Aaron Swartz was an American computer programmer, a writer, a political organizer, and an Internet hacktivist. He was involved in the development of RSS, Creative Commons, web.py, and Reddit. He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 and founded the online group Demand Progress.
Creator of Infogami, which was absorbed into social news website Reddit, and co-author of the RSS online news feed specification.
Helped start the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to further the cause of effective online activism. The next year, he became a research fellow at Harvards Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption and founded the online group Demand Progress, which campaigned against the Stop Online Piracy Act.
In January 2011, he was arrested by MIT police on breaking-and-entering charges for downloading academic articles. Federal prosecutors then charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The charges brought a total maximum penalty of $1 million in fines and thirty-five years in prison.
In January 2013, almost two years to the day after the federal government denied his attorneys second offer of a plea bargain, Swartz was found dead of a suicide by hanging in his Brooklyn apartment by his partner, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. There was no suicide note found.
I think deeply about things and want others to do likewise. I work for ideas and learn from people. I don’t like excluding people. I’m a perfectionist, but I won’t let that get in the way of publication. Except for education and entertainment, I’m not going to waste my time on things that won’t have an impact. I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don’t take me seriously. I don’t hold grudges, it’s not productive, but I learn from my experience. I want to make the world a better place.
Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
Growing up, I slowly had this process of realizing that all the things around me that people had told me were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be, they weren’t natural at all. They were things that could be changed, and they were things that, more importantly, were wrong and should change, and once I realized that, there was really no going back.
Creativity comes from applying things you learn in other fields to the field you work in.
Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.
Before I went to college I read two books. I read a book “Moral Mazes” by Robert Jackall which is a study of how corporations work, and it’s actually a fascinating book, this sociologist, he just picks a corporation at random and just goes and studies the middle managers, not the people who do any of the grunt work and not the big decision makers, just the people whose job is to make sure that things day to day get done, and he shows how even though they’re all perfectly reasonable people, perfectly nice people you’d be happy to meet any of them, all the things that they were accomplishing were just incredibly evil. So you have these people in this average corporation, they were making decisions to blow out their worker’s eardrums in the factory, to poison the lakes and the lagoons nearby, to make these products that are filled with toxic chemicals that poisoned their customers, not because any of them were bad people and wanted to kill their workers and their neighbourhood and their customers, but just because that was the logic of the situation they were in. Another book I read was a book “Understanding Power” by Noam Chomsky which kind of took the same sort of analysis but applied it to wider society which you know we’re in a situation where it may be filled with perfectly good people but they’re in these structures that cause them to continually do evil, to invade countries, to bomb people, to take money from poor people and give it to rich people, to do all these things that are wrong. These books really opened my eyes about just how bad the society we were living in really is.
Computers will be able to do all the mundane tasks in our daily lives.
Real education is about genuine understanding and the ability to figure things out on your own not about making sure every 7th grader has memorized all the facts some bureaucrats have put in the 7th grade curriculum.
