The tragedy of Aaron Swartz

By Tom Chatfield

In January 2011, Aaron Swartz was caught downloading millions of journal articles from the JSTOR scholarly database, via a laptop smuggled into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The US Attorney’s Office in Boston indicted him in federal court on four felony charges, later increased to 13, claiming wire fraud and breach of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The maximum prison sentence was 95 years, the maximum fine over $3m. The justice system had decided to make an example of someone opposed to copyright law, who had publicly called for an end to the “private theft of public culture” and the “privatisation of knowledge”. On January 11th 2013, a few months before his trial was due to begin, Aaron Swartz hung himself in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26 years old. He had told nobody that he was about to take his own life, or why.

Swartz – hacker, programmer, entrepreneur, activist – used technology with a passion and fluency that had set him apart before he was even a teenager, and which earned him intellectual peers decades his senior. Yet, as Justin Peters’ new biography, “The Idealist”, makes clear, Swartz did not live for technology. He wanted to make a difference. Technology was his superpower, his chance to change how things worked. But it also made him vulnerable, colliding the realms of ideals and facts. He was brilliant, young, impatient to fix the inadequacies of actuality. Actuality fought back.