Aaron Swartz

“ Theory and Technology
In 2009, I invited Aaron Swartz to contribute a "synthesis lecture"—essentially a short online book—to a new series I was editing on Web Engineering. Aaron produced a draft of about 40 pages, which is the document you see here. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I don't know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.
Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn't solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This was cause for real pain and distress for Aaron, and it was the root of his really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors. And it's a testament to Aaron's intellect, heart, and friendship that he was always forgiven for this. Many of us "grown ups" in Aaron's life have, over the years, sat down to talk about this, and about our protective feelings for him, and to check in with one another and make sure that no one was too stung by Aaron's disappointment in us. ”

“ 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 will forever remain an inspiration. During his short time on earth, he made an eternal difference. For that, we give Aaron our thanks and reaffirm our commitment to continue his march for freedom and a more just world. ”

“ Instead, they have amassed great wealth. They are worshipped. Yet here's Aaron, somebody whose life is the exact opposite of these people — and I've met these people, I've met Aaron, and you can not imagine a polar opposite of beauty in human beings. ”

“ Robots and browsers and protocols are fun, sure, but if you want your site to succeed it ultimate has to appeal to humans—the real people who build and use all that other stuff. And even if information doesn’t, humans generally want to be free. ”

“ OpenSecrets.org wants people to find out about the problematic influence of money in politics. Taxpayer.net wants to draw attention to this wasteful spending. The public wants to know how money in politics causes wasteful spending and a site that helps them do so would further each organization’s goals. ”

“ But even if the law didn’t get in the way, there’s so much value in sharing data that most data providers will eventually come around. Sure, providing a website where people can look things up can be plenty valuable, but it’s nothing compared to what you can do when you combine that information with others. ”

“ Which is why watching focus groups is such an infuriating experience: like a girl pretending to play dumb in a bar, you’re watching people act the way they think people expect people like them to behave. ”

“ The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.
Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost. ”

“ He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more. Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. ”

“ The cigarette industry is still powerful, but it's a lot less so after weathering so many lawsuits. While I favor tort reform, even with reform it's likely going to be worth it for people to seek damages from corrupt corporate executives, elected officials, etc. ”

“ Ideally, of course, intelligent applications won't be dependent on a single commercial site, like Freebase, but will merge and combine knowledge from various sites across the Web, crawling and trawling for more useful information and deciding which bits of it to trust. ”

“ Freebase is an enormous collaborative Web-editable RDF-like database, prepopulated with data extracted from Wikipedia and numerous other sources and supplemented with the contributions of various users. Freebase is still quite small, but their aims are ambitious—creating a database that combines numerous different sources and providing it as a backend to people who want to build more intelligent applications. ”

“ And when people who use such software find themselves having to write a URL on a t-shirt or link to something from an email, they create a redirect—a special URL who’s only purpose is to introduce people to the nightmarish randomnumber system used by their actual website. ”

“ Search engines don’t just look at the content of a page to decide whether it’s a good result for someone’s search, they also look at the URL which, because it’s so limited, is given special weight. But if your URLs are just numbers, they’re unlikely to have anything that matches people’s search engine queries, making them less likely to be found in search results. ”

“ Just as the interlinking power of the World Wide Web sucked all available documents into its maw—encouraging people to digitize them, convert them into HTML, give them a URL, and put them on the Internet (hell, as we speak Google is even doing this to entire libraries) —the programmable Web will pull all applications within its grasp. The benefits that come from being connected are just too powerful to ultimately resist. ”

“ Just letting users take their data home with them is weak brew compared to sharing it with the wider world. (Picture a wide world of people at home with their weak data brew.) Which is why the Web invented APIs, letting us share the data with everyone who could think of a use for it. ”

“ We will continue by considering what it means to build a program on top of the Web—how to write software that both fairly serves its immediate users as well as the developers who want to build on top of it. ”

“ Doctorow argues that any system collect accurate “metadata”—the kind of machine-processable data that will be needed to make this dream of computers-using-the-Web come true—will run into seven inescapable problems: people lie, people are lazy, people are stupid, people don’t know themselves, schemas aren’t neutral, metrics influence results, and there’s more than one way to describe something. ”

“ The success of GNU/Linux has led to a larger free software movement as well as the “open source” movement, which releases software and its source code under copyright licenses that provide some of the software freedoms. ”

“ But software developers quickly discovered that, for social creatures like us humans, everything has a component of social interaction. For example, titling and categorizing the photos you take would seem like an obviously solitary activity. But sites like Flickr demonstrate that people love to discuss and categorize photos of their friends, or even strangers, and that people, all things considered, would prefer to organize their photos in a program that exposes them to other people. ”

“ But only a completely asocial web application consists purely of software. The vast majority of them are interesting because they give you access to data contributed by other users as well. For example, the software that lets people edit web pages is just about the least interesting thing about Wikipedia. The reason the site is so popular is because so many people have put their accumulated knowledge into that software. ”

“ Second, it makes it much harder to keep secrets. How many people would have to be embarrassed (or prosecuted) based on corroborated stories before people get a whole lot more concerned about being found out and become a whole lot less corruptible? ”

“ Yet, as my little thought experiment above has hopefully made clear, the programmable web is anything but a pipe dream—it is today’s reality and tomorrow’s banality. No software developer will remain content to limit themselves only to things on the user’s own computer. And no web site developer will be content to limit their site only to users who act with it directly. ”

“ Instead of getting existing systems to talk to each other and writing up the best practices, these self-appointed guarantors of the Semantic Web have spent their time creating their own little universe, complete with Semantic Web databases and programming languages. But databases and programming languages, while far from perfect, are largely solved problems. People already have their favorites, which have been tested and hacked to work in all sorts of unusual environments, and folks are not particularly inclined to learn a new one, especially for no good reason. ”

“ Still, peer-to-peer software, if we could make it work, would seem to give the best of both worlds: the freedom to modify how a program functions on our local computers as well as the ability to share and collaborate with others across the Internet. ”

“ Some great strides have been made in building peer-to-peer software, in no small part because of the vast amount of interest in using the technology to share music without getting caught by enforcers of the law. But, especially compared to Web 2.0 server technology, peer-to-peer is still in its infancy. Writing a social application so that its peer-to-peer is about a thousand times harder than writing the same program as a web app. ”