Farewell Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)

It looks like Aaron Swartz may have willed all his money to Givewell. This... makes it even sadder, somehow, in ways I don't know how to describe.

His last Reddit comment was on /r/HPMOR.

One of my favorite quotes of his, from Fix the machine, not the person:

[When a] system isn’t working, it doesn’t make sense to just yell at the people in it — any more than you’d try to fix a machine by yelling at the gears. True, sometimes you have the wrong gears and need to replace them, but more often you’re just using them in the wrong way. When there’s a problem, you shouldn’t get angry with the gears — you should fix the machine.

...You can’t force other people to change. You can, however, change just about everything else. And usually, that’s enough.

Fuck.

That's really disturbing. I exchanged some friendly emails with him a few months back last time :/ . Didn't think of this as a possibility at all. So sad to see younger people go.

Sidenote: something is profoundly wrong with US. 35 years sentence even as a possibility? What the hell? In the EU he'd face some fine and community service maybe and that's about it, or actually nothing at all as the case would have been dropped when MIT and JSTOR backed down.

From the linked Cory Doctorow eulogy:

This morning, a lot of people are speculating that Aaron killed himself because he was worried about doing time. That might be so. Imprisonment is one of my most visceral terrors, and it's at least credible that fear of losing his liberty, of being subjected to violence (and perhaps sexual violence) in prison, was what drove Aaron to take this step. But Aaron was also a person who'd had problems with depression for many years.

A depressed 26-year-old faced a significant probability of spending decades in a small steel cage in which he would face a high likelihood of being repeatedly raped.

I feel like there's nothing I can say that will do justice to this tragedy, but it seems worse to say nothing.

Aaron was a hero, and the world will be a darker place without him.

I feel sad. I almost always cry when I feel death in near mode. I didn't know Aaron except for his glorious deeds and LW posts, but it still feels awful.

I feel guilty because there are many more people I can't cry for. Aaron was a cool guy, but so are all the other people who die every day.

I feel angry at the world for being so terrible and destroying one of us forever. Death is unacceptable. Let's stop this, OK?

Can we promote this to Main in homage? That's the piece I remembered when I realized "Oh crap, this Aaron Swartz".

He killed himself; this is true. He faced 35 years of confinement and the very-real prospect of rape. This, too, is true. He was criminalized for his intent to freely distribute scientific knowledge. This makes him a hero. He broke, but only storybook heroes are unbreakable. It's depressing how society seems to persecute those most able to improve it; that the broken machine slays those very engineers who've dedicated their lives to its repair.

The public servants responsible for the case against Aaron Swartz as of July 2011:

U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz
Special Agent in Charge Steven D. Ricciardi
Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen P. Heymann
Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott L. Garland
Cambridge Police Commissioner Robert C. Haas
The U.S. Secret Service’s Electronic Crimes Task Force
The Cambridge Police Department
The MIT Police Department

May they be remembered.

--Teresa Nielsen Hayden

This is from the discussion I mentioned as "more links"-- I probably should have said something about how thorough it is.

So, The Tech is reporting that Aaron Swartz has killed himself. No suicide note has surfaced, PGP-signed or otherwise. No public statements that I've been able to find have identified witnesses or method. Aaron Swartz was known for having many enemies. There's the obvious enemies in the publishing industry and the US attorneys office. Cory Doctorow wrote that he had "a really unfortunate pattern of making high-profile, public denunciations of his friends and mentors."

I'd like to raise the possibility that this was not a natural event. Most of this evidence can be adequately explained by how little time has passed, so we'll know more in a few days or weeks.

Strange side note: He had a PGP public key on his web page at http://www.aaronsw.com/pgp, retrievable from Wayback Machine, but the link went bad some time after Jul 28 2012. All other links on the site seem to be fine.

Additional side note: if your chance of being murdered ever goes past 0.01, state publicly that you don't believe in suicide and that any suicide note would definitely be cryptographically verifiable. If it ever goes past 0.05, set up a record-audio-to-Internet button that you can activate in under a second, then give your lawyer a signed message saying that any supposed suicide note which lacks a certain phrase is fake.

One more human dead. One of the saddest possible things imaginable, and it happens on a daily basis. It is particularly sad to see this happen to "one of our own". I somewhat wish that we could feel this sad at each death that happens, but I don't think we could survive that amount of sadness. So we go on through life, constantly knowing deep down that utter tragedy is happening every minute, but doing our best not to think about it lest we allow it to wash over us and submerge us in a tide of constant misery.

