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The Book That Changed My Life (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

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Two years ago this summer I read a book that changed the entire way I see the world. I had been researching various topics — law, politics, the media — and become more and more convinced that something was seriously wrong. Politicians, I was shocked to discover, weren’t actually doing what the people wanted. And the media, my research found, didn’t really care much about that, preferring to focus on such things as posters and polls. As I thought about this more, its implications struck me as larger and larger. But I still had no bigger picture to fit them in. The media was simply doing a bad job, leading people to be confused. We just had to pressure them to do better and democracy would be restored. Then, one night, I watched the film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (I think it had come up in my Netflix queue). First off, it’s simply an amazingly-good film. I’ve watched it several times now and each time I’m utterly entranced. It’s undoubtedly the best documentary I’

The Book That Changed My Life (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought) Raw Thought by Aaron Swartz The Book That Changed My Life Two years ago this summer I read a book that changed the entire way I see the world. I had been researching various topics — law, politics, the media — and become more and more convinced that something was seriously wrong. Politicians, I was shocked to discover, weren’t actually doing what the people wanted. And the media, my research found, didn’t really care much about that, preferring to focus on such things as posters and polls. As I thought about thi

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