Ben Wikler

“ Is the freedom to connect like freedom of speech, or like the freedom to murder? This bill would be a huge, potentially permanent loss. If we lost the ability to communicate with each other over the Internet, it would be a change to the bill of rights — the freedoms guaranteed in our constitution. The freedoms our country had been built on would be suddenly deleted. New technology, instead of bringing us greater freedom, would have snuffed out fundamental rights we'd always taken for granted. ”

“ As, amazingly, the whole planet now knows, Aaron was indeed a passionate advocate for access to information and for a free and open Internet. He believed in these things for their own sakes, but moreover, as a mean towards the even deeper end of building a world defined by social and economic justice. As Roy touched on, Aaron was brilliant, but what made him even more special was how he resisted the impulse to presume that he alone was responsible for his brilliance or should benefit therefrom. ”

“ Aaron believed there's no shame in admitting failure. It's why he loved GiveWell, among other things. But there's a deep, deep shame in pride that prevents you from admitting failure. There's a deep, deep shame in caring more about believing that you're changing the world than actually changing the world.
Aaron would have loved to have been here, because out of the last week and out of today, phoenixes are already rising from his ashes. The best possible
legacy for him is for all of us to go out from here today and do everything we can to make the world a better place. ”

“ So I'm just reporting from my dreams, to the world in which I awoke this morning, that that second tower — it's burning.
Oddly, I never met Aaron. I'm told he liked my writing; I'm also told he liked David Foster Wallace. So let me read this and close.
Worship power, and you will feel weak and afraid. You will need more power over others to keep that fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you'll end up feeling stupid, fraught, always on the verge of being found out, and so on. ”

“ They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value, without ever being fully aware that that's what you are doing . And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear, on contempt and frustration, and craving, and the worship of self.
Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. ”

“ And Aaron was the guy you wanted to hand this off to.
One of the amazing things about maturing — about getting older — is that you realize your job is to leave. Your job is to leave the world better than you found it, and you want to leave it in the hands of people who were really good at taking care of the stuff that really matters, and standing up for the stuff that really matters. ”

“ With Aaron's death, we now have one fewer person who thinks that way, and I think we desperately need more. Arguably, we need a small army of rational altruists just to match what Aaron accomplished in his short lifetime. We'll need a huge army of them if we're ever going to realize Aaron's dream of the world, which was nothing less than a world without any injustice or suffering of any kind. So if you haven't tried thinking that way before, I think today would be a good day to start. ”

“ Ask yourself whether you've let yourself fall into a job or a cause because it's easy and because you're used to it, or whether you're being strategic and deliberate and reflective about picking the battles where you can do the most good. And after you take the step back today, if you can ask that same question tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. You'll be thinking about the limited, invaluable minutes in your life the way Aaron thought about his. ”

“ Aaron would have wanted us to look at the history to understand our next tasks. I mean, you understand — Aaron touched so many of us in the progressive community that we are unable to sort of figure out, what is the strategies and tactics of next? But he was the consummate — he wanted to a historian, and a sociologist, and many things.
Revolutions are made by people. They are not made by heroes. But nevertheless, leaders matter greatly everywhere in the world. Our country has a tradition of creating a climate of fear whenever they risk change. ”

“ Aaron wanted to talk about the big fights, the fights to make the world a better place. And I'm afraid that Aaron's legacy is going to be dumbed down to hacker, copyfighter, the way the media dumbed down the SOPA fight to Google versus the telephone companies. So, let's not forget that Aaron fought the bigger fight — the fight for access, the fight for justice, the fight for democracy. The fight for us ~ for this community, and for the greater community that is all humankind. ”

“ In the last years of Aaron's life, he had just started this journey of figuring out how to mobilize people, how to light the spark in people, so that they could realize their own power and change the world. And I think that what he did for technology and the Internet he was just beginning to do for politics. ”

“ Sure, it will have yet another name, and maybe a different excuse, and probably do its damage in a different way. But make no mistake,
the enemies of the freedom to connect have not disappeared. The fire in those politicians' eyes hasn't been put out.
There are a lot of people — a lot of powerful people — who want to clamp down on the Internet. And to be honest, there aren't a whole lot who have a vested interest in protecting it from all of that. We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom. ”

“ Today, we are left with a number of issues to fight in the wake of Aaron's passing. First, we must demand accountability for those who tormented Aaron. We do not do so to personalize the issue, or to seek revenge — that is not our motivation. We understand that if we allow the climate of fear to exist, the damage that will be done is that the next Aaron will not come. That is a future that we will not accept in our world. ”

“ Bertolt Brecht once wrote, "There are men that struggle for a day, and they are good. There are others that struggle for a year, and they are better. There are some who struggle for many years, and they are better still. But then there are those who struggle all their lives, and these are the indispensable ones." And Aaron Swartz was one of the indispensable ones.
As you have heard, Aaron was a very complex and wondrous soul, and I feel so privileged to have been one of the people who got to see him in all these other forms, his loving — he loved Ada ”

“ In my dream, this city looks very much like the ones — in all my dreams, the city looks very much like the one I grew up in — Rochester, New York — a city that doesn't matter any more than any other city, just as I matter no more than any other person. ”

“ Government, my father always assured me, was another component of a city, and a way of life , of what we all are . A piece of the power we grant to the people we trust — we trust to govern us using intellect, knowledge, and compassion. ”

