Aaron has been fascinated by the Internet since he was a child. At the age of 13, he participated in the formulation of the RSS 1.0 standard. At the age of 15, he participated in the creation of the CC Creative Commons (Creative Commons). Then he and John Gruber co-invented Markdown, and he was also a famous social news website. Co-founder of Reddit. He hated school education and jobs in big companies like other hackers. After dropping out of Stanford University, he went to the newly established startup incubator Y Combinator and became the first batch of graduates. When Reddit was acquired and the company was no longer a small team of four, he also chose to leave. His ideal is not to create a company that can achieve commercial success, but to promote the free flow of knowledge and information, and to ensure that people have the right to obtain public knowledge. From this perspective, he is not simply a technical geek or entrepreneur, but an organizer of political movements.
RSS allows people to easily subscribe to content sources on the Internet. Using subscribers like Google Reader, people can organize the blogs and news they usually follow to get the latest content at all times. The CC agreement is aimed at the traditional Copyright (reserving all copyrights). Works that follow the CC agreement only reserve part of the rights, and others can freely distribute these works (provided that they cannot be used for commercial purposes). The book "Code 2.0" written by Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the CC agreement (and Aaron's mentor), adopted the CC principle, and its translation rights are no longer monopolized by domestic publishing houses. Aaron also participated in the creation of the Open Library project. He collected public data in the U.S. Library of Congress and tried to build an online archive of all books and share it with everyone.
Aaron hates all unreasonable behaviors that hinder the spread of knowledge in order to make money. When he learns that people browsing federal legal documents on PACER (the electronic warehouse of federal court records) actually need to pay for each page, he uses the program to transfer the library Download the legal documents available here and upload them to Public.Resource.Org for everyone to view for free. Although this is not illegal, it has attracted the attention of the FBI and put the young man under pressure from public power for the first time. Then it was a download that drove him to death. As we all know, the copyright of many academic journals is in the hands of publishers, and most people cannot browse these papers for free. In order to try to share these materials, Aaron, a researcher at Harvard University, took advantage of his identity to sneak into the computer room of MIT and downloaded a large number of academic journal articles on JSTOR through the MIT network. This time he was subjected to phishing law enforcement by the U.S. Secret Service and the police, and was arrested in January 2011.
The prosecution finally brought 13 felony charges against Aaron in order to kill the chickens and the monkeys. He may face decades of jail and a fine of 1 million U.S. dollars. All this finally made Aaron, who was deeply depressed, committed suicide on January 11, 2013, at the age of 26.
"Information is power. But like all power, some people just want to own it. All the scientific and cultural heritage in the world, which has been published in books and periodicals for centuries, is gradually being used by a few private companies. Digitize and lock up. Want to read those papers with the most famous research results? You have to pay a lot of money to publishers like Reed Elsevier. Force scholars to pay to see the work of colleagues? Scan all libraries, but Only allow people to read through Google? Only provide scientific literature for students of famous first-world universities, but not for children in third-world countries? This is shameless and unacceptable."
-Aaron Swartz, "Guerilla Team Open Access Manifesto (Guerilla Open Access Manifesto)
Before he committed suicide, he led a beautiful victory, which was a campaign against SOPA (Prohibition of Internet Piracy Act). This is the highlight moment in Aaron's short life, and it is also a shining moment of the power of the Internet in promoting social innovation. The original intention of SOPA is to protect copyright, but the actual handling method has severely shaken the foundation of Internet information openness and requires Internet platforms to conduct self-censorship, which most Internet companies cannot tolerate. And those who support SOPA are the traditional copyright owners, including publishing companies, record companies, film companies, etc., behind which there are huge benefits. When SOPA was proposed, it received the support of many members of Congress. Aaron, who believes in freedom of information, naturally did not want the bill to pass. For this reason, he founded the "Demand Progress" (Demand Progress), which organized mass lobbying to call on ordinary people to petition the Congress. Oppose SOPA.
