People I Look Up To
Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz was, like a lot of other people, my first introduction to the ideas of "open access" and internet freedom. he was an activist who wanted everyone to have access to knowledge without a paywall. he founded websites to keep eyes on politicians, helped create RSS, was a well known Wikipedian, campaigned against the Stop Online Piracy Act, and used the 26 years that he was alive to work towards a more progressive world. he killed himself as a direct result of U.S. Attorney Stephen P. Heymann's overzealous campaign that would've put Aaron in federal prison for up to 35 years and fined him $1,000,000 for the crime of sneaking into an unlocked MIT closet and downloading academic journal articles from their computer network. and in an era of internet where companies like OpenAI are given free reign to ALL of this information and more, without so much as a second thought, just makes Aaron's death even more despicable. he was everything good about the internet, and like many other activists, was killed by the state for wanting to make the world better.
"Well you can't get rid of hits, right. It's a fact that people would wanna do what their friends are doing, you can't avoid that. But what you can do is say: there's the whole rest of the world out there. There's a whole rest of what people care about other than what everybody else is doing. Everybody has their own particular interests everybody has something that fascinates them, and what the internet does is it allows them to do that. To get involved and find other people who share these things."
— Aaron Swartz, in an Interview for Steal this Film 2
Marion Stokes
Marion Stokes was a civil rights activist, librarian, and archivist who recorded and saved thousands of hours of TV news footage between 1977 and 2012 - the year of her death. she was a member of the the U.S. Communist Party, a chair on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and was involved in the civil rights movement (to the point that the FBI had spied on her). she was an activist who utilized archivism as a form of her activism. she saved an estimated 70,000 hours of VHS footage that she stored in rented apartments. to the point that she planned outings with her husband and children around the length of a VHS tape. any analog horror Youtuber or Lost Media fan who has ever used old TV news footage in their videos have Marion to thank. she was motivated in the pursuit of truth, by making the act of rewriting history far more difficult. beginning with the Iranian hostage crisis, and ending with the shooting of Sandy Hook Elementary. after her death, her son Michael Metelits donated her collection to the Internet Archive for preservation.