Aaron Swartz - The boy who could change the world: the writings of Aaron Swartz

It is a fair question whether its fair to any of us to gather in one place the writings of a persons life. Writing reflects thinking. Thinking evolves. Who we were at nineteen does not reflect who we were at twenty-five, or who we would have been at fifty. Learning looks like inconsistency. Changes seem unjustified, since theyre rarely even acknowledged.

Im 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 I was then teaching. After introducing him to some friends, I recounted to them a recent post from his blog.

Afterward, Aaron was upset with me. That was private, he said.

But you posted it on your blog, I replied, a bit puzzled by the objection.

Yes, he responded, on my blog, for the people who read my blog. Not for the random student at the Stanford Law School.

But Aaron has left us no choice. We have a right to understand the extraordinary influence that this boy had, by understanding his words and thus his thought. And one way to do that is through his words. They are incomplete. They are sometimes inconsistent, as one essay struggles against another. But as Ive read the collection gathered here, I recognize the soul who speaks through these writings. I remember these steps, and have learned more as Ive walked through them again. There is a reason for us to reflect on these bits from an incomplete life. They teach us something. And they inspire.

From a very young age, Aaron felt a freedom that most of us never really know: the freedom to simply do what you believe is right. Thats not to say that most of us live life in the wrong. But most of us have a way of avoiding the confrontations between right and wrong. We learn early on how to fudge the facts, how to dodge the uncomfortable.

Aaron never quite learned that. Or if he did, he got rid of it when he was young. It isnt as though he was that guy preaching in the corner to the unwilling listener. He wasnt. He spoke through questions, not commands. He inspired by giving others a sense of the best they could be. And he often was super-quiet as he worked out what or whom to believe. A quiet kid among strangers. A deep blue pool, hiding a volcano.

But he was not quiet in his endless writings. And these writings capture well a mind in constant reflection: often aware of his advantage, always working through the politics of a society too mixed in its own advantages, and working endlessly to understand how best to understand and persuade.

In the essays collected here, you can watch a boy working on many problems at the same time. Like the CPU in a computer, different bits are in the foreground at different times. But every theme collected here was being worked on, if differently, at every point in the adult period (from about fourteen on) of this twenty-six-year-olds 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 it work better for people. He was constantly working on access: to culture, and particularly access to knowledge especially; tothe stuff that was supposed to be free. He was increasingly working in political philosophy: on how to know what was right, because he certainly had his views of right. He was especially working on progressive politics: the best ways to talk about issues from surveillance to Social Security, how to rally a public. And he read voraciously, fiction as well as nonfiction, reporting at the end of each year on the hundreds of books he had read that year, with a short review of each. And tragically, he was working on what he believed he had to do, the law notwithstanding. He rallied others to cross what he believed to be an unjust line. He crossed it himself.

No one should confuse these writings with revealed truth. Aaron had learned more than many ever will. He had worked out more than most. But theres an incompleteness here, which I know he saw, but which he imagined in the years ahead he would fill out. His technical skills had tripped him into financial freedom; he loved the range to think and act that that freedom gave him, because it gave him the chance to dig deeper, over time. And if there is one thing that I think terrified him the most about the prosecution that brought about the end of his life, it was the slow recognition that even if he had won his case against the government (which his lawyers at the end believed he would), he would be left without that freedom anymore. His fortune wasted, he would have been forced back into a world where he could no longer afford to live a life devoted exclusively to what he believed was right.

In the end, a work like this can only ever be a picture of a life incomplete. Few of us will ever come close to the influence this boy had. Thats 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 us on the path that he, and maybe we, thought best. There are scores still left in his command. There is an endless amount that we must finish. For this writer, and thinker, and activist, and hacker, and dear friend, we will.