Aaron Swartz Concepts

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz

by Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig · 5 Jan 2016 · 377pp · 110,427 words

Aaron Swartz (1986–2013) was an American computer programmer, a writer, a political organizer, and an Internet hacktivist. He was involved in the development of RSS, Creative

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© the individual contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher. Excerpt from Aaron Swartz’s A Programmable Web: An Unfinished Work © 2013 Morgan & Claypool Publishers. Used with permission. Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be

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Distributed by Perseus Distribution LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Swartz, Aaron, 1986-2013. The boy who could change the world : the writings of Aaron Swartz / Aaron Swartz ; with an introduction by Lawrence Lessig ; part introductions by Benjamin Mako Hill, Seth Schoen, David Auerbach, David Segal, Cory Doctorow, James Grimmelmann, and Astra Taylor

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America 10987654321 CONTENTS Introduction by Lawrence Lessig Free Culture Introduction by Benjamin Mako Hill and Seth Schoen Counterpoint: Downloading Isn’t Stealing UTI Interview with Aaron Swartz Jefferson: Nature Wants to Be Free Guerilla Open Access Manifesto The Fruits of Mass Collaboration The Techniques of Mass Collaboration: A Third Way Out Wikimedia

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Carson: Mass Murderer? Is Undercover Over? Disguise Seen as Deceit by Timid Journalists Books and Culture Introduction by James Grimmelmann Recommended Books Guest Review by Aaron Swartz: Chris Hayes’ The Twilight of the Elites Freakonomics The Immorality of Freakonomics In Offense of Classical Music A Unified Theory of Magazines On Intellectual Dishonesty

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-five, or who we would have been at fifty. Learning looks like inconsistency. Changes seem unjustified, since they’re rarely even acknowledged. I’m sure Aaron Swartz in particular would have felt this as unfairness. When he was a student at Stanford, he attended a reception at the Stanford Law School, where

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differently, at every point in the adult period (from about fourteen on) of this twenty-six-year-old’s life. He was constantly working on Aaron Swartz: on who that was, and how he was constrained. He was constantly working on technology: on how to make it work, and how to make

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’s a puzzle to many. He was never on The Colbert Report or The Daily Show; NBC Nightly News never once covered the thoughts of Aaron Swartz. Yet his influence weaved itself through the lives of an incredible number of very different souls. He found us, and, wound us up, and set

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an endless amount that we must finish. For this writer, and thinker, and activist, and hacker, and dear friend, we will. —Lawrence Lessig FREE CULTURE Aaron Swartz’s life was shaped by an ethical belief that information should be shared freely and openly. Driven by this principle, Aaron worked extensively as a

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fee would rise by $4.88 per month” (p. 31); 4.88 × 12 ≈ 59, so I say $60/yr. UTI Interview with Aaron Swartz https://archive.org/download/AaronSwartz20040123UTIInterview/Aaron-Swartz-2004-01-23-UTI-interview.html January 23, 2004 Age 17 Hey. Who are you? Well, I’m trying to figure that out

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Wikipedia contributors weren’t very important, but those were precisely the people who could vote for me—in other words, I alienated my only constituency. “Aaron Swartz: Why is he getting so much attention?” wrote fellow candidate Kelly Martin. “The community has long known that edit count is a poor measure of

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to watch Transformers, well, then next time they might just win. Let’s not let that happen. COMPUTERS In 2000, at the age of thirteen, Aaron Swartz coauthored the RDF Site Summary (RSS), 1.0 specification, which became the first major standard for syndicating website and blog content through feeds. It was

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. —David Auerbach Excerpt: A Programmable Web http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdf/10.2200/S00481ED1V01Y201302WBE005 November 2009 Age 22 The following is an excerpt from Aaron Swartz’s A Programmable Web: An Unfinished Work published in 2013 by Morgan & Claypool. Excerpted by permission of Morgan & Claypool Publishers.—Ed. If you are like

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lack of political entrepreneurs, then all we need to do is make more. Now I just need to find some lunatics with money. Full disclosure: Aaron Swartz recently co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, making him something of a political entrepreneur himself. Before that he was one of those lame tech

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to be our leaders and what they have to go through to get there. Guest Review by Aaron Swartz: Chris Hayes’ The Twilight of the Elites http://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/18/guest-review-by-aaron-swartz-chris-hayes-the-twilight-of-the-elites/ June 18, 2012 Age 25 In his new book, The

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simply becoming yet another professor. But for those who genuinely care about their legacies, it doesn’t seem like there’s much choice. CONTRIBUTOR BIOS Aaron Swartz (1986–2013) was an American computer programmer, a writer, a political organizer, and an Internet hacktivist. He was involved in the development of RSS, Creative

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the freedom to experiment and innovate in the spirit of Studs’s own work. Studs and Ida Terkel Award Winners Aaron Swartz, The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz (awarded posthumously) Beth Zasloff and Joshua Steckel, Hold Fast to Dreams: A College Guidance Counselor, His Students, and the Vision

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet

by Justin Peters · 11 Feb 2013 · 397pp · 102,910 words

better title later. We did: The Idealist. Sometimes your first instincts are your best ones. The Idealist is not meant as a comprehensive biography of Aaron Swartz or a comprehensive history of Internet activism or American copyright law. Little at all about this book is comprehensive. Someone could easily make another book

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covered herein. Any errors and omissions are my responsibility alone. —Justin Peters Boston, Massachusetts, July 2015 INTRODUCTION: THE BAD THING On Friday, January 4, 2013, Aaron Swartz awoke in an excellent mood. He brought his girlfriend, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, up to the roof of their apartment building in Brooklyn, New York. Under

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was seeking, forever iterating his way toward the ideal outcome, the logical solution. The bad thing was bad, in part, because it resisted logical analysis. Aaron Swartz had no criminal record. His alleged crime was neither violent nor actively malicious. Swartz returned everything he had downloaded, and JSTOR, conscious of its public

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replied after he stopped fidgeting. Then he paused and tilted his head. “And . . . Larry invited me. Couldn’t turn it down.”28 * * * AT the time, Aaron Swartz was almost certainly America’s youngest public-domain enthusiast. A small and thoughtful fifteen-year-old from the wealthy Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois

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let the folks back east understand this.”56 The remarks were a recruiting pitch, soliciting soldiers to join the cause of free culture. How could Aaron Swartz decline? * * * DESPITE Swartz’s bravado, Lessig’s words, and their colleagues’ enthusiasm, “the folks back east” in Congress remained suspicious of file sharing, the Internet

