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.
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.
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.
The 'Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto', also, does not limit its sights to just those materials that are traditionally, or commonly understood to be, "public documents", but to the "the world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage".
The whole quote is "The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals...". He then goes on to talk exclusively about academic publishing in the rest of the manifesto.
Even the title - "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto" - refers to a very specific movement in favor of freely available ("Open Access") academic journals.
I think your reading of the Manifesto misses the forest for a tree.
Scientific papers or the even smaller set of 'public documents' were not the whole program, just a useful (and especially moderate and academically respectable) 1st step. The whole program is opposing all "laws that restrict what bits I can put on my website".
As the wordplay joke at the bottom of the "Bits are not a bug" page notes, "Attorney General's Warning: This page advocates advocacy of the violent overthrow of the United States Government."
| 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.
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.
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.
It's also a good thing that one of the "minor open-source libraries" that he wrote were not the inspiration for Google's webapp(2) or Facebook's Tornado...
Most of what I've read approaches hagiography. I can't help but wonder if some of the fawning praise heaped upon him, and his elevation to a hero partaking in an epic battle between Good and Evil was no less a contribution to his death than the supposed bullying of the prosecutor.
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.
