When I checked Twitter Saturday morning, I learned that the programmer, writer, and activist Aaron Swartz had killed himself at age twenty-six. Though I had only known Aaron through online conversations, I was immediately in tears, and it was soon clear that I was not the only one. One of the hardest things about writing this essay was the constant interruption: Every few minutes, it seemed, Twitter delivered a new tribute to Aaron’s talent and generosity, and I couldn’t stop reading them.
As a teen-ager, Aaron helped shape R.S.S., the protocol that sends the content of Web sites out as feeds, and he worked on the team that launched Reddit, a site where users share and sort links. Programming was only one of his gifts, though. I became aware of him in January, 2006, not long after he resurrected the Web site of Lingua Franca, a magazine about intellectual life where I had worked as a writer and editor at the turn of the century. The Web site had gone dark not long after the magazine’s bankruptcy and closure in 2001.
Technically Aaron violated my copyright and that of many of my friends when he brought the Lingua Franca website back to life, but as Aaron understood, context matters enormously in questions of copyright. Because bankruptcy leaves behind a legal mess, the odds are that Lingua Franca would have had no online afterlife at all without his intervention. Though I’m a believer in copyright, I was grateful, as were former colleagues whom I discussed it with. Moreover, it tickled me that our old publication had a young fan who was so, well, cool.
I started to keep up with him by reading his blog. In 2007, he collaborated with the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle on Open Library, a project that aimed to catalog and make available books in the public domain, and the same year, he wrote a piece of journalism that impressed me: an article that debunked the notion that the environmentalist Rachel Carson, by virtue of having campaigned in her lifetime against the pesticide D.D.T., was somehow responsible for a later rise in malaria in Africa. It was intelligent and heartfelt. Aaron’s software accomplishments had evidently brought him a fair amount of money, and the article gave me the sense that he was eager to find new ways to contribute to the world’s work. An aptitude for programming, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a developing talent as a writer: It was an intriguing combination. I wondered if I was watching the birth of a new kind of public intellectual.
We got in touch online in 2009, for reasons I don’t remember now, and though I can’t say I ever got to know him well, we started corresponding. He wrote once to say that he was on his way to Williamsburg and did I know whether the journal n+1 was hosting any parties in the near future. Alas, at that moment no parties were scheduled, and I never did get a chance to meet him face-to-face. Another time, he sent me the draft of an essay of his about John Maynard Keynes, and we had a long exchange about the immortality of money, the mortality of humans, income inequity, and the capitalist elite’s apparent efforts to avoid having an economy with full employment. After an article of mine was published containing the phrase “software languages,” he wrote to remind me that the correct term was “programming languages.”
I enjoyed the detailed reports that he posted on his blog of his reading, which was omnivorous. He seemed fascinated by the problem of governance, as it plays out in both corporations and in political entities, and I found myself learning quite a bit from him. In 2010, this interest led him to set up Demand Progress, a lobbying group and a center of online activism, which campaigned for freedom of expression on the Internet and other progressive causes.
One of Aaron’s causes was making freely available information that in his opinion ought to be. In September, 2008, he liberated nearly twenty million pages of federal court records from a government-run database that usually charged a dime or so per page. His scheme was on the near side of the letter of the law, but the F.B.I. compiled a dossier on him anyway and sent a car up and down the street where his family lives in Illinois—hard-line measures that he impishly published on his blog a year later, once he had obtained his F.B.I. file via a Freedom of Information Act request.
He went a step further in September, 2010, stashing a laptop in a utility closet at M.I.T. in order to download 4.8 million scholarly articles from the database JSTOR. He was caught and arrested, and in July, 2011, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts alleged that he intended to upload the articles to a public file-sharing site and charged him with four counts of felony—later raised to thirteen counts. Conviction could have sent him to jail for thirty-five years and cost him a million dollars in fines. Aaron’s friend and mentor Lawrence Lessig has called the federal prosecutor a “bully,” and in a public statement, Aaron’s family has accused her of “intimidation and prosecutorial overreach” that “contributed to his death.”
Though I never debated copyright with Aaron, I suspect we didn’t see eye-to-eye on it. When Congress tried to pass anti-piracy legislation in 2011, he helped lead an Internet campaign against the legislation—a campaign that I found a little overheated. As someone who tries to make a living as a writer, I hope that copyright has a place in the Internet’s future, though not perhaps in its current form. Nonetheless, the idea of sending Aaron to jail for thirty-five years for downloading a mass of scholarly articles—it boggled my mind when I first heard about it, and it still does. After all, there is something wrong in principle with JSTOR and with any database that keeps scholarship, which is heavily subsidized by taxpayer money, behind a paywall. It’s impossible for me to believe that Aaron had any other motive than to protest this failure of principle.
I come by my ambivalence about JSTOR honestly. On the one hand, I’ve written a handful of the articles in it, none of which I ever have been or ever will be paid for, and all of which I wish could circulate freely. And on the other hand, I tap the database almost every working day and find it invaluable, and I know that few worthy things happen in our society unless they can be monetized. If Aaron’s goal was to protest the commercialization of scholarship, I’m not sure he picked the best target. JSTOR is a non-profit, probably better understood as one of the damaged offspring of American higher education than as an active villain. Indeed, at the time of Aaron’s indictment, the organization declared that once Aaron had handed back the files, JSTOR itself “had no interest in this becoming an ongoing legal matter,” and its leaders now insist that “The case is one that we ourselves had regretted being drawn into from the outset.” In the past year, JSTOR has taken steps to open up access to researchers who don’t belong to a university with a subscription, and I hope the organization isn’t demonized for their role in the case.
I can’t bring myself to be so charitable about the federal prosecutor. I simply can’t see how a prosecutor could convince herself that a young activist deserved such merciless treatment for an altruistic mistake.
Some are already starting to hail Aaron as a martyr. That rhetoric makes me uncomfortable for different reasons, and let me finish by trying to explain why. Aaron may or may not have made a mistake when he downloaded the JSTOR articles, but he definitely made one when he killed himself. The person he killed did not deserve that. Just to name one loss for him: He was a curious person, but now he’ll never find out what will happen to Bradley Manning, how the Supreme Court will rule on gay marriage, or whether Congress will ever reform copyright. By just a day or so, he missed learning that the Treasury nixed the idea of minting a trillion-dollar coin—the subject of one of his last tweets. I was looking forward to the great things that Aaron was going to do, but now I have to find a way to move on without him. He seems to have been made more vulnerable to suicide by depression, which he described in a short story and an essay published on his blog in 2007. People find it hard to treat the illness seriously because it “is not seen as ‘real’ enough,” he wrote then. “And there is, of course, the shame.” I’ve struggled with depression since I was younger even than he was, and I’m familiar with the illness that he was describing and the shame that one feels in fighting it. It’s embarrassing to have to ask for help—and then to have to keep asking and asking for it, again and again. But there’s no other way. You can’t think your way out of it, no matter how sharp you are. You have to let at least one other person in.
Because what if someday Congress succeeds in reconceiving copyright for the digital age? If you were someone like Aaron, you’d be sorry to miss it.
Photograph by Michael Francis McElroy/ZUMA Press/Corbis.