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you know you are doing so by choice; it is easy to shirk tedious tasks when your well-being has never hinged on their completion. Aaron Swartz was nineteen years old when Reddit and Infogami merged, ferociously intelligent but inexperienced with life, thrust into an environment that demanded more maturity and commitment

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Giustiniani and the other White Friars arrived at the caves, they had reached the end of their journeys. Although he didn’t know it yet, Aaron Swartz’s journey was just beginning. * * * OPEN access is an anodyne term for a profoundly transformative idea. Advocates argue that academic research should be made

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information about politics, votes, lobbying records, and campaign finance reports under one unified interface.” Swartz’s personal website, the FBI observed, “includes a section titled ‘Aaron Swartz: a lifetime of dubious accomplishments.’ ” The FBI agents reported that Carl Malamud had “published an online manifesto about freeing PACER documents,” and that the exploits

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use of a robot, etc.). Does the university contact law enforcement? Would they be willing to do so in this instance?”32 * * * IN September 2010, Aaron Swartz purchased a new Acer laptop and visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, planning to download as many articles as possible from JSTOR. Logging on to

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for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.”50 Another post encouraged readers to sign an online petition confirming that they “stand with Aaron Swartz and his lifetime of work on ethics in government and academics.”51 Within hours, fifteen thousand people had signed the petition, and Demand Progress had

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considering the relatively meager coverage his ongoing case had received while he was alive. The mourning soon spread worldwide. On a memorial website titled Remember Aaron Swartz, which had been hastily put together by some of his friends, mourners from around the globe posted messages of remembrance and sympathy. “I met Aaron

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world linked by digital networks that have not entirely fulfilled their transformative promise, Stewart Brand’s paradox seems more relevant and more frustrating than ever. Aaron Swartz spent his life caught in this paradox, and while he didn’t quite succeed in disentangling it, he at least called attention to the fact

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chapter previously appeared, in slightly different format, in Justin Peters, “The Idealist,” Slate, February 7, 2013, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/02/aaron_swartz_he_wanted_to_save_the_world_why_couldn_t_he_save_himself.html. Reprinted with permission. 1 Interview with Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, January 2013. 2

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-month prison sentence; Swartz’s former attorney, Andrew Good, said that the government offered him a thirteen-month sentence. 4 Norton, “Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation.” 5 Aaron Swartz, “HOWTO: Lose weight,” Raw Thought, March 1, 2010, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/loseweight. 6 Danny O’Brien, “Teenager in a Million,” Sunday Times

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/magazine/201206/christine-lagorio/alexis-ohanian-reddit-how-i-did-it.html. 8 Norton, “Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation.” 9 Aaron Swartz, “Copyright Terrorism,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, May 22, 2002, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000277. 10 Aaron Swartz, “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” Archive.org, https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt. 11 US Attorney

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Anti-Suit Movement,” Raw Thought, March 16, 2010, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/antisuit. 23 Interview with Wes Felter, February 2013. 24 Aaron Swartz, “Eat and Code,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, August 2, 2005, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/eatandcode. 25 Interview with Ben Wikler, January 2013. 26 Stinebrickner-Kauffman, interview. 27 Ibid. 28

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-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila, “The Semantic Web.” Scientific American, May 17, 2001, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-semantic-web/. 45 Aaron Swartz, “I think there is a,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, January 14, 2002, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000111. 46 Felter, interview. 47 Wilcox-O’Hearn, “Part 1.” 48 Eldred

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Interview with Lisa Rein, January 2013. 50 Interview with Ben Adida, January 2013. 51 Rein, interview. 52 Aaron Swartz, “Emerging Technologies—Day 2,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, May 15, 2002, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000254. 53 Aaron Swartz, “May 13, 2002: Visiting Google,” Google Weblog, May 13, 2002, http://google.blogspace.com/archives/000252. 54

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Aaron Swartz, “Arrgh, pirates,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, February 04, 2002, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000158. 68 Aaron Swartz, “LimeWire has gotten really good,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, January 24, 2002, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000143. 69 Aaron Swartz, “Trip Notes,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, October 08, 2002, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000647. 70 Aaron Swartz, “Mr. Swartz Goes to Washington,” Aaron Swartz

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, January 15, 2003, http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2003&post=2003-01-15,7. 79 Lessig, Free Culture, 244–45. 80 Aaron Swartz, “Day of Mourning,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, January 15, 2003, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000806. 81 Swartz, “Mr. Swartz Goes to Washington.” 6. “CO-OPT OR DESTROY

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Subversion, December 23, 2001, http://web.archive.org/web/20020205111032/http:/swartzfam.com/aaron/school/. 2 Aaron Swartz, “Instant Message from LelandJr247,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, December 11, 2003, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001087. 3 Aaron Swartz, “Stanford: Day 1,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, September 21, 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20041009200559/http://www.aaronsw.com

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Weblog, November 15, 2004, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001480. 7 Wilcox-O’Hearn, “Part 1.” 8 Aaron Swartz, “Home Again,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, February 13, 2005, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001558. 9 Aaron Swartz, “News Update,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, February 17, 2003, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000838. 10 Paul Graham, “What I Did

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.com, March 2005, http://paulgraham.com/summerfounder.html. 12 Ibid. 13 Infogami, March 4, 2006, https://web.archive.org/web/20060323211212/http://infogami.com/. 14 Aaron Swartz, “infogami,” Infogami, circa October 25, 2005, https://web.archive.org/web/20051025013124/http://infogami.com/. Swartz had two co-applicants: the Danish programmer Simon Carstensen

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and the British programmer and historian Sean B. Palmer. 15 Aaron Swartz, “SFP: Come see us,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, April 16, 2005, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001679. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Interview with Simon Carstensen, February 2013. 19

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. 20 Interview with Steve Huffman, January 2013. 21 Aaron Swartz, “Stanford: The Cynic Returns,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, April 16, 2005, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001680. 22 Aaron Swartz, “I Love the University,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, July 26, 2006, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/visitingmit. 23 Aaron Swartz, “On Losing Weight,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, July 26, 2006, http://www

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.aaronsw.com/weblog/losingweight. 24 Aaron Swartz, “A Night at the Coop,” Raw Thought, October 24

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, 2006, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/coopnight. 25 Swartz, “Stanford: The Cynic Returns.” 26 Aaron Swartz, “A Non-Programmer’s Apology,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, May 27, 2006, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/nonapology. 27 Aaron Swartz, “Stanford: Mr. Unincredible,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, March 26, 2005, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001629. 28 Rob Kling and

