Nearly a year ago, Aaron Swartz committed suicide. He wasn’t someone I knew. He was a coder like me, but unlike me, when he was 14 years old, he helped author RSS, one of the foundational blocks of publishing (everything from blogs to newspapers to Twitter) on the web. He was instrumental in work at Creative Commons. He was one of the co-founders at Reddit. He had a hand in numerous technologies and ideas that I use on a daily basis.

He was more than a hacker. He was an organizer and an activist. He made huge quantities of private government information public. He was harassed to death by MIT and the U.S. Department of Justice after illegally downloading a ton of academic journal articles. I hope that even if you didn’t know who he was, you’ll take a moment to read some of what has been written about him and by him, because when he died we lost one of the really good guys. He had already made a difference in the world. He was only 26 years old. He would have done so much more.

When he died I spent a lot of time reading what other people were writing about him. I spent time absorbing the anger and the weeping. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, sent this email:

Aaron is dead.

Wanderers in this crazy world,
we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.

Hackers for right, we are one down,
we have lost one of our own.

Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders,
parents all,
we have lost a child.

Let us all weep.

timbl

Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons wrote:

Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

I could go on. There’s a lot of good stuff to read written about Aaron. I’ve provided a few links below. (And the video of him speaking, also below, is long, but well worth watching.) But I didn’t see anyone write what I was thinking at the time, which was this:

I know that there are activists and fighters the world over who are dying for what they believe in, but Aaron’s death shook me deeply because it feels so close to home. Aaron was the sort of hacker I wish I was, with seemingly limitless idealism, integrity, and brilliance. He did what he believed was right, uncompromisingly, and was remarkably successful at it. He trod a path that too few of us do and he died in the fight. He was just two years older than me. Reading his work, reading others’ stories and reflections about him,—it makes me wish I were a better person. I’ve been so angry recently about so many things that are wrong in the world—too many to enumerate—and I’ve felt so impotent in the face of it all. I wish I had Aaron’s courage, intelligence, and determination, but I’m not there right now. I want to do what I can to get there. I think that one of the best things that might still come out of this—one of the ways that Aaron’s legacy may continue—is other people realizing that they do too.

I’m going to spend some of this January reflecting on Aaron’s short life and what he might have accomplished had it been longer.

Further Reading

• Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing), RIP, Aaron Swartz
• Lawrence Lessig, Prosecutor as Bully
• Tim Berners-Lee, Aaron is dead.
• Taren SK (Aaron’s partner), Why Aaron Died
• Amy S. Choi (Feministing), Aaron Swartz on misogyny in technology
• Aaron Swartz’s Weblog