Aaron Swartz
The early years of the twenty-first century saw a generation of programmers and activists working at the intersection of open technology and political advocacy, pushing for wider access to information across the internet. Aaron Swartz, born on November 8, 1986, in Highland Park, Illinois, was among the figures who worked across that intersection as a programmer, hacktivist, political activist, writer, businessperson, and Wikimedian.
Swartz was educated at North Shore Country Day School and later attended Stanford University. His technical contributions came early and spanned several areas of web infrastructure. He helped develop the web feed format RSS, helped define the Markdown publishing format, and helped develop the website framework web.py. He was also a co-founder of Reddit and founded the online group Demand Progress. His work extended to Creative Commons, and he served as a research fellow at Harvard University's Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption. These roles placed him across a range of projects concerned with how information is created, shared, and governed online.
In 2011, Swartz was arrested after connecting a computer to the MIT network and downloading a large volume of articles from JSTOR. The arrest and subsequent legal proceedings drew considerable public attention to questions about digital access and prosecution practices. Swartz died on January 11, 2013, in Brooklyn, at the age of twenty-six.
Following his death, Swartz received a number of formal recognitions. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame and received both an EFF Award and the James Madison Award. These honors, granted in recognition of his work across programming, activism, and open-access advocacy, mark the concrete record of how his contributions were assessed by the organizations that presented them. The James Madison Award, in particular, is associated with efforts to promote public access to government information, an area consistent with his broader work as a political activist and writer.
Quotes by Aaron Swartz
On the one hand, I want to be very open about everything, On the other, I heavily defend people’s right to privacy.
Geeks seem a lot more willing to treat people based on what they can do rather than who they are.
The law about what is stealing is very clear. Stealing is taking something away from someone so they cannot use it. There’s no way that making a copy of something is stealing under that definition.
With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge – we’ll make it a thing of the past.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture.
Books are totally useless unless you take their advice. If you just keep reading them, thinking “that’s so insightful! that changes everything,” but never actually doing anything different, then pretty quickly the feeling will wear off and you’ll start searching for another book to fill the void.