Digital age is not just about Steve Jobs, Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg. It is also
about three young personalities: Julian Assange, Aaron Swartz and Edward
Snowden. Here is an attempt to have a quick look at the environment that shaped
their personalities.
What are the commonalities between Edward Snowden, Aaron
Swartz, and Julian Assange?
Following similarities are known:
Whistle blowers, radical thinking from young age, anti-establishment, champions
of individual freedom and privacy rights, advocates of open sourcing, extremely
intelligent, cyber punks, led a small but committed team, and targeted by Law
and Police for cyber crimes.
I am not here to judge or comment
about their action or crime. That is the job of the investigators and the judiciary. My attempt
is to look at their family backgrounds, the ‘significant others’, their
schooling and the immediate social environment and understand the influence of
each of these factors on their attitudes, behavioural patterns and views of
life.
Though many readers are aware of
the actions of the above three persons that led to the criminal charges against
them, let me recapitulate the key charges against them.
 |
| AARON SWARTZ picture: guardian..co.uk |
Aaron Swartz was arrested by the Police in connection with the
illegal downloading of academic papers from the online database JSTOR. This is
an online database of research papers and articles written by the academic
community. The website charges a fee for accessing to the full versions of the
papers. Millions of students and researchers worldwide look at JSTOR in
connection with their assignments, projects, theses etc. Many affluent
universities and research institutes have registered at this site so that their
students have access to the online database. But many institutions and
individuals cannot afford to pay the charges to read the articles in the
database. Even I have experienced disappointment many times when JSTOR asked me
to pay up while trying to read the articles. Most of these studies reported in
JSTOR are in fact products of academicians
who received public funds or fellowships
for their research projects or huge research grants from institutional donrs. (Though this is not a justification for the action of Aaron Swartz,
one would rightly wish that these papers should have been ideally circulated
freely among the academic community by the academic institutions through their
websites). Aaron Swartz illegally downloaded large number of articles and given
free access to people.
Earlier, Aaron who had created interactive
educational websites at the age of 13, and who had done extensive research on
political corruption, had downloaded and released millions of federal court
documents that were not confidential for the benefit of the public.
Aaron Swartz chose to escape from
this world forever on January 11, 2013 at the age of 27. (It is an 'irony' that just two days before his suicide JSTOR announced that it is releasing close to 4.5 million articles to the public domain)
 |
| EDWARD SNOWDEN getty images/business insider |
Edward Snowden: In the month of June 2013, thirty year old Snowden leaked details of highly confidential mass surveillance programs of Governments of UK and US. He worked as a security guard in the National Security Agency and later in the CIA in the area of Information Technology. He left CIA and was associated with a few private companies. US has filed espionage charges against Snowden. While this article is being written, it is reported that Snowden has taken asylum in Hong Kong and then traveled to Russia and also requested for asylum in Ecuador.
 |
| JULIAN ASSANGE photo: independent.co.uk |
Julian Assange: (Extracted
from my article on the subject) While Bill
Gates and Steve Jobs were acclaimed for their creativity
in Information Technology, Assange became popular (or infamous) for finding
holes in the systems created by them. His team, comprised of either eccentric
persons or persons with anxiety disorders and mostly from dysfunctional
families, started their hacking adventures with the computer network through
which most of the countries ran their classified computer sites. They wandered
through the corridors of US Air Force in the Pentagon, tramped
through Motorola, padded through Xerox, and swam
down into the US Naval Undersea Warfare Engineering Station.
Wikileaks released over half million US
National text pager intercepts relating to September 11, 2001 attacks in New
York and Washington. It used anonymous sources of information and leaked
details related to Guantanamo Bay, US Military equipment in Iraq, Confidential Congressional Reports, Confidential Climate Change Agreements, Frauds
within Multi-National Corporations, Internet Censorships in countries etc.
Wikileaks released a database of hundreds of documents from as many as
160 ‘intelligence contractors’ in the ‘mass surveillance industry’. On February
27, 2012 wikileaks published what they called ‘Global
Intelligence Files’ which are about 500 million e-mails (of the
period from 2004 to 2011). It was claimed that these e-mails revealed confidential
communications of various companies, indicating the dubious role played by
the Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Company.
The charge levelled by Police and many
public organizations centred on following questions. How can a person who
claims to be the champion of freedom of information thwart the privacy of
individuals and institutions? How can a person who claims to be engaged in
ethical mission commit the crime of unauthorized snooping and stealing secret
information? How can a person disseminate information that seriously damages
the security, peace and reputation of states and global institutions?
A quick Sociological Analysis
A quick look at the background
and upbringing of these three persons who shook the world points towards the
need for a comprehensive sociological analysis of the factors that shaped their
personalities. With a very limited analysis of piecemeal data found in the
secondary sources and certain traces of primary sources that available in the
public domain, I have focused on only two areas of their background: One, the
family where they were brought up and two, their schooling.
Let me start with their perception
of their schooling.
Victims of a repressive schooling
Education manifests itself as a draconian
and inescapable prison for a large number of students who were forced to enroll
in abusive schools all over the world. All three of them hated the school
system. They found their schools uninteresting, torturing and preventing the
learning process.
Snowden dropped out while he was in high school. He later joined a
community college but he could not complete the course. Swartz dropped out of school in Grade IX. Assange had to stay in more than fifty towns in Australia and studied
in more than thirty schools, mostly in the suburbs. So he was always labelled
as a ‘new boy’ in every school. He found the school to be an agony of boredom
and a place of slow learning.
All the three had to face bitter
experiences while they were in school. For example, Assange was subjected to
corporal punishment by one of the school principals based on a false
accusation. That tormented him for many years.
