Aaron Swartz committed suicide in 2013, eight years and ten days ago. He was 26. As I write this, I am 26. He read the same fanfic I did, and posted to a forum I read (the comments sections of his posts have multiple friends of mine chiming in). He tried to make the world a better place. He wrote about social science. Suicide has no single cause. But deliberate government persecution, aided by a complicit institute more focused on research dollars than advancing technology? That is what a social scientist might call a “contributing factor.”
I did not know him. I have heard him spoken of, remembered, by those who did. Here’s someone else writing about him:
Aaron Swartz had the most important quality for an innovator. He was pure in heart. And he loved the web. He was eager to improve himself, the internet, and to share the beautiful treasure trove of science with the world. He personally invented many important technologies for the web and he shared them. He wrote earnestly about innovation and he lived it. He recognized that it was wrong for the forces of greed and materialism to squat on scientific papers, especially those funded by tax dollars, as most research is. Like a true innovator, he stood up for what he believed in, and he did something about it. He released the information to the world.
It is easy to forget people. I still use two technologies he played a key role in. The RSS feed, which enabled a blogosphere of open discussion, free from the constraints and character limits of Twitter and Facebook, open to the world in a trusting gesture that the modern newsletter is more cautious about? He worked on that spec. When he was 14, he was flown out to California for meetings about it, because he was an important contributor.
I’ve also used RECAP. PACER is a government program to let you read the law. One school of thought is that the law is legally binding on citizens, and so it should be free. The other school of thought is that they have power and can charge people money, so it should be expensive. Sometimes this extends to making it illegal to upload the law, when it is defined in special codes. In this case, the federal government was more reasonable. They would just charge you $10 to read a court’s decisions. But Mr. Swartz, he thought that was wrong. He belonged to the first school. He thought that every citizen should be able to read the law that binds them. So he designed RECAP. Whenever you paid for a decision with PACER, it would upload a copy to RECAP. Whenever RECAP already had a decision that PACER wanted to charge you for, you could just read RECAP’s copy instead. He made public a fifth of all judge-made law, the sort of law that really matters.
Many people in the government were furious. They tried their best. But he had done nothing wrong, and even their best lawyers couldn’t say he’d done anything illegal.
But the thing about a vengeful government is that, when everyone commits crimes, some people can be convicted based on other factors. Sometimes it is San Francisco only prosecuting Chinese laundromats. Sometimes it is relentlessly attacking someone for prior civil disobedience.
Aaron Swartz thought that research should be free. He thought that scholarship, written with love and care, written for the public to understand, should be accessible to everyone, not locked behind a paywall. So he downloaded many journal articles, and tried to upload many journal articles. But he was caught. And he was prosecuted, and persecuted, and eventually he killed himself.
He was 26.
I don’t have anything particularly new or insightful to add. This is said on no special anniversary, and nobody will expect me to remember him on this day. But he was 26. Tomorrow I turn 27. I can think of how young I am, and how little I have yet accomplished compared to what I imagine myself possible of.
Eleven days ago, SCOTUS decided that prosecuting someone, not for accessing something that they were blocked from accessing by computer rules, but merely in the wrong state of mind or for the wrong reasons, is not a felony, and is indeed legal. Perhaps.
He is gone, but not forgotten. Still, he is dead. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. GNU Aaron Swartz.