The Moon Recommends: The Internet's Own Boy and Bitter Lake

Aaron Swartz "The Internet's Own Boy"

The Beeb has excelled twice recently firstly with the as ever brilliant Storyville series bringing Aaron Swartz - the Internet's Own Boy documentary to BBC Four and on iPlayer until 2 March and also appropriately it is available on Ubend.  His recent death was marked on the Moon as when he was still in his early teens he was one of the key players in the creation of what is commonly known as Really Simple Syndication or RSS, which is how the vast majority follow this blog and what powers Moonblogsfromsyb and Total Moon as well as what delivers email alerts from blogs/sites, Google Alerts etc etc...


It is also key to what led to the whole social media phenomenon but in his short life he was probably not that happy with the way it was developing into systems that want to tell people what it thinks you should like, or what some corporation or political party has paid to be pushed to you whilst also getting as much information about you as possible -  as opposed to a system that sent to you and brought together just the info you had requested. 

He did have great success as a political activist using his creative skills to help stop the ridiculous SOPA bill and for more info you can read this excellent article from the ever brilliant John Naughton from The Observer as featured on Moonblogsfromsyb

Also featured on Moonblogsfromsyb is the amazing BBC blog from Adam Curtis and, as you may know, his latest film has been released exclusively via iPlayer. and is available for the whole of 2015. As with his blog he has made excellent use of the BBC archive and it is a fascinating watch even if the narrative does jump around a bit. 

The best part is the portrayal of the latest British involvement in the Helmund province of Afghanistan which shows it was only marginally less disastrous than the first one and in a way that our mainstream media never had the guts to  - as they always said we were " making a difference". In the film a former officer confirms that the difference we were making was simply making things a lot worse. 

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