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not a bug,” http://web.archive.org/web/20031229025933/http://bits.are.notabug.com/. 30 Aaron Swartz, “The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, February 3, 2002, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000155. 31 Aaron Swartz, “Stanford: Private Meeting,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, March 26, 2005, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001645. 32 “iTunes Music Store

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. Facelift for a corrupt industry,” Downhill Battle, http://www.downhillbattle.org/itunes/. 33 Aaron Swartz, “Of Washington and Worcester,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, July 3, 2005, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/downhillbattle. 34 Swartz, “Stanford: Day 3.” 35 Swartz, “Of Washington and Worcester.” 36

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, 2007, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dying. Swartz later edited the post to change the name of the “Aaron” character to “Alex.” 50 Aaron Swartz, comment on “Reddit cofounder Aaron Swartz discusses how he was fired from Reddit,” accessed on August 20, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_cofounder

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.org/read. 22 All italicized quotes in this section come from the “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt. 23 Aaron Swartz, “OCLC on the Run,” Raw Thought, November 15, 2008, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/oclcreply. 24 Ibid. 25 Bess Sadler, “the free flow of information

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, 2008, 2:57 p.m., https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00179.html. 56 Aaron Swartz, “today’s featured superhero: Carl Malamud,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, June 16, 2002, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000345. 57 Aaron Swartz, “Introducing web.resource.org,” Aaron Swartz: The Weblog, July 2, 2002, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000381. 58 Carl Malamud

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October 16, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDetZaIKmPI. 71 Stinebrickner-Kauffman, interview. 72 Wikler, interview. 73 JSTOR Documents, 1299. 74 Ibid., 3089. 75 Aaron Swartz FOIA Release, Secret Service Documents, 880–81 (hereafter referred to as Swartz FOIA). 76 Ibid., 594, 639, 883. 77 JSTOR Documents, 3093. 78 Swartz FOIA

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Bill to Combat Online Infringement,” press release, September 20, 2010, http://www.leahy.senate.gov/press/senators-introduce-bipartisan-bill-to-combat-online-infringement. 17 Aaron Swartz, interview by Ben Wikler, The Flaming Sword of Justice, podcast audio, January 22, 2011, http://www.flamingswordofjustice.com/episodes/2-2011-1968. 18 Moon, Ruffini

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, https://web.archive.org/web/20110722104427/http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/support_aaron. 52 “UPDATE: More Than 15,000 People Sign Petition in Support of Aaron Swartz,” Demand Progress Blog, July 19, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110723205147/http://blog.demandprogress.org/2011/07/update-more-than-15000-people-sign-petition

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/education/higher/articles/2011/07/20/activist_charged_with_hacking_mit_network_to_download_files/. 55 “More Than 35,000 Sign Petition in Support of Aaron Swartz,” Demand Progress Blog, July 20, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110723204917/http://blog.demandprogress.org/2011/07/more-than-35000-sign-petition-in-

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support-of-aaron-swartz/. 56 Abelson et al., MIT Report, 68. 57 Brewster Kahle, “Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg Passes,” Brewster Kahle’s Blog, September 7, 2011, http://brewster

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-act. 74 Swartz, Flaming Sword of Justice. 75 Interview with Holmes Wilson, January 2013. 76 Swartz, Flaming Sword of Justice. 77 Stinebrickner-Kauffman, interview. 78 Aaron Swartz, “How We Stopped SOPA” (keynote speech, F2C: Freedom to Connect, Washington, DC, May 21, 2012). 10. HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD 1 Swartz, “How

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, September 1, 2012, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dalio. 16 Interview with Jeffrey Mayersohn, January 2013. 17 Swartz, “Lean into the pain.” 18 Seth Finkelstein, “Aaron Swartz ‘JSTOR’ case indictment revised/expanded,” Infothought, September 14, 2012, http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001476.html. 19 US Department of Justice, United States Attorneys

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’ Manual 9–27.320(B) (1997), available online at http://www.justice.gov/usam/united-states-attorneys-manual. 20 Aaron Swartz, “Since power over human beings is shown . . . ,” Raw Meat, September 13, 2012, http://qblog.aaronsw.com/post/31460484751/since-power-over-human-beings-is-shown

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and the next one originally appeared in Slate. Used with permission. 38 Peters, interview. 39 Wikler, interview. 40 Jean-Claude Guédon, “An Unforgettable Mind,” Remember Aaron Swartz, January 18, 2013, https://github.com/rememberaaronsw/rememberaaronsw/blob/master/memories/_posts/2013-01-18-An-unforgettable-mind.md. 41 Brad Templeton, “What Is a

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. Used with permission. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Abelson, Harold, Peter A. Diamond, Andrew Grosso, and Douglas W. Pfeiffer. Report to the President: MIT and the Prosecution of Aaron Swartz. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013. Anderson, Chris. Free: The Future of a Radical Price. New York: Hyperion, 2009. Bellesiles, Michael A. 1877: America’s

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from, 159–61, 171, 248 Reed Elsevier, 175, 178–79, 180, 239 Reformation, 99 Rehnquist, William, 138 Rein, Lisa, 123, 130, 139, 141, 269 Remember Aaron Swartz, 261 Rensselaer, Stephen van, 35 resource.org, 187 Reville, Nicholas, 152 robotic harvesting, 198–99 Romuald (monk), 169 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 78, 82, 208 Roosevelt

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet

by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers and Josh Levy · 30 Apr 2013 · 452pp · 134,502 words

Michael Sriqui Eric Usher TABLE OF CONTENTS A Moment for Aaron Foreword by the Editors Hacking Politics: TLDR PART 1: The World Before SOPA/PIPA AARON SWARTZ For Me, It All Started with a Phone Call CORY DOCTOROW The History of the Copyright Wars JOSH LEVY Before SOPA There Was Net Neutrality

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Turning the Tide on SOPA DAVID SEGAL What Was Lamar Smith Thinking? PATRICK RUFFINI A Punch in the Gut TIFFINIY CHENG Waking the Sleeping Giant AARON SWARTZ Who’s Crazy Now? DAVID SEGAL Nearing the Point of No Return PATRICK RUFFINI The Markup ANDREW MCDIARMID AND DAVID SOHN Bring in the Nerds

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Leave the House That Day PATRICK RUFFINI Internet 1, Congress 0 ZOE LOFGREN Championing Technology and Free Speech in Congress Was Lonely … But Not Anymore AARON SWARTZ After the Blackout LARRY DOWNES Who Really Stopped SOPA—and Why EDWARD J. BLACK Legislative Fights Are Like Icebergs CASEY RAE-HUNTER Not in Our