On SOPA, members of Congress clearly underestimated the power of netizens. It can be seen from the defection of the world-renowned domain name provider GoDaddy: GoDaddy initially supported SOPA, and this move caused protests from many webmasters. Many websites, including Wikipedia, quickly withdrew from GoDaddy within two days by 37000. With multiple domain names, GoDaddy quickly stated that it switched to the opposition camp. On January 18, 2012, Wikipedia, Reddit, Craigslist, Mozilla and other websites decided to shut down for 24 hours to express their protest. On that day, the phone call of Congress was blown and the situation quickly reversed. The next day, many MPs who originally supported SOPA were arrested. Shake, stand on the side of opposition, and in the end SOPA was not passed by Congress. Aaron was very happy. This was one of the few moments of victory in his life. This moment made him feel that his ideas were feasible in the real world.
There is no doubt that the Internet has penetrated into all aspects of our lives. Even a bill promoted by huge interest groups and political forces like SOPA is no match for the tens of thousands of ordinary people who use the Internet. If an Internet company supports SOPA, users can vote with their feet to make it impossible to survive; if someone shakes the foundation of the Internet, the major Internet companies will not hesitate to conduct joint protests, and their amplification effect is hundreds of times stronger than street protests. . The proponents of SOPA did not realize that the resistance faced by such a counter-current bill was so great, and Aaron did not realize that the power of the Internet was already quite mature politically, and he did not embrace too much in the beginning. hope. In any case, this is a major event in American political history, and Aaron has also become a major figure in this major event.
However, this victory did not change Aaron's ending. The prosecution relied on the outdated Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to increase the felony charges against Aaron, and Aaron also rejected a plea that would bring grace. After Aaron was arrested, JSTOR gave up the prosecution. The government has been trying to kill a hundred people. MIT, once considered the birthplace of the hacker spirit, remained neutral and sat idly by. The free and unrestrained life was disrupted by this case. Aaron, who was sensitive and fragile by nature, also suffered from depression. He was burdened with great mental pressure and financial burden and finally chose to commit suicide before the trial of the case without leaving any last words. Many people feel frustrated and angry about this. The turbulent emotions are mixed with regrets for talented teenagers, dissatisfaction with the government's rush to kill, disappointment at MIT's betrayal of the hacker spirit, and complaints against this morbid society.
Sir Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web and a good friend of Aaron, wrote sadly:
Aaron is dead.
Wanderers in this crazy world,
we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.
Hackers for right, we are one down,
we have lost one of our own.
Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders,
parents all,
we have lost a child.
Let us all weep.
Aaron Swartz may never attract the attention of the public like Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerberg , His ability is enough for him to obtain a huge amount of wealth, but he did not do so, but chose a path that few people walked. Like Tim Berners-Lee, Aaron doesn’t care about making money. He only cares about how to truly achieve freedom of information and empower the people. He is a pure idealist. He could see through the irrationality of this society at a glance, but his thoughts were too advanced, and he was too sensitive. In the battle against the powerful system with one person's power, he was finally strangled by this era. The era of the Internet revolution has passed. Now it is not only the government that wants to restrict freedom, but the closure and monopoly of many Internet companies has also built a high wall. Openness, freedom, sharing, these ideas that once represented the core values of the Internet are being marginalized. Aaron must have felt a certain degree of loneliness and helplessness in it. But this is not a hopeless battle. After Aaron's death, those old laws were fiercely attacked by the people and legal circles. Congress has also kept pace with the times and amended it, including the "Aaron Act" which amended the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" of 1986, and the "Science and Technology Research Achievement Fair Access Act" which promoted free academic papers. (FASTR), the latter is called "Another Aaron Act." Some scholars have also begun to publish their papers online for free, and attach the hashtag #pdftribute to express their condolences to Aaron. Time will prove it all.
Aaron Swartz's life is short and glorious, and his story should be known to everyone. He is a pioneer in advancing information openness and the Prometheus of our time. Maybe we can't bear the price of the rebel's pursuit of freedom, but at least we can practice Aaron's ideas in our lives. This is probably the best memorial to him.
"It’s not enough just to live in and the current world. That way, you have to accept what others give you. I think there must be a spirit of questioning. I think from a scientific perspective, everything you learn is temporary. There is room for correction, refutation, and questioning in everything I have learned. The same is true for society. When I can try my best to solve a real fundamental problem, I cannot avoid it."
-Aaron Swartz
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