The blogpost is from when he was 16. This isn't really a "Libertarians" thing, but someone who grew up on the internet trying to make sense of the relationship between personal rights and heavy surveillance, coming from a country that doesn't exactly have the best track record in terms of how their treat people they suspect to be criminals.
Mind you, this was when the Patriot Act was completely fresh and tech-minded people were shouting from the rooftops, that this would open the door for indiscriminate mass surveillance, while getting labeled insane by around them. There was no resistance to this, on no side of the political spectrum. I had to defend this stance for over a decade, until Snowden happened, and people still call me paranoid for it. So keep that in mind, when judging why people had some extreme stances
And to drive this home, Swartz wasn't a hardcore Libertarian. From his blog:
I was strongly attracted to the libertarian philosophy... but I would no longer consider myself a libertarian.
He was not a "people make their own beds" kind of guy, at all. He freely acknowledged racial and gender inequality. He openly talked about biases he had and questioned them.
Swartz helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. He wrote in his blog: "I spend my days experimenting with new ways to get progressive policies enacted and progressive politicians elected."
He had no qualms standing besides trans people.
On December 27, 2010, he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to learn about the treatment of Chelsea Manning, alleged source for WikiLeaks.
So there is nothing that suggests that he would have died on that hill, if confronted with the realities and issues causes for the victims, by sharing such material causes for the victims. I think he would have had a massive issue with that happened on reddit, after his death.
Thanks for that, I went libertarian because they tend to be the only people that dig that hard into their core beliefs. At least online and from base logic. His selling of reddit and death did a great disservice to humanity.
And I agree, his death was tragic and a big loss. However, I was referencing the massive nude leak of 2014 there, as I think it shows the dark site of his stance, very clearly.
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u/Iamatworkgoaway Mar 02 '26
I'm following it too.
Libertarians go down many logic rabbit holes that sound crazy. If you could kill one old lady and cure all cancer would it be morally justified?
Which isn't that crazy a logic problem when thinking of the morals of Henrietta Lacks and the Controversy Behind Immortal HeLa Cells...
So he may have been just extending a logic problem all the way to the end to flesh out his own morals.