Ugh. What a world we live in...

I'm furious, but my target is not the legal system or the idiots who bullied Swartz. I despise them, yes, but there's a bigger target that might be causing way more harm here.

I was writing this big text about it, but there wasn't really much concrete information in it. It feels like the media's lack of action, in light of the current movement and near-martyrdom status Swartz has gained now that the public media jumped on the news of the suicide and spread it all over the ball we live on, is partly to blame.

All the counterfactuals ran through my head when I read about this. Basically, Swartz was fighting for access to information, in a manner that apparently broke no laws or rules he could have been aware of, and it turned out to be the lack of public awareness about his case, and his lack of information on how the public and his friends would react and support him, that probably contributed the most to whatever complicated thing happened in his mind to make him end his life.

(ETA: It looks like other people are also picking up on this (linked article made #1 on HackerNews at time of edit), so yeah, media and information issues.)

Because of shitty broken social systems, the news of his death are contributing more to his life goals than the news of his life. Think about this. For him, dying turned out to be more effective than living.

This should not be.

Stigmatizing depression is bad. Stigmatizing suicide is probably good, and I'm worried by the posthumous status boost Aaron is getting. More thoughts on this

Even Tim Berners-Lee weighs in:

Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.

A eulogy by Cory Doctorow is up at BoingBoing.

Apparently, his (heroic) actions may not even have been illegal. Stupid ***** legal system.

First post, though long time lurker. One thing that has been bothering me about this: Aaron was familiar with the methods. He was a member of this community. He had a brilliant mind. How was he willing to take this action? I find myself confused, for these seem to be completely contradictory facts.

As someone with a history of mental illness, I have found certain comfort in rationality. Using the tools of rationality, I believed I've been able to notice when my thinking starts to go wonky and depression begins to kick in, and I'm able to take action against it. I believe that I will never again consider suicide a possibility.

But this happened. It doesn't change anything about my practices or actions, but it is a piece of evidence that rationality isn't enough, and that bothers me. I can read through his writing, like the post mentioned in another comment (fix the machine, not the person), and see how it directly contradicts the idea of suicide. But evidently, that was not enough.

I found this Hacker News comment pretty inspiring... it's amazing how much he was able to accomplish, especially considering he was only 26.

Reading more about the circumstances of Aaron's suicide has led me to be quite upset with certain individuals who decided to prosecute him anyway, despite JSTOR dropping their suit and convincing others to do the same. For shame.

I'm saddened he no longer though his life worth living, I hope the remaining people's lives can be made better, it was very generous of him to make efforts to that end.

So I occasionally come across posts comparing the cases of Aaron Swartz and Amanda Todd: both bullied for years and eventually committing suicide after making a less-than-prudent decision at some point in their lives. On the face of it, it seems silly to compare a fighter for freedom of information and against censorship with a naive young girl talked into lifting her top on camera. However, the actual impact of their suicides may well be comparable if the legal system and public perceptions are affected as a result. Is there something to this, or is it just a standard accidental pattern matching?

My personal favourite of his essays: Against Reflective Equilibrium (or, What is ethics for?)

Another petition: To

Investigate the possible abuse of power by US District Attorney Carmen Ortiz and others in the Aaron Swartz case.

For downloading academic journal articles, Aaron Swartz faced criminal charges that (if he won) at best would have cost him $1 million in legal fees, and (if he lost) at worst could have cost him $4 million more in fines and up to 50 years in prison[1]. Even if he were guilty -- and it is not clear that he was[2] -- such absurdly harsh prosecution is not justice.

A bully whose victim is driven to suicide is not solely responsible for the victim's death, nor are prosecutors Ortiz and Heymann solely to blame for Aaron's suicide. But they do bear responsibility for their own prosecutorial abuse.

The public deserves an independent investigation into the prosecutorial excesses that contributed to Aaron's death.

Found via a comment on this article.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/01/remembering-aaron-swartz

It should have been me. He was doing more for the world than most people ever will and he died when my selfish lazy ass survived. I'm a fucking moron so I didn't notice the friction between the rope and the anchor and it broke and I landed on my ass, but he wasn't a fucking moron, he could see that kind of thing and now he's dead. Fucking hell, why couldn't it just have been me instead of him?

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