Aaron Swartz

Recently, I became obsessed with reading "We are the nerds", a book about the story of reddit's fortune, which mentioned the story of Aaron Swartz, a computer genius.

In the summer of 2005, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian established the online platform reddit while participating in the Y combinator start-up program, during which they also met Aaron Swartz through the program. Although Swartz was only 19 years old at the time, he had already participated in the design of RSS 1.0 5 years ago (14 years old!), so he was already well known in the IT world. With the help of Paul Graham, head of Y combinator, Swartz joined the reddit team and became the third founder of reddit. When they first joined reddit, Swartz and Huffman worked closely together. They worked together to rewrite reddit, which was originally written in Lisp, into python, and also enhanced the functions of the website, laying a solid foundation for the rapid growth of reddit in the future. He thought that after joining the genius Swartz, the development of reddit should be even more powerful, but Swartz, who is a bit unusual in his personality and doesn't treat people well, gradually lost interest in the work he was doing, and even stopped developing reddit. His sabotage made Huffman only Can support all the technical work of the website alone. At first Huffman and Ohanian thought he was too young to have a tantrum (don't forget he was only 19 at the time), so they tried to encourage him to return to work, but their hard work paid off in the end, and the team showed up. A state of cold war. With no other option, Huffman and Ohanian opted to sell the burgeoning reddit to media giant Condé Nast—because they feared the company would be screwed up and there would be no chance of a sale if it was too late.

After the acquisition, Swartz, Huffman and Ohanian still work on reddit - the acquisition stipulated that they should stay at the company for at least 3 years, but Swartz's situation has not improved. He disappeared from time to time during his work, and he has been on his personal blog. Condé Nast's bizarre behavior for posting suspected suicide messages was beyond his eyes, and he was fired in January 2007. Swartz was only a little more than a year from participating in reddit to being fired.

The jobless Swartz has since focused on social issues. Swartz, who has always been concerned about these issues, particularly focuses on defending the freedom of information and speech, and even his views on freedom of speech have somewhat influenced the open culture of "speech without boundaries" in the early days of the reddit community (of course, whether it is good or bad is a matter of opinion) . He even risked his life by using his own program to download a large number of files from PACER (a website that stores US court records) and JSTOR (a database of academic papers), and then publish them for free on the Internet. He believes that information should be freely available to anyone, and believes that his "hacking" is entirely in the public interest. But apparently the U.S. government didn't think so: U.S. police later arrested Swartz and charged him with hacking JSTOR. Although some media and academics have pleaded for Swartz, the prosecution still insists on increasing the charges, which may make Swartz face a heavier sentence. Swartz, who was already emotionally unstable, hanged himself under the pressure of criminal prosecution and financial difficulties. He died at the age of 26.

In his short life, this extraordinary computer wizard has brought many important contributions to the Internet: RSS for publishing information on the Internet, Creative Commons protocol for promoting information sharing, Python module web.py, and early reddit programming, etc. , and Swartz's insistence on freedom of speech and information is even more far-reaching: he has participated in and promoted the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA, a US bill aimed at combating online infringements, but the provisions are generally considered by the Internet community to hinder freedom of speech) ; After his death, the academic community and the U.S. government began to question or even review the appropriateness of academic achievements being locked behind a paywall.

Swartz's uncompromising spirit and ill-mannered personality made him suffer, and his almost hysterical pursuit of freedom even indirectly wrote his sad ending. There is no doubt that some of his initiatives have been controversial, and he has made many mistakes during the development of reddit and promoting related issues, but no one can deny that many of his actions are out of the pursuit of universal values. If he is a "normal person" and concentrates on writing programs, launching startups, and going public, even if he can't become Mark Zuckerberg's second, it's not impossible to be on par with Jimmy Wales. But "unfortunately" he did not embark on this "ordinary road". Instead, he embarked on a road against power that challenged the system, and became the Don Quixote in the eyes of many people. The public either ignored his actions, or It is to ridicule him, and the system's suppression of dissidents is even more ruthless. No matter how talented Swartz is, he can only become a victim under "justice" in the end, even if the so-called "justice" actually does not exist. It is based on the greater injustices of not opening up information and unequal knowledge.

In order to commemorate Swartz's efforts, later generations have designated November 9 every year as Aaron Swartz Day . Different websites and hackers continue to promote information liberalization in order to continue Swartz's beliefs. A belated affirmation for him.