At the time of his death, the 26-year-old Swartz had been pursued by the Department of Justice for two years. He was charged in July 2011 with accessing MIT’s computer network without authorization and using it to download 4.8 million documents from the online database JSTOR. His actions, the government alleged, violated Title 18 of the U.S. Code, and carried a maximum penalty of up to 50 years in jail and $1 million in fines.
The case had sapped Swartz’s finances, his time, and his mental energy and had fostered a sense of extreme isolation. Though his lawyers were working hard to strike a deal, the government’s position was clear: Any plea bargain would have to include at least a few months of jail time.
A prolonged indictment, a hard-line prosecutor, a dead body—these are the facts of the case. They are outnumbered by the questions that Swartz’s family, friends, and supporters are asking a month after his suicide. Why was MIT so adamant about pressing charges? Why was the DOJ so strict? Why did Swartz hang himself with a belt, choosing to end his own life rather than continue to fight?
When you kill yourself, you forfeit the right to control your own story. At rallies, on message boards, and in media coverage, you will hear that Swartz was felled by depression, or that he got caught in a political battle, or that he was a victim of a vindictive state. A memorial in Washington, D.C., this week turned into a battle over Swartz’s legacy, with mourners shouting in disagreement over what policy changes should be enacted to honor his memory.
Aaron Swartz is a difficult puzzle. He was a programmer who resisted the description, a dot-com millionaire who lived in a rented one-room studio. He could be a troublesome collaborator but an effective troubleshooter. He had a talent for making powerful friends, and for driving them away. He had scores of interests, and he indulged them all. In August 2007, he noted on his blog that he’d “signed up to build a comprehensive catalog of every book, write three books of my own (since largely abandoned), consult on a not-for-profit project, help build an encyclopedia of jobs, get a new weblog off the ground, found a startup, mentor two ambitious Google Summer of Code projects (stay tuned), build a Gmail clone, write a new online bookreader, start a career in journalism, appear in a documentary, and research and co-author a paper.” Also, his productivity had been hampered because he’d fallen in love, which “takes a shockingly huge amount of time!”
How can one sort of organization develop a young man like Aaron Swartz, and how can another destroy him?
He was fascinated by large systems, and how an organization’s culture and values could foster innovation or corruption, collaboration or paranoia. Why does one group accept a 14-year-old as an equal partner among professors and professionals while another spends two years pursuing a court case that’s divorced from any sense of proportionality to the alleged crime? How can one sort of organization develop a young man like Aaron Swartz, and how can another destroy him?
Swartz believed in collaborating to make software and organizations and government work better, and his early experiences online showed him that such things were possible. But he was better at starting things than he was at finishing them. He saw obstacles as clearly as he saw opportunity, and those obstacles often defeated him. Now, in death, his refusal to compromise has taken on a new cast. He was an idealist, and his many projects—finished and unfinished—are a testament to the barriers he broke down and the ones he pushed against. This is Aaron Swartz’s legacy: When he thought something was broken, he tried to fix it. When he failed, he tried to fix something else.
Eight or nine months before he died, Swartz became fixated on Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s massive, byzantine novel. Swartz believed he could unwind the book’s threads and assemble them into a coherent, easily parsed whole. This was a hard problem, but he thought it could be solved. As his friend Seth Schoen wrote after his death, Swartz believed it was possible to “fix the world mainly by carefully explaining it to people.”
It wasn’t that Swartz was smarter than everyone else, says Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman—he just asked better questions. In project after project, he would probe and tinker until he’d teased out the answers he was looking for. But in the end, he was faced with a problem he couldn’t solve, a system that didn’t make sense.
by Justin Peters, Slate | Read more:
Photo by Sage Ross/Flickr/Wikimedia Commons
