Unplugged - Voices: The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014)

- Part 1

Abstract

! "There is one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living, is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy" (my translation). Those words from Albert Camus’s 1942 The Myth of Sisyphus may resonate with the dramatic story of Aaron Swartz. Academics in management studies may be inclined to relate it to some organizational concerns but suicide necessarily goes beyond and remains a painful question mark. Also because management is just or mostly a matter of life. Some rare people are not able to come in the Truman Show. Their extreme lucidity prevents them from accepting the inescapable dose of lying that makes possible the organizational play. Common decency, in Orwell’s vocabulary, accompanies them in everyday practice but makes life unbearable as social interactions become hopeless. Loneliness of enterprising the self is exhausting. Aaron Swartz was one of those.