“ Aaron really could do magic.
Aaron's magic was in asking questions, first and foremost. He often told me that he thought the reason he was a fast programmer was because that he was just really good at asking Google what the right code snippets were, (laughter)
Aaron's magic was in asking questions and in believing that the answers were not inevitable. Why should for-profit corporations control the world's academic research? It's not a question most of us have ever thought to ask, despite going through years of university, where we might be reading academic research every day. ”

“ What Bob taught me at that — at that funeral: we have a choice today. We have this very small and unique opportunity in history to shake up the control by these self- aggrandizing egomaniacs who use technology for the good of the 1%. This is not something that — Aaron's legacy is to kill that grip. ”

“ The historian Rick Perlstein, who was a good friend of Aaron's, and who Aaron loved, wrote a memorial for Aaron where he said that each of us contains a universe in our heads, a world of information and heroes and villains and ideas. The difference was that Aaron had 14 or 15 of them. And different people here today represent different parts of those worlds. Our next speaker is Glenn Otis Brown; he was the first Executive Director of Creative Commons. He's done a million other things in technology, and got to know Aaron in another one of those worlds. ”

“ I mostly knew Aaron as a friend and as an activist, but I learned a lot about
technology from him, and one thing that I learned about was the agile method of software development, which is practiced at ThoughtWorks. And in agile software development, the idea is you make things, right away, and put them in front of real people, and then see what doesn't work, and then fix that. And then make it again. And you're constantly building and changing things, and it's something that works incredibly well in technology. ”

“ A person, the most complex thing we've yet found in our universe. He turned to me once in a movie theater and said, like someone who had just realized the answer to a difficult math problem, "I contain multitudes." (laughter)
However, to call Aaron extraordinary isn't a way to side-step the message of how he lived his life. The only reason we're all here at this memorial, holding up this 26-year-old as a paragon, is that in a culture ruled by fear, he learned and taught me that trying is more important than being afraid. ”

“ But Aaron was interested in small things, as well. He once walked me through one of his proudest accomplishments, which was getting the letter "s" appended to the end of a word in a financial regulation bill. This subtly expanded shareholder protections, as he explained to me. There was no issue or battle too big or too small for Aaron's interest — what drove him was just whether he saw an opportunity to accomplish something positive. Our conversations were wide-ranging, but there was always that background focus
on rational altruism — on bringing it back to getting something done. ”

“ I felt like I was in control of my life instead of the other way around, like its challenges just bounced off me as I kept doing what I wanted. Normally I feel buffeted by events, a thousand tiny distractions nagging at the back of my head at all times. ”

“ One friend of Aaron's who wasn't able to be here is Larry Lessig. Larry went to the funeral on his son's birthday, and it's his son's birthday party today. And at a time like this, you need to be with your family. But he sent these — these words.
"There are no words for this sadness. Tears were made for this. Silent tears, ferocious hugs; words remain for happier things, for the world he wanted, for the world he helped to build. Let us save our words for this — for the ways we will make the world he needed, for the ways we will guarantee the justice he was denied. He lives with us, always. ”

“ I think he would be honored by the efforts to combat excessive prison sentences, and to promote freedom of information. But these aren't the only actions that I think do honor to Aaron. I think anyone who is struggling to make the world a better place, in any area, in any place in time, is in some sense honoring his memory.
That doesn't mean all actions are equally valuable; for Aaron, they never were. If you're thinking about Aaron today, I'd suggest looking at your efforts to create positive change and asking yourself if these are the best you can do. ”

“ Aaron is like many of tens of thousands of Americans who don't have his influence, and doesn't have these friends — the wonderful people we have here. This system that is in America today is an abuse of state power. ”

“ So... now we're going to watch some excerpts from his Freedom to Connect speech, and as you'll see, Aaron actually says it better than I could. So, over to you, Aaron.
SWARTZ: There's a battle going on right now, a battle to define everything that happens on the Internet in terms of traditional things that the law understands. Is sharing a video on BitTorrent like shoplifting from a movie store? Or is it like loaning a videotape to a friend? Is reloading a webpage over and over again like a peaceful virtual sit-in, or a violent smashing of shop windows? ”

“ He never let his youth define who he was or constrain what he did. And in the end, he couldn't allow Steve Heymann and the US Attorney's office to control him either.
We now live in a world without Aaron. But the legacy he would have wanted to leave is clear. That's why I'm here today. That's why all of you are here today. Because I still believe that the world can change, even though Aaron's not here to do the changing himself. ”

“ The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been borne of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. ”

“ During our annual retreat this summer, Aaron had joined 500 of his colleagues, and we had a number of speakers discussing one of the more egregious cancers of our country, which is the US Justice System. We have 5% of the world's population, and yet 25% of the prisoners of the world are incarcerated in our country. African Americans now count for one million of the 2.3 million prisoners. 80,000 people as we sit here today are in constrained confinement or solitary confinement. ”

“ Those words were on the subject of whether GDP statistics are robust enough to be able to shed light on whether technological progress is slowing down. These topics were examples of Aaron's interest in what he called "meta-issues" — how to improve your productivity, how to reason in the most effective way, how to promote rational altruism, how to design our organizations and manage people. Aaron was fascinated by these topics because he thought that figuring out more about them could improve the world on a lot of different fronts at once . ”

“ I met Aaron through his interest in the work of Peter Singer. Peter Singer is a philosopher who argues that we're morally obligated to give as much as we can to charity, because our money can do so much more good for others than it can do for us. Peter promotes my organization, Give Well, because Give Well works to find the charities that are doing the most good, for example, in terms of lives saved per dollar given.
This is not the way most people think about giving to charity. For most people, giving to charity is optional, and it's personal. ”