Review of The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014) by Daniel P — 01 Sep 2016

The Internet's Own Boy, Brian Knappenberger's documentary about the life of Aaron Swartz and what he brought to our technology based modern society, manages to be simultaneously hopeful and optimistic, and absolutely heartbreaking and infuriating.

This documentary starts out simple enough, focusing on the rise of Aaron Swartz as we follow the programming prodigy whose influences on the world wide web started at an unbelievable age: by age 14, for example, he had already become a member of the working group that founded RSS.

But as the film progresses, things get more and more complicated, not unlike the life of Swartz. The hopeful tale of the young man grows bleak as we follow his attempts to fight against government policies related to the Internet, such as his opposition towards the infamous SOPA act in 2011 and his mass downloading of federal documents from the PACER documents, and the aftermath that followed.

It's at this point that the message Knappenberger is trying to convey becomes more apparent, and he presents it in a hard-hitting manner, no matter how one-sided it may be. What Knappenberger, and ultimately Swartz himself, makes apparent about copyright law and creative commons proves just how broken the system, and the way the government has established said system, truly is, all while being rather informative about the subject for viewers without a huge understanding of it all.

It's all quite fascinating, and its relevance has never been stronger than in today's age.