The best of Aaron Swartz
Aaron Swartz is most commonly remembered for his technical achievements or the tragic circumstances of his death. However, the mark he’s always left on me was his unique voice in writing - one that has paved the way for this generation of internet writers. Aaron was one of the first and best online bloggers that wrote to understand.
A quick summary of Aaron’s life as programmer and hacktivist: At the age of 13, he was already the creator of award-winning websites and a co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification underpinning web feeds. Four years later in 2005, Paul Graham encouraged him to be part of YC’s first batch of startups. This eventually led to his co-founding Reddit. After Reddit was acquired, Aaron discovered corporate life wasn’t for him. He turned his energies towards solving the problems he saw in journalism and politics. Aaron continued to pursue problems in political advocacy when, in 2011, he was arrested for writing code to systematically download academic articles from the digital library JSTOR. With multiple felony charges looming over him, Aaron took his own life two years later.
Throughout this journey, Aaron was relentlessly curious. His blog posts spanned topics across economics, science, philosophy, and technology. When you read his best work, you can see how he faced problems and, through the process of writing, solved them.
Understanding himself
Much of Aaron’s blog was introspective. He lays bare his thinking on topics many of us would consider private.
Lawrence Lessig tells a story of sharing the details of one of Aaron’s blog posts to some friends. When Aaron found out, he was upset about this breach of privacy. In response to Lessig’s confusion on why he would consider the revealing content from a post on a public website a violation, Aaron responded it’s “for the people that read my blog. Not for the random student at Stanford Law School!”.
This not-quite-public-but-not-quite-private perspective Aaron had for his blog meant he didn’t hesitate from being vulnerable. We can see the working mind of a young man tangling with life’s toughest problems. In his posts we see him come to conclusions, get stuck, and change his mind. By revealing that process, Aaron teaches us how we, too, can better make sense of the world and how we fit into it.
• Why I Am Not Gay (2009) - Aaron’s exploration of what role he wants sexual orientation to (not) play in his identity.
• Life in a World of Pervasive Immortality: The Ethics of Being Alive (2009) - A struggle with what morality means, written after Aaron acquired more money than he knew what to do with, before he eventually became involved with GiveWell
• Legacy (2006) - A meditation on what legacy he wanted to leave. Written at age 19, he concludes for some people there’s no choice but “trying to do things that change the system instead of following it”.
Understanding change
Reading Aaron’s writing, you get the sense that he was consumed by understanding the process of change. He was frustrated by how suboptimal the way the world, the government, and he himself operated. This obsession to dissect the inner workings of life’s machinery and how to piece it together better led him to discover truths still relevant today.
• Fix the machine, not the person (2012) - The Raw Nerve series is some of Aaron’s best writing. Part seven covers a story of how Toyota turned around one of the worst performing auto plants in the country through the power of organizational design.
• Lean into the pain (2012) - part four of the same series. “The topics that are most painful also tend to be the topics that are most important for us”.
• Theory of Change (2010) - A deceptively simple, but powerful idea. We usually start planning from the actions available to us. However, if you want to cause change, you need to work backwards from your goal.
• HOWTO: Be more productive (2005) - Many of these suggestions may seem unsurprising now, but this was written in 2005 and still more concisely articulated than modern instances floating around.
Understanding the future
Aaron was an optimist. He wrote to understand what the future would be like and how he could shift it towards a better world.
• How to Save The World, Part (2011) - This post was originally shared with his close friends. Aaron lays out a battle plan for small, nimble organizations that can cause change.
• Free Speech: Because We Can (2006) - I’d love to be able to have a conversation with Aaron about free speech tradeoffs today. Still, a direct line can be drawn from Aaron’s observations on the shaky foundation of free speech in 2006 to those discussions today.
• Parpolity (2012) - A vision for how technology could run governance. Written almost a decade ago, the idea of nesting and recursive structures is interesting for cryptocurrency, community-building, and of course civic tech.
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Aaron left the world too soon.
For those of us not fortunate enough to have met Aaron, his blog provides us the opportunity to interact with an unique and beautiful soul. Though he is gone, his writing remains to inspire us to question systems, build things, and better the world.