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the Popular First Amendment CORY DOCTOROW Blanket Licenses: One Path Forward in Copyright Reform LAWRENCE LESSIG The Internet Can Help Strike at the Root Conclusion Aaron Swartz speaks at the New York City anti-SOPA rally on January 18th, 2012 A MOMENT FOR AARON: 1986-2013 This book was constructed over the

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course of the fall, and we intended to release it earlier this winter, but then tragedy struck: our friend and colleague Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11th, while under federal indictment for downloading too many academic articles housed by the online cataloguing service called JSTOR. The shockwave

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social media platforms that merely linked to targeted foreign sites could also be penalized. HACKING POLITICS: TLDR 1. “… This Isn’t a Bill About Copyright” Aaron Swartz (Internet freedom activist and founder of Demand Progress) For me, it all started with a phone call. It was way back in September 2010, when

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registrar or registry to no longer resolve that domain name—you’d land on an error message or be redirected to a government notice instead. Aaron Swartz I knew that if the Supreme Court had one blind spot around the First Amendment, more than anything else—more than slander or libel; more

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of sites that the U.S. government wasn’t very happy with. Internet Service Providers would then be encouraged to steer users clear of them. Aaron Swartz It’s so easy to accidentally copy something. So easy, in fact, that we found the leading Republican supporter of COICA, Orrin Hatch, had illegally

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taking down a URL, rather than focusing on the specific, illegal content constituted an unfair prior restraint, blocking the potential publication of perfectly legitimate content. Aaron Swartz If you wanted to censor the Internet, if you wanted to come up with a way the government could shut down access to particular websites

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that in the intervening time enough doubts could be raised that proponents could be persuaded to amend the bill. Not defeat it. But improve it. Aaron Swartz “Look,” they said. “This bill is going to pass. It’s going to pass unanimously. As much as we try, this is not a train

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of a number of progressive Netroots groups, one of which was called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and had been co-founded by whiz kid Aaron Swartz, renowned across the web for his Python coding skills and Internet evangelism. Aaron was based in Boston and spent much of the last couple months

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sort of thing. One day he told me he was quitting PCCC; and here I was, six weeks later, working with him at Demand Progress. Aaron Swartz Now I’ve actually done a few online petitions before. I’ve worked at some of the biggest groups in the world that do online

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up, and numerous times, tech industry sources warned that this could be passed, perhaps by voice vote, in the closing days of the 111th Congress. Aaron Swartz And at the same time we told the press about it—and about this incredible online petition. And we met with the staff of members

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made on Capitol Hill are a calculation of the people versus the money, but when the people do not show up, money will always win. Aaron Swartz It was amazing, it was huge, the power of the Internet rose up in force against this bill. And then it passed the committee unanimously

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broke Dodd’s filibuster and immunized the telecoms. This seemed like the same thing. If they really wanted SOPA and PIPA, they could break Wyden. Aaron Swartz Now, as you may know, a single senator cannot actually stop a bill by themself. But they can delay it. By objecting to a bill

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, as it was a virtual certainty that any social or mobile startup would have users who would post pirated content at some point in time. Aaron Swartz I was at an event and I got introduced to a U.S. senator—one of the strong proponents of the original COICA bill. And

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up some of my friends at Mozilla (you may have heard of their browser, Firefox) and said that we had to do something, and quick. Aaron Swartz When the bill came back and started moving again, it all started coming together. All the folks we had talked to suddenly began really getting

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. We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before. Aaron Swartz I remember at one point during this period, I helped organize a meeting of startups in New York, trying to encourage everyone to get involved

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was reasoned that members would be taking meetings there in between votes. We brainstormed creative ways for members to experience the crescendo of outrage firsthand. Aaron Swartz Big stories like this are just more interesting at human scale. The director J. D. Walsh said good stories should be like the poster for

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. Feinstein, once a reliable vote for the existing version of Protect IP, is now working hard to amend the bill, according to Senate Democratic aides.” Aaron Swartz If there was one day that this shift happened, I think it was the day of the hearings on SOPA in the House, the day

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!” These weren’t veteran activists, and nobody had yet invented whatever chants one’s supposed to recite at an Internet rally: this was something new. Aaron Swartz First the Republican senators pulled out. Then the White House issued a statement opposing the bill. Then the Democrats, left all alone, announced they were

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. All told, an estimated eight million Americans called their representatives and senators to voice their opposition to SOPA and PIPA. The phone meltdown had arrived. Aaron Swartz Wikipedia went black. Reddit went black. Craigslist went black. The phone lines on Capitol Hill flat-out melted. Members of Congress started rushing to issue

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Smith announced the indefinite delay of the SOPA markup and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) pulled PIPA from the agenda in the Senate. Aaron Swartz We killed the bill dead. So dead that when members of Congress propose something that even touches the Internet, they give a long speech beforehand

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tech companies even showed up. Second, the opposition to SOPA (and to a lesser extent, PIPA) was diverse, diffuse, and powered from the bottom-up. Aaron Swartz Hard to remember how close it all came to actually passing. Hard to remember how it could have been any other way. Patrick Ruffini First

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. That in itself was an amazing victory. And if we learn anything from the SOPA/PIPA fight, we should learn how to do that again. Aaron Swartz It wasn’t a dream, or a nightmare. It was all very real. And it will happen again. Sure, it will have a different name

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at its core not about a criminal issue but rather an economics and political debate that is better suited to be dealt with in Congress. Aaron Swartz There are a lot of powerful people who want to clamp down on the Internet. And, to be honest, there aren’t a whole lot

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, makes the point using fairly blunt language. http://www.meetup.com/ny-tech/photos/5468462/87002632/ FOR ME, IT ALL STARTED WITH A PHONE CALL AARON SWARTZ Aaron Swartz was a writer, a technologist, and an Internet freedom and social justice activist. The essay below is adapted from a talk Aaron gave in conjunction

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of a number of progressive Netroots groups, one of which was called the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and had been co-founded by whiz kid Aaron Swartz, renowned across the web for his Python coding skills and Internet evangelism. Aaron was based in Boston and spent much of the last couple months

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a core group of conservative bloggers co-signing our petition when it went live on November 16, 2010. Right before launch, I traded emails with Aaron Swartz, founder of Demand Progress and an early force in reddit, marking the beginning of the collaboration between the two groups: From

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: Aaron Swartz To: Patrick Ruffini Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:03:23 -0500 Subject: coica Hi, Patrick—I’ve noticed you’ve tweeted a couple times

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takeover of the Internet—and I was curious if you had any advice on how to get their attention. Thanks, Aaron From: Patrick Ruffini To: Aaron Swartz Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:17:57 -0500 Subject: Re: coica Working on this right now actually. What we’re hoping to do is

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to have good read on what types of campaign tactics are likely to generate action. Lunch with Aaron Swartz My involvement with Demand Progress began on December 20, 2011, when I met the young Internet activist Aaron Swartz for coffee in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle. I had never heard of Aaron or

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pages of their site or, on the suggestion from Harvey Anderson at Mozilla, blackout their logo. Our “Contact Congress” widget, built with the help of Aaron Swartz, gave sites, blogs, and individuals a way to further spread the word and at the same time protest SOPA. (This tool and associated site in

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, where active users congregate to discuss meta-concerns about the site. We crossed our fingers. Elizabeth Stark reached out to sites like Tumblr and 4chan. Aaron Swartz and David Segal spearheaded outreach to progressive “Netroots” groups like Avaaz, Credo, and MoveOn. Twitter was chirping about the following day’s protest. In the

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the latest legislative events. FFTF and its allies kicked into even higher gear, seeking to expand the number of participating websites. WHO’S CRAZY NOW? AARON SWARTZ There was probably a year or so of delay. And, in retrospect, we used the time to lay the groundwork for what came later. But

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/PIPA rise again for a proactive effort to pass those laws? Only time will tell. But I’m ready if you are. AFTER THE BLACKOUT AARON SWARTZ For millions of Americans, the SOPA/PIPA battle was one of the most interesting stories of the year. Indeed, the whole affair made Time Magazine

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. There was also something important happening on the back-end of those constituent contacts that’s a bit esoteric, but worth mentioning: Demand Progress (namely, Aaron Swartz) built a tool which we shared with Fight for the Future that generated actual emails to Congress each time somebody signed up on one of

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—and on hackers. The meaning and merits of hacking have been prominent in our minds in recent weeks, since the passing of Demand Progress’s Aaron Swartz. This tragedy has afforded us a rare chance to illuminate the contrast between white hat and black hat hackers. The former try to do right

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory

by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin · 1 Oct 2018

s mother had died of brain cancer, Huffman’s marriage was deteriorating, and in early 2013, their onetime friend and business partner, the hacker wunderkind Aaron Swartz, under indictment for wire fraud and computer fraud, had hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. It seemed like a hell of a story: Two nice

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, occasionally whispering to each other notes of approval. * * * That same evening, on the other edge of the continent, a pale eighteen-year-old named Aaron Swartz sat in front of a computer in his dorm room at Stanford University. Harvard was on his mind, too. Swartz was pondering crafting an essay

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walked there, fearing being a few minutes late. Graham shook their hands and gave them a tour of the space. The kid was Stanford freshman Aaron Swartz, who in certain Internet circles was a minor legend, having at age fourteen cowritten the RSS 1.0 standard, a new way of syndicating

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. They mulled different names for whatever Swartz’s creation would be. When the meeting ended, it was already clear that Graham had mentally accepted Aaron Swartz to Y Combinator. There was Chris Slowe and Zak Stone’s group of Harvard grad and undergrad students, whose concept of a desktop search program

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: yes. The Russians, whom Graham had started to think of as “The 3 Mikhails” (never mind that one of them was named Greg): yes. Aaron Swartz, the Internet phenom: yes. Promptly at 7 p.m., Graham started dialing numbers. Huffman and Ohanian were crashing that weekend with their friend Felipe Velásquez

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. Before the first dinner, a few of the founders had thoroughly Google searched one another. Huffman knew one he wanted to meet in particular: Aaron Swartz. Huffman had heard he was a hacker prodigy with a libertarian bent and a flair for the dramatic, which was readily on display on his

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billion). There was Trip Adler, the founder of Scribd, an online library and document-sharing platform with more than three hundred thousand titles. There was Aaron Swartz, who would become renowned for his prodigal work on open-Internet projects, and who would become an activist against government regulation of the web. And

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. But the apartment was bright and just a ten-minute walk from Harvard’s campus. Not all the Y Combinator guys were so lucky. Aaron Swartz had spent the past summer awkwardly cohabitating in a tiny MIT dorm room with a foreign stranger he’d met on the Internet, whom he

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Reddit wouldn’t sell, it would have to grow. That meant bringing on at least one other full-time developer. Graham pitched Huffman on taking Aaron Swartz. Huffman admired young Swartz, and despite Infogami’s stagnation, Swartz was already a legend among certain programmers, an Internet wunderkind whose online clout could only

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* * * Back home, a host of factors had led Ohanian to make the potential acquisition his priority. Most of the factors stemmed from one human being: Aaron Swartz. Swartz and Huffman had grown very close over that winter while rewriting the site, building out its infrastructure, and managing its growth with new servers

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great company to work at.” He didn’t fly back east after winter break and dropped out of MIT. * * * No one was certain what Aaron Swartz would do after the acquisition; he’d long displayed skepticism of large, capitalist enterprises—though he liked Wired—and no enthusiasm for continuing with Reddit

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walking through the UC Berkeley campus. Graham paced the campus, calling various people in Swartz’s life, for the next hour. With every call to Aaron Swartz that went to voicemail, the possibility grew: This was a suicide note. They called the Cambridge police. * * * In Boston, Swartz cowered against a concrete

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s not how the adult world works. Meanwhile, I’m realizing that I’m a grown-up. We were grown-ups explaining the world to Aaron.” Swartz’s life up to this point had not prepared him for this. He’d grown up affluent in Highland Park, Illinois, enabled in his

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to taking a logical action: shutting down the obvious places within Reddit where child pornography was being found. Blackout After he was dismissed from Reddit, Aaron Swartz had moved back to Boston and begun dabbling in politics. He’d helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a political action group. He’d

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.” After stepping away from the microphones, Ohanian passed by a man with wire-rimmed glasses, slouched shoulders, and a mop of wavy dark hair: Aaron Swartz. He wore a black wool bomber jacket. They nodded to each other but didn’t catch up or reminisce. This was the last time Alexis

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Ohanian saw Aaron Swartz. Meet Your New CEO To Condé Nast Digital, Reddit was a wondrous traffic beast: It had been more than doubling in page views every

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to live silent lives of self-abnegation and study, in hopes of somehow improving what they saw as a depraved, mismanaged society. By 2008, when Aaron Swartz found himself here, the hermitage had long been abandoned. But its caves and surrounding brick structures had been restored. The monastery known now as Eremo

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make it a thing of the past. Will you join us? It was titled the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, and signed, “Aaron Swartz. July 2008, Eremo, Italy.” Swartz posted it online. * * * Aaron Swartz had already begun a transformation by the time he left Reddit in the early winter of 2007. He’d publicly disavowed

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sheer intellect. During the course of the investigation into his downloading actions, on his blog, the world’s long-standing window into the mind of Aaron Swartz, he went silent. Harvard suspended his fellowship and banned him from campus. He stepped down from his position at Demand Progress, and ended a romantic

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Swartz and some of his free-information activist cohorts, the question was not “Did Swartz commit a crime?” but rather “Why was it necessary for Aaron Swartz to be labeled a felon?” Swartz read and posted a review of Kafka’s The Trial. The whole thing, for a time, seemed like

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feeling better. Walking in, Stinebrickner-Kauffman saw Swartz hanging from a window, a belt cinched around his neck. His body was cold. * * * The suicide of Aaron Swartz became a global news story within a day. Websites popped up to eulogize the brilliant young programmer who’d always been willing to stand up

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Few mentioned his ongoing struggles with depression and illness. Instead they pondered: Was the government overzealous in pursuing him? At his funeral the following Tuesday, Aaron Swartz’s father was unambiguous. In a steely voice, Robert Swartz told the mourners at the packed sanctuary of Highland Park’s Central Avenue Synagogue, “Aaron

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To those who wish they could do more to foster equality of education, of access to information, he became a hero. Mention of the name Aaron Swartz became a rallying cry against government overreach in prosecution, against Internet regulations, against the surveillance state, and in favor of reforming computer-crime laws. Many

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posthumous awards and a few poignant acts of cultural dissent followed. When Anonymous hacked the State Department website on February 17, 2013, they declared, “Aaron Swartz this is for you.” Anonymous also hacked MIT’s website, and part of the U.S. judicial system’s web presences, all in Swartz’s

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and perhaps was a sneaky reference to the never-realized better world we’d all, decades ago, imagined computers might bring. The words read “RIP AARON SWARTZ.” Part IV Omniscient Guardians of the Depths Every weekday morning, Michael Brutsch said goodbye to his wife at their home in suburban Dallas and made

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More than a decade later, though, a portion of the young hackers’ theory had been back on Huffman’s mind. He recalled that his and Aaron Swartz’s idea that their genre of Internet company was comprised of “lists”—lists of ideas, articles, songs, images, podcasts, anything—had incepted Huffman with

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Huffman and Ohanian (third and fourth from left), Chris Slowe (fifth from left), Justin Kan (front seated), Aaron Swartz (immediately behind him), and Sam Altman (arms crossed). Courtesy of Kate Courteau. After Y Combinator ended, Aaron Swartz’s company, Infogami, merged with Reddit. Swartz moved into the apartment Huffman, Ohanian, and Slowe, the

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In this never-before-published image from January 17, 2012, Ohanian speaks at a rally in New York City, wearing his father’s red tie. Aaron Swartz, who was pursuing his own activism, watches from a few feet away. This was the last time the two men saw each other. Photograph by

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a Startup an eighty-page thesis: “Our Y Combinator Summer 05 Application,” posted by Alexis Ohanian on November 29, 2010, AlexisOhanian.com. Swartz was pondering: Aaron Swartz, “The Case Against Lawrence Summers,” aaronsw.com, March 9, 2005. “If you want to do it”: Paul Graham, “How to Start a Startup,” essay

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Stories of Startups’ Early Days (New York: Apress, 2007), 448. “You better quit your job”: Ibid. “You know, Sam”: Ibid., 449. When the meeting ended: Aaron Swartz, “SFP: Come see us,” aaronsw.com, April 16, 2005. Modern frat-life touches: Sarah Maslin Nir, “Are Finals Clubs Too Exclusive for Harvard?,” New York

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/reddit-founder-alexis-ohanian-real-biz-rebecca-jarvis-40771917. How to Act Like a Real Adult had thrown up his hands: Justin Peters, The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet (New York: Scribner, 2016), 148. “fake world of school”: Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks with Geeks.

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“I found myself stuck”: Aaron Swartz, “Introducing Infogami,” Infogami.com, accessed through Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20070308114441/http://infogami.com/blog/introduction. Rounding Error “Together, we felt unstoppable

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”: Swartz, “Introducing Infogami.” The Algorithm and the Cupboard “just a list of links”: Aaron Swartz, “The Aftermath,” Raw Thought (blog), November 1, 2006. when Arrington phoned Delicious’s founder: Michael Arrington, “Yahoo.icio.us?—Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us,”

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TechCrunch, December 9, 2005. You Are Making Us Sound Stupid “We all started getting touchy”: Aaron Swartz, “How to Get a Job Like Mine,” speech, as prepared, for the Tathva 2007 computer conference at NIT Calicut. He wrote a program

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: Aaron Swartz, “Some Announcements,” Raw Thought (blog), January 5, 2006. He built and released: Aaron Swartz, “Wassup?,” Raw Thought, March 27, 2006. “You’d think, this is a kid”: The Internet’s Own Boy:

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“The situation was so toxic”: Peters, The Idealist, 157. We Are the Nerds “Suits…are the physical evidence”: Aaron Swartz, “The Anti-Suit Movement,” Raw Thought, March 16, 2010. The Deal “The other year”: Aaron Swartz, “A Night at the Coop,” Raw Thought, October 24, 2006. PART II Chasing That Moment Swartz whiled away

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Reddit,” http://web.archive.org/web/20070723115645/http://talkcrunch.com/wp-content/TalkCrunch-EP017-WiredAcquiresReddit.mp3. Millionaires’ Ball “I looked them straight in the eye”: Aaron Swartz, “The Afterparty,” Raw Thought, November 2, 2006. The opening price: “Web Startup for Sale on Ebay,” Bloomberg News, August 24, 2006. a final price

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, November 15, 2006. A Moment Before Dying “Heh. I bet the first time”: “A Chat with Aaron Swartz,” transcript of interview by Philipp Lenssen, Blogoscoped.com, May 7, 2007. “I know exactly what to do”: Aaron Swartz, “Last Day of Summer Camp,” Raw Thought, January 22, 2007, accessed through Internet Archive, https://web

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Camp.” The Physicist, the Information Cowboy, the Hacker, and the Troll “So I have my own justification”: Aaron Swartz, “Free Speech: Because We Can,” Raw Thought, November 23, 2006. “I fight laws that restrict”: Aaron Swartz, “Bits are not a bug,” NotaBug.com, accessed through Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20060105054203/

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The bill would have authorized: S. 3804—111th Congress: Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, www.GovTrack.us, 2010. “This bill would allow the government”: “Aaron Swartz: How We Stopped SOPA,” YouTube, August 17, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl0vHBsapBc. “a battle to define everything”: Ibid. “bunker-buster bomb”:

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conducting: John Schwartz, “An Effort to Upgrade a Court Archive System to Free and Easy,” New York Times, February 12, 2009. The file was closed: Aaron Swartz FBI File #1, 2009, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fbifile. He had set up a website: “Content Liberation Front,” contentliberation.com, accessed through Internet Archive

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, https://web.archive.org/web/20090102192453/http://contentliberation.com:80/. At dinner, the activists bemoaned: Scheiber, “The Inside Story of Why Aaron Swartz Broke Into MIT and JSTOR.” The conference ended on September 22: Peters, The Idealist, 201. It violated JSTOR’s terms of service: “JSTOR Evidence in

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United States vs. Aaron Swartz”; see document cache at https://docs.jstor.org/. downloaded some two million JSTOR articles: Connor Kirschbaum, “Swartz indicted for JSTOR theft,” The Tech (MIT), August

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MIT police captain Albert Pierce: Harold Abelson, Peter A. Diamond, Andrew Grosso, and Douglas W. Pfeiffer, “Report to the President: MIT and the Prosecution of Aaron Swartz,” Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 26, 2013. He and another local officer: Cambridge police report. had with him a thumb drive: Kirschbaum, “Swartz indicted

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Times, July 19, 2011. “makes no sense”: Ibid. The Secret Service searched: FBI File, Aaron Swartz, p. 12, https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/aaron-swartz-first-release.pdf. Investigators searched for a motive: David Kravets, “Feds Used Aaron Swartz’s Political Manifesto Against Him,” Wired, February 22, 2013. It was a direct call to

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action: Swartz, “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.” “Most people, it seems”: Aaron Swartz, “Stanford: Mr. Unincredible,” aaronsw.com, March 26, 2005. “the bad thing”: Eulogy to Aaron Swartz, delivered by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, January 24, 2013. “Am I always going to feel like this?”: Peters, The

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by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. a massive memorial service: Susan Berger, “Family, Web Celebs Mourn Internet Activist,” Chicago Tribune, January 16, 2013. “Aaron Swartz this is for you”: Larissa MacFarquhar, “Requiem for a Dream,” New Yorker, March 11, 2013. Anonymous also hacked: “Hackers take over gov’t website

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot

by Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein · 6 Sep 2021

good for human beings and for society? Back in 2004, just as Silicon Valley was reemerging from the “dot-com bust,” a young man named Aaron Swartz enrolled at Stanford University. Like Browder, he had been fascinated by computer programming from an early age. He’d won a national prize at the

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and Steve Jobs and would be told again about Mark Zuckerberg and Elizabeth Holmes; the same story that Joshua Browder is currently living out. But Aaron Swartz was different. He was less interested in making money than in using technology to change how human beings access and interact with information. “Information is

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tech circles. In the month following his death, the hackers known as Anonymous infiltrated the websites of MIT and the US State Department and declared, “Aaron Swartz this is for you.” Lawrence Lessig eulogized Swartz as someone he had mentored but who, in the end, had really mentored him. Memorials sprang up

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a person struggling with depression and wonder what might have brought him to contemplate suicide and then to take his own life. For us, however, Aaron Swartz’s death is a hinge event in the evolution of the politics and ethics of technology. His life, and what became of the world of

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roots in the creation of the internet and the culture of Silicon Valley. Today, fewer than ten years after his death, virtually nobody talks about Aaron Swartz. He is mostly forgotten in Silicon Valley, and he is unknown to the wider public. At Stanford University, we rarely meet students who know Swartz

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role in Brexit, the election of Trump, and the siege of the US Capitol. * * * The rise of the Joshua Browders and the decline of the Aaron Swartzes encapsulate the challenge the world confronts with Silicon Valley. One of the most far-reaching transformations of our age is the wave of digital technologies

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accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” Barlow’s words were celebrated by the hackers of his time, including the young Aaron Swartz, not yet a teenager. Few people would have anticipated the sheer concentration of power in the hands of a tiny number of private technology companies

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the capital to help take the initial product to the next level and (with even more funding) to the one after that. Nineteen-year-old Aaron Swartz was a member of YC’s first entrepreneur batch in 2005. He dropped out of Stanford to continue pursuing Infogami, the company he had formed

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consortium, creating new pathways for young people to work on addressing social problems with technology. It’s the kind of development that kindred spirits of Aaron Swartz should be thrilled to see. If we look beyond the United States and Europe to other industrialized democracies, we can find powerful sources of inspiration

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work in nonprofit organizations and the public sector—the ambition is big. It’s a world in which the civic-mindedness of technologists such as Aaron Swartz is no longer considered exceptional. In transforming how we teach technologists, we must also pay attention to whom we are teaching. Since new technologies encode

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/2019/06/28/councils-make-record-1-billion-parking-charges/. “I would like to”: Joshua Browder, interview by Antigone Xenopoulos, 2018. “turns out to consist”: Aaron Swartz, “Stanford: Day 11,” Raw Thought (blog), October 2, 2004, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001428. Swartz became a young millionaire: Kathleen Elkins, “The First Thing

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.com/2019/02/11/reddit-raises-300-million-at-3-billion-valuation.html. “Information is power”: Aaron Swartz, “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” Archive.org, July 2008, https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/mode/2up. “At most ‘technology’ conferences”: Aaron Swartz, “Wikimedia at the Crossroads,” Raw Thought (blog), August 31, 2006, http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog

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/wikiroads. “Aaron Swartz this is for you”: Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Darker Side of Aaron Swartz,” New Yorker, March 11, 2013, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

by Clive Thompson · 26 Mar 2019 · 499pp · 144,278 words

us were understating what was going on.” When we spoke, she was working as the lead coder developing SecureDrop. I ran into Helsby at the Aaron Swartz hackathon in San Francisco. It’s held every fall as a weekend where crypto hackers gather to work on software that, they hope, empowers the

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million and decades in jail, he committed suicide. “Aaron was persecuted for reading too quickly in a library,” says Brewster Kahle, a cofounder of the Aaron Swartz hackathon along with Lisa Rein, herself a cofounder of Creative Commons. After his MIT hacking days in the ’80s, Kahle made millions with start-ups

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encrypting it. (The show has, they note, surprisingly realistic hacking; plot points have included Raspberry Pi computers and Android rootkits.) Indeed, the room here at Aaron Swartz day is dressed as if they were extras on Mr. Robot, with plenty of dyed hair, leather jackets, multiple piercings, and laptop lids buried beneath

