UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara A Web of Extended Metaphors in the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto of Aaron Swartz A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Education by Kathleen Anne Swift Committee in charge: Professor Richard Duran, Chair Professor Diana Arya Professor William Robinson September 2017 The dissertation of Kathleen Anne Swift is approved. ................................................................................................................................ Diana Arya ................................................................................................................................ William Robinson ................................................................................................................................ Richard Duran, Committee Chair June 2017 A Web of Extended Metaphors in the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto of Aaron Swartz Copyright © 2017 by Kathleen Anne Swift iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my committee for their advice and patience as I worked on gathering and analyzing the copious amounts of research necessary to write this dissertation. Ongoing conversations about hacktivism, Anonymous, Swartz, Snowden, and the rise of the surveillance state have been interesting to say the least. I appreciate all the counsel and guidance I have received over the years. In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. purportedly from Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Ch. XLV, Lérida, 1658 iv VITA OF KATHLEEN ANNE SWIFT June 2017 EDUCATION B.A. in English Literature, Michigan State University, June 1989 M.A. in Rhetoric and Writing Studies, San Diego State University, June 2008 Ph.D. in Education, University of California, Santa Barbara, September 2017 PROFESSIONAL EMPLOYMENT • Graduate Teaching Assistant March 2011 to June 2011 University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies • Graduate Research Assistant January 2013 – March 2013 University of California, Santa Barbara McEnroe Reading Clinic • English Instructor September 2013 – May 2014 Brooks Institute • Graduate Teaching Assistant September 2014 – December 2014 University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies • Vice President of Graduate Student Affairs September 2015 – June 2016 UCSB Graduate Student Association PUBLICATIONS Chapter in an Anthology Swift, K. (2010). Eugenics, nazism, and the sinister science of the human betterment foundation. In Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick (Eds.), The responsibilities of rhetoric (pgs. 214 - 218). Long Grove, Illinois: Waveland Press. Editorialist and Blogger at • Op-Ed News • Counterpunch • Radiooccupy.net • Noozhawk • The Independent • The Bottom Line • Edhat v ABSTRACT A Web of Extended Metaphors in the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto of Aaron Swartz by Kathleen Anne Swift Hacktivists tend to be an anonymous group of individuals asynchronously distributed across widely different locales around the planet. They frequently use computers and other forms of information and communication technologies (ICT) to advance such digital rights causes as free culture and open access to the Internet, in addition to the open source software movement. Their arguments against the encroachments of intellectual property rights on the digital commons have pitted them against government and corporate institutions with vested security and remunerative interests in the World Wide Web. While a great many studies have been conducted on the sociological and historical implications of the hacktivist phenomenon, few if any have been conducted on the underlying stances and arguments of the hacktivist community and the corporations and governments they frequently oppose. For my research, I have analyzed linguistic framing and metaphor usage in combination with theories of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Frame Semantics, and Cognitive Linguistics as a means to examine the stances of three principal antagonists in the debate over freedom of information on the Internet: 1) hackers and hacktivists; 2) vi civil rights groups; and 3) governments and corporations. I have focused in particular on the hacktivist, Aaron Swartz, whose authorship of Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (2015, p. 26) coupled with his act of content liberation when he downloaded millions of academic articles, led to his indictment by the Department of Justice. My eclectic methodology serves to unpack the construction of meaning arising from texts produced by and about hacktivists with a focus on linguistic framing as a tool for analyzing the metaphors that inform stances. Relevant to my study has been the function of metaphorical concepts as ways to create complex frames that in turn capture the attitudes, values, and beliefs that accompany the stances associated with metanarratives and worldviews. Such a methodology has helped elucidate the conflicting epistemological attitude of hacktivists and authorities toward online freedom of information. The findings of my study reveal that the metaphors used to talk about the social epistemology of the Internet lie at the heart of the debate. Lakoff and Johnson’s expansion on Michael Reddy’s conduit metaphor has been meaningfully applied to an interpretation of the Internet itself in order to facilitate an understanding of the significance of the knowledge ecology in the Information Age. My findings show that Reddy’s conduit metaphor is directly implicated in the downfall of Aaron Swartz and provides a cautionary tale for those fighting to preserve public access to the electronic knowledge commons. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS I. The Debate Over Freedom of Information on the Net...…………………………... 1 A. Synopsis of Previous Research………………………………………. 5 B. Methods of Data Collection and Analysis …………………………. 6 C. Specific Research Questions………………………………………… 7 D. A Close Examination of Six Texts….………………………………. 8 II. Hacktivists and Hacker Ethics.………………………………………………….. 15 A. Hacktivist Tools and Practices…………………………………….. 17 B. Hackers and Phone Phreakers.…………………………………..... 21 C. Hacktivist Targets.…………………………………………………. 26 D. Hacktivist Venues…………………………………………………. 29 E. Hacktivist Transformations……………………………………….. 31 III. Government and Corporate Responses to Hacktivists ………………………… 42 A. Communication Power…………………………………………….. 45 B. The Digital Commons……………………………………………… 55 C. Networks of Outrage and Hope…………………………………… 57 D. Digitally Enabled Social Change……………………...…………… 63 E. Reaction by Big Corporations ……………………………………… 69 IV. A Framework for Analysis..…………………………………………………... 73 A. Cognitive Linguistics and Frame Semantics……………………….. 74 B. Critical Discourse Analysis………………………………………… 77 C. Linguistic Framing and Conceptual Metaphors……………………. 79 viii D. Paradigm Shift: Michael J. Reddy’s Conduit Metaphor…………… 88 E. Metaphors in Action……………………………………………….. 95 V. Social Epistemology in Cyberspace………...…………………………………. 104 A. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto…………………………………. 110 B. Swartz’s FBI Files………………………………………………… 123 C. The MIT Report…………………………………………………… 131 D. The DOJ’s Press Statement………………………………………… 142 E. Anonymous’ Memorial to Swartz…………………………………. 154 F. Aaron’s Law……………………………………………………… 164 VI. The Conduit Metaphor Writ Large…………………………………………… 179 References……………………………………………………………………….... 207 ix I. The Debate Over Freedom of Information on the Net My dissertation examines online social movements and in particular the hacktivist movement. Orthodox theories and explanations of social movements are not necessarily applicable to hacktivists which makes a simple definition of hacktivism misleading since these groups and individuals often lack the traditional hierarchical structure of spatially domiciled social advocacy organizations. Hackers, hacktivists, and the alternative computing crowd are distributed across the Internet in time and space rendering them non- linear in structure and protean by nature. A cursory examination of 4Chan, progenitor to Anonymous, is evidence enough of this (Stryker, 2011). Yet hacktivists do constitute themselves as a group with definable plans and objectives and this may be seen in their promotion of hacker ethics as outlined by Gabriella Coleman in Hacker Politics and Publics (2011, pp. 511 - 516). Such hacker ethics include: 1) freedom of information 2) prevention of censorship 3) and protection of personal privacy on the World Wide Web. The hacktivist fight for freedom of information in cyberspace is no mere philosophical conundrum. It is a struggle for open access and free culture on the Internet in order to preserve the fair use of copyrighted works in the public domain. For my research, I explore the role of conceptual metaphor in developing a theory of knowledge