Benjamin Mako Hill

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz
by Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Jan 2016

Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2015 Distributed by Perseus Distribution LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Swartz, Aaron, 1986-2013. The boy who could change the world : the writings of Aaron Swartz / Aaron Swartz ; with an introduction by Lawrence Lessig ; part introductions by Benjamin Mako Hill, Seth Schoen, David Auerbach, David Segal, Cory Doctorow, James Grimmelmann, and Astra Taylor ; postscript by Henry Farrell. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62097-076-8 (e-book) 1.Internet—Social aspects. 2.Internet—Political aspects. 3.Intellectual property. 4.Copyright. 5.Computers--Social aspects. 6.Computer architecture. 7.Swartz, Aaron, 1986-2013—Political and social views. 8.Political culture--United States. 9.Popular culture—United States.I.

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These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors. www.thenewpress.com Book design and composition by Bookbright Media This book was set in Aries and Gill Sans Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 CONTENTS Introduction by Lawrence Lessig Free Culture Introduction by Benjamin Mako Hill and Seth Schoen Counterpoint: Downloading Isn’t Stealing UTI Interview with Aaron Swartz Jefferson: Nature Wants to Be Free Guerilla Open Access Manifesto The Fruits of Mass Collaboration The Techniques of Mass Collaboration: A Third Way Out Wikimedia at the Crossroads Who Writes Wikipedia?

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In the speech that closes this section, Aaron describes being called back into the world of free culture to lead the fight against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a proposed U.S. law designed to restrict the Internet in ways that would cut back on the kind of information sharing that Aaron supported. He calls on his listeners to believe that their personal engagement in activism for information freedom is urgently needed and that they can become the “hero of their own story.” —Benjamin Mako Hill and Seth Schoen Counterpoint: Downloading Isn’t Stealing http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001112 January 8, 2004 Age 17 The New York Times Upfront asked me to contribute a short piece to a point/counterpoint they were having on downloading. (I would defend downloading, of course.) I thought I managed to write a pretty good piece, especially for its size and audience, in a couple days.

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change
by Bharat Anand
Published 17 Oct 2016

“If you view community” I am grateful to Anil Dash for an interview in December 2013. All quotes in this section from Dash are from this interview. Mako Hill noticed something interesting Benjamin Mako Hill, “Almost Wikipedia: What Eight Early Online Collaborative Encyclopedia Projects Reveal About the Mechanisms of Collective Action,” in Essays on Volunteer Mobilization in Peer Production (Ph.D. diss. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013). I am grateful to Benjamin Mako Hill for an interview in January 2014. All quotes in this section from Mako Hill are from this interview. The norms on Wikipedia I am grateful to Alan Wu for a very informative description of Wikipedia norms; interview conducted in April 2016.

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There’s a second, more basic, one: thinking that merely “opening up” to crowds will generate content. Wikipedia is perhaps the most studied crowdsourcing organization in the world. “There’ve been over 6,000 papers written about it,” noted software-developer-turned-social-scientist (and now University of Washington professor) Benjamin Mako Hill, whose own Ph.D. dissertation added to the list. Yet, when he embarked on his study of its success, Mako Hill noticed something interesting: Wikipedia wasn’t the first effort to create a volunteer-driven online collaborative encyclopedia. Seven similar efforts preceded its 2001 launch. None came remotely close to achieving Wikipedia’s success.

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I am extremely grateful to all those who were willing to be interviewed about, and to reflect on, their experiences: Kjell Aamot, Janet Balis, Binny Bansal, Paul Berry, Caitlyn Chen, Ben Colayco, Scott Cook, Larry Culp, Anil Dash, Markus Dohle, Pieter du Toit, Clark Gilbert, Espen Egil Hansen, Karim Lakhani, Anne Messitte, Benjamin Mako Hill, Phil Kent, Madeline McIntosh, Jon Miller, Craig Moffett, Ajit Mohan, Sverre Munck, Barry Nalebuff, Raju Narisetti, Martin Nisenholtz, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Torry Pedersen, David Perpich, Andrew Rashbass, Jan Rivkin, Rolv-Erik Ryssdal, Terje Seljeseth, Uday Shankar, Carl Shapiro, Paul Smurl, Robert Steen, Peter Stern, Chris Stibbs, Ole Jacob Sunde, Steve Tadelis, Denise Warren, Carl-Nicolai Wessmann, John Winsor, Ali Yurukoglu, and Dylan Zhang.