Aaron Swartz wrote about his
views on schooling:
‘Education becomes the stupid thing in classrooms that you have to do to get a decent job, an entirely mercenary perspective that’s helplessly encouraged by the mercenary pressures of student loans’ . …..‘School is a world where genuine education is absolutely the last thing on anyone’s mind’. ….In Schools, ‘kids cheat, not just by copying on tests, but by taking copious steroids’ ( You can have a look at his weblog )
Wounded by the loneliness and marital discord between parents
Two of them had tormented
childhood due to the marital discord between their parents.
Snowden had to live for many years along with parents who were
unhappy with each other. Ultimately, his parents divorced when he was about 18
years and his father who worked as an officer in the Coastguard married again.
Assange’s mother experienced repeated marital breakdown and that
had affected him severely.
Though there is no information
that points towards any disharmony between his parents, Swartz had described in his writings that he had a lonely
childhood.
How much of their actions were triggered by their ‘personality’ that
shaped in the childhood environment?
There is no doubt that all three
of them perceived certain systemic maladies and wanted to act in response to
that. But are there any other reasons for their so called ‘deviant’ responses?
Did Swartz commit suicide solely due to the police investigation and
crime charges against him by the State?
Aaron Swartz, though a young and
strong intellectual who was greatly influenced by the writings of Chomsky, was
an occasionally depressed person.
Swartz who had suffered
ulcerative colitis had written about his bouts of depression. He had suicidal
tendencies. There are several references to this in his weblog written much
earlier to these investigations: ‘I got
sick; I thought of suicide’,
‘Everything gets coloured by the sadness’, ‘Your face falls; perhaps you cry’
He wrote about himself in his weblog:
‘..a misanthrope, prone to mood swings, eating binges,
who spends his days moping around the house in his pyjamas, too shy and sad to
step outside’
See another interesting note:
‘What is frightening, it would
seem, is that people aren’t the way we expected. They seemed to be brave and
kind-hearted, but when the moment was right they were capable of being crafty
and manipulative’
What about Snowden?
I could trace about him in the
web.archive.org. I found the following note written by him in his profile page
of a company he associated as an ‘Editor/Coffee-boy’. (I am not sure whether the
web page of the Ryuhana Press still exists as you read this now):
‘I really am a nice guy, though.
You see, I act arrogant and cruel because
I was not hugged enough as a child, and because the public education system turned its wretched, spiked back on me’
The above sentences clearly
showed how disgusted he was with the upbringing and also about the schooling he
underwent.
And what about Assange?
I have already written about him
in another blog post. I am reproducing a relevant extract from my article below:
Was he deviant
in his teenage years? May be, if we compare his lifestyles with others', of the
same age, of the same time. He started keeping his hair very long in spite of
injunctions not to. He was often been ridiculed or judged on account of his
hair. He defied the instructions of both teachers and his mother and the
stepfather. He refused to tie his shoelaces in the normal way and devised an
elaborate system of wrapping the laces round the ankle and tying a knot rather
than a bow, and began to teach the method to other kids. Later he dispensed
with shoes altogether.
Young
Assange keenly observed how his activist mother participated in the protests
against war, uranium mining, harmful fishing practices, logging in rainforests.
He thus gained firm education in the arts of political persuasion. But the life
of the mother and son were like fugitives, as the mother experienced the trauma
of repeated marital break down. All these childhood experiences have very
deeply influenced the personality of Assange.
Influence of the invisible father
Many
Sociologists (Nature-Nature debate)
are of the opinion that about 80% of one’s personality is influenced by
the ‘environment’ and just 20% is attributed to Heredity. In the case of Assange,
though the childhood experiences and the family background have greatly
influenced his personality, there is a clear genetic influence. That is what
Assange also believes. The book speaks about Assange’s discovery that he, in
fact, was following his father’s footsteps as far his literary interests were
concerned, without knowing him and his interests. He was amazed to find out on
his father’s book shelves, the same set of books he had purchased and read. He
says with pain: ‘I suddenly realised I had started from the bottom of myself,
on the first rung, and built myself up via many trials and tribulations, when,
all the time, if I had only known him, I might just have picked his books down
from the shelf.’ He regretted that if he had known him, he would have built
faster.
(Extracted from my article Julian Assange: A Criminal or a Champion ofOpen Society?)
Concluding note
What I have attempted here is to
provide a very brief and quick analysis of the social backgrounds of these
three personalities. A very detailed and comprehensive research based on
extensive data collection and analysis would definitely throw light on various
sociological dimensions. Janet P Near and Marcia P Miceli in their book 'Whistle-blowing: Myth and Reality' (1996) have written that the whistle-blowers are not unusual people. They are 'more likely, people who find themselves in unusual circumstances' .Researchers Alan Sroufe and team, after a detailed
study on children at Minnesota (The Development of the Person, The Guilford
Press, 2005) wrote: ‘..the explanation for why individual children and adults
are the way they are lies in the entire cumulative history and the current
circumstances surrounding the persons’. Sullivan in his book ‘The interpersonal
theory of psychiatry’ (1953) emphasized the crucial influence of nature of
schooling on children. Though subsequent to this, there is a proliferation of
studies on ‘personality determinants’, very few works do a post-mortem and
interlinking based on facts and events readily visible and still less number
scholars have the courage to do a critical analysis of a live case before them.
It is time, sociologists and social psychologists draw line to the past
focussing on the present at an appropriate angle and with a restricted
focus.
©
Sibichen K Mathew
(Views are personal. The focus is on the sociological determinants in the personality development and not intended to evaluate the personalities or actions. Author does not claim that facts on which certain assumptions are attempted are comprehensive or irrefutable)
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