You should look more closely at the history. RSS (at least, the branch of it that people use), CC, and Reddit would have exactly the same form they have today - exactly! - without Aaron's involvement.
For example: "This article was first published in 2005. After it was published, Django launched a RemovingTheMagic project to address some of my criticisms (though personally I still find it unusable), web.py inspired FriendFeed’s tornado.web and Google’s gae.webapp and others (though I still prefer web.py), and this article led to a permanent surge in Reddit traffic that still hasn’t really stopped growing."
Lessig would probably disagree with you on CC.
I left off Demand Progress so maybe we'd have SOPA in place today.