Remember Aaron Swartz

Washington, D.C. Memorial Live Stream

• Official obituary and funeral notice

  Aaron is survived by his parents Robert and Susan Swartz, his younger brothers Noah and Ben, and his partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman.

  Aaron Swartz San Francisco memorial: Thursday, January 24, at The Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, 7pm. RSVP requested, livestream.

  Remembrances of Aaron, as well as donations in his memory, can be submitted at http://rememberaaronsw.com.

  If you’re having thoughts of suicide please please speak to someone, in the USA call 18002738255 or find numbers for your country here.

• Official statement from family and partner of Aaron Swartz

  Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.

  Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.

  Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.

  Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

  Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.

• Donate

  GiveWell, an organization that Aaron loved, will direct funds to wherever they believe they will do the most to improve people’s lives.

  Donate here

• You shall live on. A glorious son

  Aron,

  I do not know you in person. I am just an year older than you. We have something in common which unites us - THE INTERNET. We belong here. This is our world where boundaries are torn apart.

  I cried. Literally cried reading about you. A part of mine wants to beleive and write this -‘Well staged Dark Knight! How is Florence? Hope you are having a good time out there.See you in the next Python conference presenting some uber cool thing which you would get to work in isolation from the rest of the world who dont understand the genius in you’. Wish it is true.I know reality is different.My wishful thinking is not going to be true.

  Some 2-3 years before, I lost 2 friends of mine.One, really brilliant fellow, did as you did. Another, just vanished into thin air. I am still searching for him. Thus,I am able to empathize more with all that people of our age go through and what you might have been through. Research, hacking, etc - which would be termed as path breaking things - are no longer fun and free.I am intrigued to think what would the society made of Edison had he been living now. May be his professor might have shown him the doors because of 99 failures or may be the justice system might have booked him for wasting state money, but producing no result.Damn!

  Aron, You shall live on, for, the free content on the internet has an indebtion to repay you. You shall live on, for, not just the fact you were a genuius but you were a kind person. A gentle human being who touched the heart of many who came in touch with you. There are many geeks and nerds in this world, but not everyone has a kind helping heart which you had. Thank you. You shall live on, for, in the sincerity of the intentions you did nothing wrong and is surely on the lines of some good souls who have walked on this planet.You just genuinely wanted to help others. That is something glorious.

  This world may not be right place for you with all the jealously and ill-motivated people around. May be you belong elsewhere where only kindness and good things exist. Wishing you well!

  with sincere appreciations, Vignesh

  Dear Robert and Susan Swartz,

  Having experienced first hand, the experiences parents go through in these situations, my heartfelt feelings of reassurance to both of you. Your son was a great man whose ‘love for humanity’ was so rare in the technological world.

  In India, in some schools,as we grew up we are taught some important scriptural lessons. A profound teaching is - soul never perishes. So, please be reassured, your son is just doing fine. Nothing can happen to him. It is as much simple a fact as someone going from USA to Australia.

  For the good hearted person he was, only good shall happen to him. Sometimes, in a classroom of mediocore students, a teacher may pick the brightest one and put him in a place where his talents and abilities would be used better. May be God felt, this world is not the right place for him,for people here are not so good and unworthy of his good deeds.

  Thanks for giving us a nice person.

  good wishes, Vignesh.

• sf memorial

  

• NYC Memorial

  

• My unexpected neighbor

  I maintain pkgsrc packages of some of Aaron’s software, and over the last decade or so would occasionally send him bits and pieces of code. Along the way we somehow discovered that we’d grown up a couple hundred meters apart, separated by a driveway and some trees. (If only we’d known, and been around at the same time, our common interests would doubtless have made us fast friends.)

  When sending patches I’d always ask what he’d been up to lately, because it was always something new and ambitious, even audacious. We were just nerds on the Internet whose paths occasionally crossed, but I felt like I knew him better than that. Above all, he had managed to hold fast to a way of thinking about our world – as evidenced by his writing and his actions – that I had forced myself to hold rather more loosely. I always admired him for that.

  Had we had the chance to know each other better, I’m quite sure I’d have admired Aaron for much more.