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), accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/688697. super-open form of copyright: Tim Carmody, “Memory to Myth: Tracing Aaron Swartz through the 21st Century,” The Verge, January 22, 2013, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/22/3898584

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-myth. he committed suicide: Justin Peters, “The Idealist,” Slate, February 7, 2013, accessed August 19, 2018, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/02/aaron_swartz_he_wanted_to_save_the_world_why_couldn_t_he_save_himself.single.html. “or sectarian infighting”: Coleman, “From Internet Farming.” buy drugs and guns

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”: Thompson, “The Minecraft Generation.” “made the game for ourselves”: Thompson, “The Minecraft Generation.” “in front of a bull’s face”: Smiley, “Can You Teach.” Index Aaron Swartz hackathon, ref1 Abbate, Janet, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Abene, Mark, ref1 Abma, Jobert, ref1 Adams, John, ref1 Addiction by Design (Schüll), ref1 addictive behavior, as

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cybercrime big-name cybercriminals and state-sponsored actors, ref1 bored teenager crime, ref1 cypherpunk view on, ref1 malware attacks, ref1 penetration testers and, ref1 cypherpunks Aaron Swartz hackathon and, ref1 Brown, profile of, ref1 code as speech viewpoint of, ref1, ref2, ref3 criminal/terrorist use of crypto, views on, ref1 defined, ref1

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari · 1 Mar 2015 · 479pp · 144,453 words

circulate freely over the right of humans to own data and to restrict its movement. On 11 January 2013, Dataism got its first martyr when Aaron Swartz, a twenty-six-year-old American hacker, committed suicide in his apartment. Swartz was a rare genius. At fourteen, he helped develop the crucial RSS

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. William H. McNeill and J. R. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). 6. Aaron Swartz, ‘Guerilla Open Access Manifesto’, July 2008, accessed 22 December 2014, https://ia700808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf; Sam Gustin

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, ‘Aaron Swartz, Tech Prodigy and Internet Activist, Is Dead at 26’, Time, 13 January 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://business.time.com/2013/01/13/tech-

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prodigy-and-internet-activist-aaron-swartz-commits-suicide; Todd Leopold, ‘How Aaron Swartz Helped Build the Internet’, CNN, 15 January 2013, 22 December 2014, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/15/tech/web

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/aaron-swartz-internet/; Declan McCullagh, ‘Swartz Didn’t Face Prison until Feds Took Over Case, Report Says’, CNET, 25 January 2013, accessed 22 December 2014, http://news.

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous

by Gabriella Coleman · 4 Nov 2014 · 457pp · 126,996 words

. A recurring topic was the morality of the law, unsurprising given his personal experiences with the justice system. One day we discussed another young hacker, Aaron Swartz, who got ensnared by the American legal system. e. Aaron, at the age of twenty-five, was facing decades in prison—thirty-five years—and

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tax dollars, was wholly undeserving of a thirty-five-year sentence and a felony charge—not to mention an expensive trial paid for by taxpayers. Aaron Swartz, forlorn and overwhelmed by the prosecution, ended his life on January 6, 2013. One day, while chatting to Al Bassam about the case, I mentioned

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naive about the reality of exercising power, to the extent that he destroyed himself’ is a statement that should be applied to the prosecution, not Aaron Swartz .” tflow had experienced firsthand the force of the law knocking at his door, and did so after months of engagement in direct action for causes

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carried out against the websites of MIT, the US Department of Justice, and the US Sentencing Commission following the suicide of Internet pioneer and activist Aaron Swartz. His family and many admirers felt that his suicide at age twenty-six was a political act borne out of a sense of desperation fueled

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In the video accompanying their hacks and website defacements, Anonymous echoed this assessment: “Two weeks ago today, a line was crossed. Two weeks ago today, Aaron Swartz was killed. Killed because he faced an impossible choice. Killed because he was forced into playing a game he could not win—a twisted and

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apprehended,” theguardian.com, Aug. 6, 2013. 22. Cory Doctorow, “Prosecutor Stephen Heymann Told MIT that Aaron Swartz Was Like a Rapist Who Blames His Victim,” boingboing.net, Aug. 4, 2013. 23. Hal Abelson, “The Lessons of Aaron Swartz” technologyreview.com, October 4, 2013. 24. Gabriella Coleman, “Gabriella Coleman’s Favorite News Stories of the

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. 41. AnonOpsIndia, Twitter post, May 17, 2012, 6:08 am, http://twitter.com/opindia_revenge/status/203079500983050240. 42. “Official statement from family and partner of Aaron Swartz,” RememberAaronSw.com, Jan. 12, 2013, last accessed July 2, 2014, available at rememberaaronsw.com/memories. 43. “Anonymous Operation Last Resort,” YouTube video, posted by Aarons

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

by Keach Hagey · 19 May 2025 · 439pp · 125,379 words

.” “Pretty much everything he does is featured on Slashdot, which is sort of like The New York Times of the computer world—everybody reads it,” Aaron Swartz told The Stanford Daily that spring.6 Like Altman, Swartz was a nineteen-year-old founder from Stanford bound for the program, except Swartz was

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your civilization, that’s hubris,” he writes. “I am a transhumanist because I do not have enough hubris not to try to kill God.”26 _________________ * Aaron Swartz, who had joined Reddit as a co-founder in a kind of Graham-officiated shotgun wedding, had been fired in 2007 after struggling to adapt

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Combinator (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2012), 3. 25.Justin Kan, “My Y Combinator Interview,” A Really Bad Idea Blog, November 24, 2010. 26.Aaron Swartz, “SFP: Come See Us,” Aaron Swartz’s blog. 27.Lagorio-Chafkin, Nerds, 37–38. 28.Matthew Lynley, “How a Site That Streams People Playing Video Games Became a Billion

The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity From Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs

by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips · 23 Jun 2015 · 210pp · 56,667 words

on information, and anything preventing that is viewed as an unwelcome obstacle. While we were writing this book, news came through of the suicide of Aaron Swartz, a hacker, prolific builder, and warrior for the cause of open and free information. In his tragically short life—he was twenty-six—he cowrote

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very being. HACK 2.0 While the term “hacker” was traditionally used to refer to those like Sam Roberts, who toyed with computer systems, or Aaron Swartz, who fought to liberate information, the word has taken on broader connotations. We can say that Florence Nightingale hacked the medical profession by creating the

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Coleman, “Our Weirdness Is Free,” Triple Canopy, http://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/our_weirdness_is_free. 2. Aaron Swartz, “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” July 2008, https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto. 3. Official statement from family and partner of Aaron Swartz, http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/memories/. 4. Richard Flanders, If a Pirate I Must Be . . . : The