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child
by Morgan G. Ames
Published 19 Nov 2019

Not coincidentally, this era of Gibson’s law-flouting “console cowboys” and Levy’s youthful hacker pranks occurred during the childhoods or early adulthoods of many of those involved with One Laptop per Child, and some, such as Papert and Negroponte, write about being active participants in the early stages of this world. The imaginary of programming computers as a mode of masculine rebellion—whether against school, peers, or societal norms—was also common among OLPC’s developers. For instance, Benjamin “Mako” Hill, a longtime advisor to OLPC with a PhD from the MIT Media Lab, has described with great candor his educational journey through an attention deficit disorder diagnosis, Ritalin, and various public and private schools in an online essay titled “The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth: My Story of Unlearning.”

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These commitments to free and open-source software embodied many of the tenets of Papert’s constructionism, namely its interest in programmable computers as objects-to-think-with, objects that have “no ceiling” and can keep growing with learners throughout their lives. They also connected with many of the core values of hacker culture at MIT and beyond. With the XO, Papert’s ideas for a constructionism-based “children’s machine,” which he first articulated in the 1960s, were finally realized. Benjamin “Mako” Hill, who was then an advisor to OLPC and a board member at the Free Software Foundation during his graduate work at MIT, articulated the connections between constructionism and open-source software more explicitly: “Constructionist principles bear no small similarity to free software principles.

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IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 35, no. 1 (January–March 2013): 86–88. https://doi.org/10.1109/MAHC.2013.3. ———. Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Hill, Benjamin Mako. “The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth: My Story of Unlearning.” Benjamin Mako Hill (personal website), November 18, 2002. Last modified March 15, 2013. https://mako.cc/writing/unlearningstory/StoryOfUnlearing.html. ———. “Laptop Liberation.” Copyrighteous (blog), April 29, 2008. http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/laptop-liberation-2. ———. “OLPC and Charges of Technological and Cultural Imperialism.”

Collaborative Futures
by Mike Linksvayer , Michael Mandiberg and Mushon Zer-Aviv
Published 24 Aug 2010

Indeed, the goal of FLOSS Manuals embodies this freedom in a two-fold manner: it makes the resulting books free online, and focuses its efforts on free so ware. FLOSS Manuals has produced many fantastic manuals in 2-5 day Book Sprints. The quality of these books is exceptional, for example Free So ware Foundation Board Member Benjamin Mako Hill said of the 280 page Introduction to the Command Line manual (produced in a two day Book Sprint): “I have wri en basic introductions to the command line in three different technical books on GNU/Linux and read dozens of others. FLOSS Manual’s “Introduction to the Command Line” is at least as clear, complete, and accurate as any I’ve read or wri en.

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
by Andrew Lih
Published 5 Jul 2010

Michael Davis, Tim Shell, Terry Foote. Thanks to Wikimedia Foun- Ac know ledg ments_x dation board members Florence Devouard, Angela Beesley, and Michael Snow for discussions and insights. Smart folks who provided insight on the community and wikis included Re-becca MacKinnon, Ethan Zuckerman, Benjamin Mako Hill, Sunir Shah, Mitch Kapor, Jason Calacanis, Ross Mayfield, and Joseph Reagle. Conversations with non-Wikipedia-related people Lokman Tsui, Sasa Vucinic, Paul Denlinger, and Kaiser Kuo helped me crystallize my thoughts. While the subtitle of the book refers to Wikipedians affectionately as “nobodies,” those who gave special insight on the community were real somebodies: James Forrester, Austin Hair, Phoebe Ayers, Naoko Kizu, Revi Soekatno, Evan Prodromou, Mark Pellegrini, Kelly Martin, Kat Walsh, Greg Maxwell, Isaac Mao, Shizhao, Titan Deng, Mingli Yuan, Filip Maljkovic, Kurt Jansson, Arne Klempert, Mathias Schindler, Nina Gerlach, Samuel Klein, and Ray Saintonge.

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy
by Matthew Hindman
Published 24 Sep 2018

Loose collections of citizens would be able to function as media outlets, publishing civic information, political opinions, and even original reporting. Wikipedia and political blogs have both been invoked repeatedly as successful examples of distributed content creation. 170 • Chapter 8 Yet as work by Yochai Benkler, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill has noted, the question is not whether peer production is possible, but instead under what conditions is peer production likely to succeed?18 Again and again, real-world peer production of content has been unable to compete with traditional corporate models. Evolutionary audience models explain this failure by highlighting the intractable problem of stickiness.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

