Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz, computer programmer and activist, committed suicide on January 11th, aged 26
SMALL, dark, cluttered places were important in the life of Aaron Swartz. His days were spent hunched in his bedroom over his MacBook Pro, his short-sighted eyes nearly grazing the screen (why, he asked himself, weren’t laptop screens at eye level?), in a litter of snaking cables and hard drives. In the heady days of 2005 when he was developing Reddit, now the web’s most popular bulletin board, he and his three co-founders shared a house in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he slept in a cupboard. And it was in a cupboard—an unlocked wiring cupboard, where a homeless man kept stuff—that in November 2010 he surreptitiously placed a laptop, hidden under a box, and plugged it directly into the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline “Aaron Swartz”
Obituary
January 19th 2013
From the January 19th 2013 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the edition
Athol Fugard spoke truth to apartheid South Africa
South Africa’s greatest playwright of the apartheid era died on March 8th, aged 92
Stitch by stitch, Rose Girone kept her family going
The oldest known Holocaust survivor died on February 24th, aged 113
Muhsin Hendricks fought homophobia with the Koran
The world’s first openly gay imam was shot dead on February 15th, aged 57
Pableaux Johnson, peerless host and chronicler of New Orleans
The photographer, cook and food writer died on January 26th, aged 59
Donald Shoup knew how to get cities going
The parking-and-traffic expert died on February 6th, aged 86
Marianne Faithfull battled labels all her life
The singer and icon of the 1960s died on January 30th, aged 78