
Remembering Aaron Swartz: Commons man  - wglb
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/01/remembering-aaron-swartz?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/commons_man
======
azernik
I find it interesting that the Economist managed to figure out that Swartz's
cause was open access to public documents, while the New York Times (even in a
second article published today) is still writing about him as a purist all-
information-must-be-free ideologue.

~~~
brudgers
The Economist writes spectacular obituaries. The editors work on them to fine
polish - Ray Bradbury's was in development for many weeks before seeing
publication.

On the one hand, I was surprised that Swartz was the subject this week. On the
other, it comes as no surprise. Ink has been devoted to what it takes to be
worthy of a New York Times obituary. That Aaron Swartz's death made the
Economist speaks to the deep impact that his life's work has had.

~~~
mmakunas
The Economist obits are indeed wonderful. It's almost always the first thing I
read in it. But, as a point of clarification, this article is not the weekly
obit. It's part of the Babbage blog. It remains to be seen if something about
him will make the print edition.

------
ender7
The first two sentences of this article are quick, concise, and accurate.

 _To call Aaron Swartz gifted would be to miss the point. As far as the
internet was concerned, he was the gift._

~~~
pyre
I liked the closing too:

    
    
      | As Sir Tim put it, in fewer than 140 characters, "Aaron
      | dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder.
      | Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we
      | have lost a child. Let us weep." And the web wept.

------
lkgj
It's like you're all almost purposely going out of your way to misrepresent
what Aaron was. He should be remembered as a well-meaning, curious dreamer,
someone who later in his short life wanted to organize others politically for
the public good. An unusually sensitive everyman. He's being portrayed instead
as a technical genius or some other kind of elite. He always sought to be
involved in technology, but he never really accomplished anything
technological; he did not invent RSS or even work on what people think of when
they hear RSS. (His involvement was with a minor offshoot of the real 'RSS.')
He contributed almost nothing to Reddit. He wrote a few minor open-source
libraries, like thousands of others. I do not mean any of that as a criticism;
obviously most people don't achieve much new technologically. The key here
isn't "genius" but "public-spirited." Not "analytical power" but
"playfulness." Not Gandalf but Frodo.

Of course, his death is a horrible tragedy. It is even moreso a horrible
tragedy if it actually resulted from the JSTOR incident, rather than from
personal pressures he felt or from mental illness. The JSTOR stunt
accomplished nothing. It would barely have helped anyone. It was purely
symbolic. That is one reason the prosecution of him was so misguided, but it
is also seemingly leading to a majorly misguided reaction by people who really
have no idea what they're talking about.

This caricature of him after his death feels grotesque and manipulative.
Lessig and others should be ashamed of themselves. You should try to remember
people for what they were, not convert a very understandable grief at an
interesting, sensitive, and troubled person's suicide into a simplistic
political cause.

I say none of this to be harsh. The groupthink here is scary, though, and I do
not recall seeing it here before. I'm cowardly posting this under a new
username because I'm actually afraid of the mob mentality I'm seeing.

~~~
kragen
I worked with Aaron on the old watchdog.net. I found his technical judgment to
be consistently superior to mine, which is something that I can say of very
few other people. Tim Berners-Lee said Aaron was a mentor to him, rather than
the other way around. One of the core Django team said Aaron started the whole
magic-removal effort, and that Django was much better as a result. Aaron was
also the first person I remember to point out that Bitcoin embeds a solution
to Zooko's Triangle: <http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko> and thus the
first person to propose a practical solution to secure, decentralized, human-
readable names, which we'd all thought was impossible for about a decade, even
Dan Kaminsky. (Nick Szabo made a proposal some years back, but nobody has
attempted to build it.)

I agree that programming was not as important as organizing people for the
public good to him. But I think you should take the word of programmers who
worked with him: he was a first-class programmer.

I also think it's selling him a bit short to call him a "dreamer". He stopped
SOPA.

~~~
hobbyhacker
See 'namecoin'.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin>

------
cschmidt
I don't if this is known by everyone, but the anonymous author G.F. is Glenn
Fleishman.

------
temuze
It's humbling to be in my twenties and read about someone who had done so much
at an even younger age.

~~~
Volpe
It's also impossible, we have all "done" the same amount in the same amount of
time (that's how existence works). We just do different things, some of which
society rewards more than others.

