Greetings, friends. (IV)

Greetings, friends. This past week was the 10th anniversary of the passing of Aaron Swartz, a fact to which I was alerted by a Facebook post of Rich’s. Obviously I can’t believe it’s been that long.

I know it is poor form to speak ill of the dead, but they were human in life, once. I think people have poured into Aaron’s memory that which they wanted to see in him, but to me it all feels like a cardboard cutout of who he really was.

Aaron was, to say the least, exasperating. I met him at some open wireless spectrum thing hosted by Lawrence Lessig at Stanford circa 2002. What I remember from that first meeting was going out for lunch with him and Cory Doctorow and, in my recollection, Wendy Seltzer at a Thai restaurant in Palo Alto. Aaron poured over the menu at the restaurant and wound up ordering white rice. He was a supertaster, apparently, which was a thing I had never heard of.

He was absolutely brilliant, no doubt. Aaron was 14 going on 44, able to keep up with the intellectual heavyweights in the tech industry before he was old enough to shave. And he was possessed of a profound sense of justice, and fairness, and freedom, and he was determined to work for it. But he was also obstinate, he loved to thumb his nose at authority, and he was intensely competitive.

One day in 2006 or so, Aaron called me up to say that he had gotten a hold of the US Postal Service Master Address File, a list of every postal address in the entire country, a database for which the USPS normally charges a lot of money. Aaron had come into a copy of this database, which had somehow fallen off the back of a truck or something, and he wanted my help distributing it. His contention was that, because the US government can’t itself hold copyright, the only obstacle to distributing the Master Address File was the contract imposed by the USPS on the buyer (licensee?) of the database. Since neither he nor I had a contract with the USPS, that loophole ought to allow us to share the postal address database freely with the entire world.

This was Aaron for you in a nutshell. He was convinced that the world would be a better place if people had better access to more and better information. Aaron was personally offended to his very core that someone had seen fit to erect a wall around facts about the world, and he was determined to undermine that wall, even at considerable risk.

I never got to test his theory. I was working at the time for a company that built and sold geographic database software, to the US government among others, and I didn’t think they would appreciate me starring in a potential legal controversy like that one. I curse my cowardice. Aaron probably later found out that he was wrong, because he never mentioned it again, but my stock options in that company were never worth anything anyway. The adventure would’ve been worth it.

Aaron wasn’t just intellectually brilliant. One day, a couple years later, he and Quinn turned up on my doorstep in Brooklyn looking for somewhere to crash, and I was glad to offer them the couch. Quinn knew Aaron better than anyone, probably, and has written about him more eloquently than I possibly could.

The two of them probably arrived to find me fighting my way through learning to play the drums in Guitar Hero: World Tour on the PS2. I had been practicing at length and I was not good at it.

I woke up the next morning and padded out to the living room to find Aaron thumping away on the drum pads, banging out an easy rhythm to, I don’t know, Fleetwood Mac, or something. I blinked and realized he was playing on Expert level, and not even breaking a sweat.

“You’ve played this before,” I said.

“Never,” he said, not looking at me, not dropping a beat.

“You play the drums, though. Right?”

“No,” he said, still watching the notes roll down the screen. “This is my first time.”

You see what I mean? Exasperating.

I don’t know what to say about his demise. I was very angry with Aaron for a long time after he left this life for checking out in the way that he did. But then, goodness knows, I’ve thought about it myself.

I’m sorry Aaron’s not with us anymore, however painful the journey was (and would have been) for him. He was a deeply irritating person to be friends with, but he also had a profoundly generous soul and his brilliance was a credit to humankind. He would have accomplished so much good if he had survived. Mental illness sucks and Aaron deserved better. We all deserve better.

Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est, all of them, but especially the bastards that hounded Aaron to his end.

May your memory be a blessing, buddy.