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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31664 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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I think it was her too. Too many coincidences.

This talk of councidences reminds me of my second-most favorite niche conspiracy theory: “Ghislaine Maxwell killed Aaron Swartz.”

  1. Ms. Maxwell’s dad Robert made a huge part of his significant wealth by monetizing academic publishing. “Improbable as it might sound, few people in the last century have done more to shape the way science is conducted today than Maxwell.” Her Lichtensteinian trust fund is probably partly funded by remaining interests in those businesses even after they changed hands before Bob’s death.

  2. Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz famously committed suicide when facing criminal charges for trying to free academic publishing from the profit motive through piracy. “On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT.”

Trying to destroy someone’s family legacy and powerbase is a pretty classic motive for murder. Both /u/AaronSW and /u/MaxwellHill are pretty thoroughly archived, so it would be trivial to see what public interactions they had, if any… or any pattern of MH removing replies to AS. Unfortunately, I don’t have the programming experience to code something up to compare their post histories and where they intersected.

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