The world is poorer place today without Aaron Swartz, an extraordinary hacker and activist who took his own life on Friday. It’s been a roller coaster of a few days as I and the people I know try to process this news, sadness and anger turning to grief and resolve. There have been many thoughtful tributes to Aaron, who in only 26 years inspired so many with his character and accomplishments: my colleague Peter Eckersley wrote the touching obituary on EFF’s site; Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig, Quinn Norton, Jillian York, Rainey Reitman, James Grimmelman, Karl Fogel, Brewster Kahle, Rick Perlstein, Danny O’Brien, Tim Berners-Lee, and many more have written beautiful words that do as much as possible to sum up a truly extraordinary life.
It’s a tragedy that he is gone, and another tragedy that we’ve lost the next 50 or so years of Aaron that we might have had. At 26 he had already committed a decade and a half to creating amazing work in the name of causes he supported. Any one of his accomplishments could provide the basis of an impressive obituary. The sheer breadth and depth of them speaks to the scale of his brilliance. That they should all belong to a young man only a year older than I am is incredibly humbling.
One reason I’m so sad today is because Aaron stood so thoroughly for the cause of information freedom. I mean that in two senses: first, of course, he stood up for this endeavor, committing his life to improving the world in this arena. Through his software development, his speaking, his writing, and his life he pushed the ball forward, and we have made progress we would not have made without him. The battle against SOPA, to pick just one example, would have looked very different in his absence.
But also, for so many, he stood for that cause in a more figurative sense. His fight was that fight, and he was to my mind inextricably linked with information freedom. He stood in for it, acting as a representative and an example.
That’s a difficult mantle to bear, and I worry about the stress it would have caused him. I’ve read that he was having difficulty funding his legal defense but was terrified of asking for money, for example. I hope that wasn’t because he knew how much he meant to all of us.
It’s not very productive, though, to try to get into the head of somebody who has decided to take his own life. I understand that his family (and Lessig and many others) think that at least some of the blame rests on the shoulders of an overly aggressive prosecuting attorney. Who can say? I will say this, though. The actions of the prosecuting attorney were completely out of line and disproportionate to any sense of justice. That was as true last week as it is today. Whether or not the ridiculous charges are responsible for his death, they were responsible for destroying his life. That is enough.
It is time to take the energy of anger and of grief and channel it into productive outlets. First and foremost, in tribute to an extraordinary life, should be an effort to rectify the extraordinary injustices he fought. That means copyright reform, improving open access to information, and bringing the penalties for computer crimes into the realm of sanity.
This is a long struggle, and it will mean changing the way people look at the world. I’m saddened to see people still saying Aaron “returned” the files he downloaded from JSTOR. That construction can only underpin the theft metaphor that the prosecution depended on. JSTOR never had anything taken from them. It’s not just nonsensical to say there was something to return, it’s a misconception that contributes to the injustice he faced.
Aaron committed his life to this fight, and if he were still with us he would continue it today. Few people are so brilliant, so talented, and so driven to do what is right as he was. None of us can finish his work, but maybe all of us can.
I took this photograph this morning from Bernal Hill, a little earlier than I would normally be awake because the dog I’m sitting for (Hi, Ace!) demands it. I’ve been up to the hill a bunch of times, and the view is still striking.
I’ve lived in San Francisco for a little over a year now, but I’m still frequently getting asked how I’m enjoying it. It’s a very different city from the last few places I’ve lived. But my most common answer (unless I’m very frustrated with something at the moment) is that it’s so easy here to surround yourself with beautiful scenery.
From this spot on Bernal Hill, you can see from the Candlestick Park and the freeway interchanges all the way across downtown and Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate, way out on the north tip of the peninsula. It’s quite a place, this city.
Maira and I were walking around her neighborhood in Glen Park when we stumbled across a tiny road called Ohlone Way. It’s pretty charming. It’s properly marked as a street, but the entire length is unpaved, and not much wider than a single car across. It rained a few days ago, and the ground was still a bit muddy and marked with deep tire tracks.
The name, it turns out, is something of a pun. “Ohlone” is a name used to describe some 40 different groups of Bay Area Native Americans. The groups spoke different languages, had different traditions, and in some cases weren’t even in contact with each other, but have been lumped together because of their geographic proximity. Still, “Ohlone” is preferable to the unwieldy exonym “Costanoans” — derived from the Spanish name for the people — which seems to have fallen out of favor in the 60s or so.
In 1978, an author named Malcolm Margolin published a book documenting the lives of these people who lived in the Bay Area before Europeans arrived, called The Ohlone Way. That book has since become pretty widely cited, and is still in print some 35 years later. FoundSF has published an excerpt from that book that provides a good introduction.
I don’t know how to find more history about this little street in San Francisco, but I’d be surprised to find out it wasn’t named after the book. In any case, it’s worth strolling down Ohlone Way if you find yourself in the neighborhood.
The San Francisco Public Library has the right idea about offering unfiltered Internet access. When you connect to the open wifi network, you’re given this notice and the ability to click right through:
San Francisco Public Library is committed to providing free and equal Internet access to the public without filtering content. We do, however, ask that you respect your fellow library users and refrain from viewing obscene, offensive, harmful matter, or illegal materials prohibited by law.
There may be some uncertainty about what the future of public libraries looks like, but everybody ought to agree that it involves sticking to their core values of free and private access to the information of the world. Asking patrons to be respectful of the other people in the library is a good thing; imposing rigid software-based filters is not.
That’s the right idea even if we assume these are perfect filters that have no false positives and no false negatives. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out in a compelling criticism of UK censorship efforts, that’s never the case, and the collateral damage can be dramatic.
Tetris may be the perfect game, but the beauty of its play is woefully ephemeral. Worse, the lack of a consistent and robust system for recording and annotating individual tetromino drops has, for decades, stunted serious scholarship.
The problem is clear. Now, Tim Hwang and I have proposed a solution. Presenting1 TETRIS-SYTEM, being a recording method for matches of the puzzle-game.
The notation may feel unfamiliar at first, but even a novice Tetris player will quickly get the hang of it. We hope that one day Tetris scholars, like composers flipping through the sheet music of a symphony, will be able to reconstruct the movements and interplay in their mind’s eyes.
Yes, Tim presented it two weeks ago. I agreed to a press embargo for that duration. ↩
