Aaron Swartz was not a saint

Plenty of people had nothing good to say about Aaron Swartz. You'll notice that, aside from the black bar on HN the day his death became public, none of the people associated with YC, Reddit, etc., have said anything about him or his death. There's an excellent Latin phrase for all that:

De mortuis nil nisi bonum.

> I’m fed up with the Aaron Swartz hagiography and subsequent bullshit garment-rending from people who didn’t know him

> I don’t think I ever met him .. I may or may not have ever corresponded with him many years ago

Tom Negrino, you're an idiot.

Neither was my brother. Doesn't mean I will go on about his flaws after he died. He was human. Aaron also was. They both made mistakes. Give people some time to grieve before writing things about him. You are hurting people. Whatever Aaron did, he had a family, partner, and friends who are deeply saddened by his tragic death. Posts like these don't help. Let time heal the wounds, and then talk about it.

Tom, I think you should follow your own policy:

"However, we’ve decided that the comment area will be an Asshole-Free Zone. We’ve seen too many good discussions degenerate into forums for jerks. Because this is our blog, we see no reason to suffer fools and jerks; they can go post somewhere else, like on their own blogs (that we won’t read). So, we reserve the right to delete comments at our whim, if we determine that the comment has that indefinable but-we-know-it-when-we-see-it asshole quality. If someone is repeatedly annoying, we reserve the right to ban their IP address so that they can’t post again."

Your post has, as you say, "that indefinable but-we-know-it-when-we-see-it asshole quality".

Am I the only one that finds it ironic that this post is right above your post titled "Civility doesn’t come for free; or, hammer the trolls"?

Nobody cared about Swartz before he died- it's almost disgusting how people who disparaged his case and never once considered donating to his legal funds are now praising him as a a saint. He was a saint, but the majority of people saying that now weren't saying so before the fact.

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

He seems like he was more or less a human from where I'm standing. He did some good things, he did some bad things both of which are entirely subjective based on your values. Remember him for the things he did, good and bad. Let's learn from his mistakes and let's shut up about this and concentrate on building/doing something neat so that the rest of the world has reason to talk about us for weeks on end after we die.

I almost upvoted this post reflexively based on the title alone, because I think debate is helpful and even as a huge admirer of Aaron's, I think extreme hagiography is never a good thing.

Unfortunately, the OP doesn't fit the bill, and sounds like it comes from one of the many annoyed people whose computers lack the ability to not click-through to a story they know they won't enjoy reading.

I was hoping the OP would be half as interesting as the bait title, but I almost stopped at this paragraph:

> I don’t think I ever met him (I might have, at an O’Reilly conference in San Jose years ago); I may or may not have ever corresponded with him many years ago, and I can’t be bothered to look through my email archives to check. I know I read a bunch of his words at one point, possibly on a mailing list or on his blog. But I had no personal connection with him, as far as I can remember.

OK...

> My personal view is that killing yourself and leaving your body to be found by your lover is a profoundly horrible, selfish, and unforgivable action, and one that deserves our disgust, not our compassion. I’ll reserve my compassion for the woman whom he presumably loved, but he knew would find his corpse...The Saint Aaron bandwagon so many people have piled onto nauseates me.

OK, I guess if people are going to calling Aaron a "saint", I guess that justifies judging his suicide like the Catholic Church would...?

----

edit:

What really leaves a bad taste in my mouth is how the OP uses personal flaws (personal flaws that he admits he only knows from hearing about on the Internet) as the primary strike against Aaron being a worthwhile person to remember. If that were justified, then Steve Jobs should likewise be pissed on...not only did he break as many laws as Aaron (such as selling blue boxes), he was indisputably a more prickly person. Hell, if you really want to rank someone's worth by their personal foibles, MLK Jr. may be considered as despicable by the OP's standards.

So, first you make a big stink about people talking about the guy while not knowing about him, and then you go on to make at least 5 or more assumptions about him after you clearly admit that you did not know him well, if at all. Hypocrisy at its finest, ladies and gentlemen.

"But Swartz was offended" - citation needed

"he more or less expected to be let off the hook for his actions" - citation needed

"I had . . . seen how he lashed out at people" - funny how you provide links and evidence for all of the other statements in your essay, but this one is left out. citation needed

"he decided his moral outrage trumped the petty laws of the stupid" - citation needed

Another thing -- no one is making him out to be a "saint". They're just saddened that someone with great potential would go to so far an extent. Also, the anger directed at the prosecutors is absolutely plausible. It's ridiculous to claim that he killed himself because he wasn't "man enough" to survive the 6 months in jail. While his lover did not mention anything about a mental illness, denial is common with loved ones. Another thing -- he had a disease called ulcerative colitis, which unfortunately I do suffer from as well. It is one of the most excruciatingly painful and disabling conditions someone can have. It is known to cause depression in many people. Perhaps that disease also played a role in his death, however miniscule it may be.

