Tribute to Aaron Swartz

Biography and Works

Aaron was born in Illinois in 1986, and because he had an early exposure to computers (his dad owned a software company), he was able to learn how to program at a young age. When he was only 13, he won a prize for web development by creating TheInfo.org, a project that allowed everyone on the internet to have their own website. When he was just 16, he used his technical knowledge to help create the copyright licenses of Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to allowing creative works to be shared and modified. Pursuing his interest in computers and entrepreneurship, Aaron joined a startup accelerator (Y Combinator) to found Reddit.com, which was acquired by a larger media company later on.

Uninterested in working for businesses, Aaron decided to steer his career away from the startup world and into the political world. This is where he launched and participated in several campaigns against the social problems that he thought were most important for him to work on, including DemandProgress.org, which successfully fought against the internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.

One of the many political problems that Aaron tackled was the privatization of academic works. It turns out that a handful of giant corporations own and control the vast majority of scholarly journals and articles, forcing everyone else to pay high amounts for access. Aaron viewed this as unjust, because people without money would not have access to the wealth of human knowledge, while someone with more privilege (such students attending an American university) would. When Aaron was working on freeing information that big corporations lock up and profit off of, he wrote a computer script to download JSTOR (a scientific journal database used at universities) articles on MIT's campus as an expression of civil disobedience. He was caught running the scripts on MIT's servers on video, and the federal authorities ruled that he would receive 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine. His exact motive is not known, but knowing Aaron, it was likely to be for research (as he was a fellow at Harvard, researching law and ethics) and certainly not for anything malicious like personal gain. Even if he had given them away to the public, it should have been viewed as an act of civil disobedience, not an extreme offense of law. In any case, the MIT and the legal system used this to make a case out of Swartz and is regarded as a failure. Aaron fell into a deep depression following this verdict, and was found dead in his apartment room in 2013 due to suicide.

With the nonstop dedication that Aaron spent to "fixing the world", he is remembered by many as a relentless fighter for freedom and equality. He didn't care about becoming rich or even being personally content because his primary goal was to improve the world. His selfless character, devotion to progress, and optimism continue to inspire many, and his impact on countless individuals will never be forgotten.