Consciousness with Matthew Pines.