Special thanks to all who shared their insight and knowledge: Mayor Steve Adler, Yun Mi Antorini, Phil Aroneanu, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Douglas Atkin, Ben Balter, Zachary Barrows, Yochai Benkler, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Randy Bretz, Letitia Browne-James, Craig Calhoun, Harry Campbell, Jennifer Carlson, Alexandra Cavoulacos, Perry Chen, Joe Deshotel, Alex Fiechter, Aria Finger, Natalie Foster, Ligia Friedman, Chuck Gates, Mark Glaze, Reuven Gorsht, Nicola Greco, Tate Hausman, Scott Heiferman, Ahti Heinla, Naomi Hirabayashi, Philip K. Howard, Rick Ifland, Verity Jones, Ben Keesey, Jess Kutch, Joseph Kvedar, Sheila Lirio Marcelo, Nancy Lublin, Brian Lynch, Benjamin Mako Hill, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Michelle Michael, Geoff Mulligan, Nehkara Nikki Newhouse, Rainer Nõlvak, Alex Pentland, John Pinette, Shael Polakow-Suransky, Ai-jen Poo, Katie Radford, Thomas Reese, Jay Rogers, Robin Sather, Nathan Schneider, Michael Silberman, James Slezak, Lara Stein, Courtnie Swearingen, Madelon van Tilburg, Eric Topol, Chris Wanstrath, David Weinberger, Paul Wicks, Rob Wijnberg, David Willey.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 2 Jan 2009

Dana Boyd generously shared her rich and extraordinarily interesting learning about youth and creativity. In the end, I came to believe that that research should first be presented by her. Count me among those to acknowledge it as profoundly important to an understanding of this next generation. Benjamin Mako Hill and Erik Möller spent a great deal of time outlining a rich and sophisticated understanding of “free culture.” But that work complemented and corrected much of what I said in Free Culture, and it would have diverted the 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 296 8/12/08 1:56:18 AM A C K NO W L ED GMEN T S 297 story too much here.

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking
by E. Gabriella Coleman
Published 25 Nov 2012

And after helping to organize Debconf10 in New York City, I was able to fully experience the unmistakable pride that swells when a collective works to conjure something into being. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have participated and look forward to attending many more in future times. Though there are many developers who have taken the time to share their thoughts about Debian and other F/OSS projects, Benjamin “mako” Hill, in particular, has been a close friend and collaborator. I wish him well as he embarks on his own academic career and look forward to future collaborations. Martin Kraft, Clint Adams, Paul Wise, “vagrant,” Joey Hess, Erinn Clark, and Daniel Khan Gilmore have also been great friends as well as teachers over this journey.

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better
by Clive Thompson
Published 11 Sep 2013

surveyed about their writing: Amanda Lenhart, Sousan Arafeh, Aaron Smith, and Alexandra MacGill, Writing, Technology and Teens (Pew Internet & American Life Project, April 24, 2008), accessed March 24, 2013, www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/Writing-Technology-and-Teens/09-The-Way-Teens-See-Their-Writing.aspx?view=all. This was the epiphany of Seymour Papert: My description of Papert’s work and thinking draws from his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1993). download someone else’s Scratch game to reverse engineer it: Benjamin Mako Hill, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, and Kristina R. Olson, “Responses to Remixing on a Social Media Sharing Website,” presented at the Fourth International Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (2010), accessed March 24, 2013, www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM10/paper/view/1533/1836.

Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project
by Karl Fogel
Published 13 Oct 2005

Thanks to Greg Stein not only for friendship and well-timed encouragement, but for showing the Subversion project how important regular code review is in building a programming community. Thanks also to Brian Behlendorf, who tactfully drummed into our heads the importance of having discussions publicly; I hope that principle is reflected throughout this book. Thanks to Benjamin "Mako" Hill and Seth Schoen, for various conversations about free software and its politics; to Zack Urlocker and Louis Suarez-Potts for taking time out of their busy schedules to be interviewed; to Shane on the Slashcode list for allowing his post to be quoted; and to Haggen So for his enormously helpful comparison of canned hosting sites.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

I try not to use Google search: I use DuckDuckGo, which does not collect personal information about its users. See https://duckduckgo.com. I use various blockers: Jonathan Mayer (17 Feb 2012), “Safari trackers,” Web Policy, http://webpolicy.org/2012/02/17/safari-trackers. Google has about a third: Benjamin Mako Hill (11 May 2014), “Google has most of my email because it has all of yours,” Copyrighteous, http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-has-all-of-yours. police forces have installed surveillance cameras: Mun Wong (4 May 2011), “Top 5 cities with the largest surveillance camera networks,” VinTech Journal, http://www.vintechnology.com/journal/uncategorized/top-5-cities-with-the-largest-surveillance-camera-networks.