I'm reminded of this Ribbonfarm essay whenever news about Aaron comes up:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/09/17/how-to-be-a-precious-sn...

I think Aaron Swartz's life & death continues to fascinate us because many of us see something in him that we wish we could protect in ourselves. He's the ur-snowflake to all of us clods. It would be nice to live in a world of free access to information, universal compassion, freedom from power hierarchies, and everything that he stood for. It's just not very practical, when content creators need to eat and people have differing desires that are often at odds and reality needs to choose between multiple competing desires.