I do agree that the comparisons to MLK are over-the-top, but the thing was, he was a kid. A human kid. Humans make mistakes. If he was arrogant, so be it. People have different personalities. Steve Jobs was a total vindictive prick. Nobody gives a damn because he "changed the world." Linus is a royal ass a lot of the time, and nobody gives a damn. Why? Because he's a multi-millionaire software developer. But when a kid is mean to 5 people, oh no! Everybody loses their shit. It's ridiculous.

Also, PACER documents are legally specified to be freely accessible. That's the whole reason the charges were dropped against him. There's so much misinformation in this article, but I won't bother sifting through it. I've wasted enough time on HN today.

My conclusion is that: the author of this essay is someone who fails to present proper evidence to back up their fantasy of how Swartz behaved in the real world, and is also has no capability to empathize with Swartz in the situation he was in. He also is a major hypocrite that needs to take a look at what comes out of his keyboard and how it all fits together. He's just another idiot that's trying to be "hipster" and stick out from the norm.

So, here are my final few words to the author:

Fuck you, Tom Negrino, for being a dick about someone who has contributed a lot more to society than you think, and also fuck you for proudly stating your "facts" without proper evidence.

You're a dickhead, and all the flak you're getting on Reddit and HN is rightly deserved.

-kunai

I think the dude wanted to make a statement by killing himself. Suicide was not the only option he had. In my view, with his fame and all, he was in a unique position to fight back the charges.

Meh just a blathering moron... why is this even on the front page.

OK, I'll bite and engage a point from what's otherwise a trollish post...Let's skip the well-tread debate over the role of his depression in his suicide or if he was "man enough" to be considered a "real" activist...

The OP argues that Aaron's subterfuge makes him a poor candidate for respect:

> Swartz’s many apologists are, if effect, arguing that his actions should be completely excused because he was morally in the right. I’ve seen the more fevered comparing his actions to Martin Luther King. This is a nearly obscene comparison. King repeatedly risked his life for the civil rights of his people, proudly stood as the leader of his movement, and took responsibility for his actions. Swartz surreptitiously downloaded a bunch of data from a closet, tried to hide his face when he slipped away with the loot, and wasn’t willing to pay any penalty.

IIRC, MLK Jr chose civil disobedience because he wanted to draw public attention to the evils of segregation. Aaron obviously wanted to draw attention to his cause, but I think it's also likely that he cared as much if not more about the actual prize -- the knowledge acquired from JSTOR -- than he did about getting caught to prove a moral point.

What if he did walk into MIT, announce his name and cause, and just started brazenly freeing JSTOR until he got arrested? I suspect his detractors would still use this as an example of what a showboat he was. But what if Aaron's priority was getting the knowledge out to the world, with making a moral stand just an ad-hoc objective?

Combine this with the fact that the FBI stalked him after the PACER incident, which was decidedly both noble and legal...then it's no wonder that Aaron felt he had to be secretive. Whether or not you approve of his tragic strategy to liberate JSTOR, I find it a bit much to label him a coward, as the OP implies.

Most people would've been content with the successful showdown over PACER while secretly shitting themselves that the FBI put forth the resources to build a criminal case against them. Aaron was reportedly freaked out about it. And yet after that brush with the law, he still cared more about freeing knowledge than being safe.

Stupid? Probably, especially in hindsight. But cowardly? Perhaps, but it's at least a little less cowardly than a contrarian-wannabe pissing on the grave of someone they've never met.

Nobody claimed he was a saint, not that I know of. What they said was that he was a hacktivist and broke the law in protest of it being unfair. He found a loophole by using a closet at MIT to download JSTOR data behind an MIT IP address and kept changing his MAC address when they banned his old MAC address.

Some of you run a script that automatically changes your MAC address every time you reboot your system, apparently that is a crime how.

Google runs a web robot that scrapes content, no different than what Aaron wrote to scrap JSTOR articles.

The only real difference is that Aaron did not ask JSTOR for permission to download content. How many of you use Bit Torrent to download files without permission?

It is not so much that Aaron was innocent and a saint, he was not, it is more the case of they tried to make an example out of him and bullied and harassed him and brought outrageous punishments to him that far exceed his crimes.

The man was bullied and harassed by lawyers until he killed himself. You got cases of teenagers doing that to other teenagers over the Internet and call the bullies as murderers. But if a lawyer does it to a defendant it is not considered a murder, is it? Well maybe it should be?