The Idealist: Aaron Swartz wanted to save the world. Why couldn’t he save himself?
On Jan. 4, 2013, Aaron Swartz woke up in an excellent mood. “He turned to me,” recalls his girlfriend Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, “and said, apropos of nothing, ‘This is going to be a great year.’ ” Swartz had reason to feel optimistic. For a year and a half, he’d been under indictment for wire and computer fraud, a seemingly endless ordeal that had drained his fortune and his emotional reserves. But he had new lawyers, and they were working hard to find common ground with the government. Maybe they’d finally reach an acceptable plea bargain. Maybe they’d go to trial, and win.
“We’re going to win, and I’m going to get to work on all the things I care about again,” Swartz told his girlfriend that day. It’s not that he’d been idle. In addition to his job at the global IT consultancy ThoughtWorks, he’d become a contributing editor to the Baffler, done significant research on how to reform drug policy, and completed about 80 percent of a massive plot summary of the novel Infinite Jest. But Swartz held himself to high standards, and there was always more to do: more books to read, more programs to write, more ways to contribute to the countless projects he’d signed on for.
Swartz and Stinebrickner-Kauffman started 2013 with a Vermont ski vacation. They were joined by the young daughter of Swartz’s ex-girlfriend, tech journalist Quinn Norton. He loved Norton's daughter more than anyone in the world. Swartz adored children, and he could act like a child himself. A pathologically picky eater, he ate only bland foods: dry Cheerios, white rice, Pizza Hut’s personal pan cheese pizzas. He told friends he was a “supertaster,” extraordinarily sensitive to flavor—as if his taste buds were constantly moving from a dark room into bright light.
Though he called himself an “applied sociologist,” Swartz was best known as a computer programmer. His current project, a piece of software he called Victory Kit, was going well. Victory Kit would be an open-source, free version of the expensive community-organizing software used by groups like MoveOn—the sort of thing grassroots activists from around the world might use.
Some of those activists came to hear Swartz give a presentation on Victory Kit at a conference in upstate New York on Jan. 9. At the last minute, though, Swartz decided not to speak. His friend Ben Wikler says Swartz’s talk depended on someone else committing to join him in making their code open source. When he couldn’t secure that commitment in time, Swartz decided he wasn’t talking. “I remember being annoyed at him for being a stick-in-the-mud,” Wikler says.
Swartz had his principles, and he held to them forcefully. “Aaron generally felt like being a stickler about that stuff made the world better, because it actually pushed people to do the right thing,” says Wikler. He wouldn’t sign any contracts that might encourage patent trolling. He was finicky about his wardrobe, wearing T-shirts whenever possible. “Suits,”he wrote on his blog, “are the physical evidence of power distance, the entrenchment of a particular form of inequality.”
He wasn’t dogmatic about everything. He’d always been opposed to marriage, but he was starting to think he’d gotten that wrong. On Friday, Jan. 11, Stinebrickner-Kauffman stopped over at Wikler’s house. She and Swartz were coming over for dinner later that night, but she came by herself beforehand. As she played with Wikler’s new baby, she mentioned that Swartz had told her that, after the case was resolved, he might consider getting married. If that was possible, anything was possible. But less than two miles away, in a small and dark studio apartment, Aaron Swartz was already dead. Read more:
