Aaron Swartz
15 quotes
Biography
Aaron Hillel Swartz, also known as AaronSw, was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS; the technical architecture for Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses; and the Python website framework web.py.
"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."
"We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial freedom. They threw themselves into it. They did whatever they could think of to do. They didn’t stop to ask anyone for permission. … The senators were right: The Internet really is out of control. But if we forget that, if we let Hollywood rewrite the story so it was just big company Google who stopped the bill, if we let them persuade us we didn’t actually make a difference, if we start seeing it as someone else’s responsibility to do this work and it’s our job just to go home and pop some popcorn and curl up on the couch to watch Transformers, well, then next time they might just win. Let’s not let that happen."
"Aaron, a hero of the internet and a legend among men, was targeted by a corrupt system that sought to make an example out of him. He faced a harsher punishment than murderers, robbers, child pornographers, or even terrorist sympathizers! All for doing nothing more than downloading academic articles."
"We’ve lost a fighter. We’ve lost somebody who put huge energy into righting wrongs. There are people around the world who take it on themselves to just try to fix the world but very few of them do it 24/7 like Aaron. Very few of them are as dedicated. So of the people who are fighting for right, and what he was doing up to the end was fighting for right, we have lost one of our own. … We’ve lost a great person. But also, we’ve lost somebody who needed to be nurtured, who needed to be protected. I didn’t work with Aaron as closely as many people here, but I got the sense that all who have known him realized that he needed to be protected. He needed to be held carefully in our hands. He needed to be nurtured. So nurturers of the world, everyone who tried to make a place safe to work or a home safe to live, anyone who listens to another, looks after another or feeds another, all parents everywhere — we’ve lost a child. And there’s nothing worse than that."
"From the beginning, the government worked as hard as it could to characterize what Aaron did in the most extreme and absurd way. The “property” Aaron had “stolen,” we were told, was worth “millions of dollars” — with the hint, and then the suggestion, that his aim must have been to profit from his crime. But anyone who says that there is money to be made in a stash of ACADEMIC ARTICLES is either an idiot or a liar. It was clear what this was not, yet our government continued to push as if it had caught the 9/11 terrorists red-handed."
"I received an email from JSTOR four days before Aaron died, from the president of JSTOR, announcing, celebrating that JSTOR was going to release all of these journal articles to anybody around the world who wanted access — exactly what Aaron was fighting for. And I didn’t have time to send it to Aaron; I was on — I was traveling. But I looked forward to seeing him again — I had just seen him the week before — and celebrating that this is what had happened. So, all of us think there are a thousand things we could have done, a thousand things we could have done, and we have to do, because Aaron Swartz is now an icon, an ideal. He is what we will be fighting for, all of us, for the rest of our lives."
"I think that the best legacy that — the best tribute we can pay to Aaron’s legacy is to continue to fight as hard as we can to make this world a more just, fairer place. That’s the thing that he cared most about. And I’m going to keep doing that. … I also hope that this can serve as a wake-up call for the broader issues in the criminal justice system. It’s not just this one act. Our system is deeply, deeply unfair. And as I said earlier, millions of people suffer because of it needlessly. And I hope that — you know, in this country, it’s very hard for people to — for politicians to look weak on crime, but that’s not what this is. This is — this is about justice, and nobody should have to face what Aaron faced. And I hope we can help save people in the future."
"Aaron believed that [...] you literally ought to be asking yourself all the time: "What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now, and if you are not working on that, why aren't you?""
"Being around some of the bright lights of the technology world and having them expect great things helps you sit down and do it seriously."
"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."
"I was around computers from birth; we had one of the first Macs, which came out shortly before I was born, and my dad ran a company that wrote computer operating systems. I don't think I have any particular technical skills; I just got a really large head start."
"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."
"With the death of bin Laden, it's finally time for Congress to bring back the pre-9-11 legal norm, before we decided it was okay to toss out our civil liberties if the 'bad guys' were scary enough."
"Computers will be able to do all the mundane tasks in our daily lives."