I've started this post about four times now and deleted it about four times, which if you know me at all is not normal. Usually I just bang these things out over coffee and hit publish before I can second-guess myself. Not this one.
Aaron Swartz died on Friday. He was 26. If that name doesn't mean anything to you, the short version is: he helped write the RSS spec when he was 14, he was one of the co-founders of Reddit (well, Infogami, which got folded into Reddit), and more recently he was one of the people who organized the internet against SOPA back in 2011 and 2012 (the blackout, the phone calls to Congress, all of it). He was also, at the time he died, facing a federal case that could have put him in prison for something like 35 years, over downloading a huge pile of academic journal articles from JSTOR through MIT's network. He had access. He wasn't supposed to bulk-download them. Prosecutors treated it like he'd robbed a bank.
I never met the guy. I want to say that up front because I've seen a few posts this weekend from people practically implying they were best friends, and I think that's a little gross, honestly. But I used his stuff constantly without ever really clocking it. web.py, the little Python framework, that's his. Half the RSS feeds this blog has ever produced exist because a teenager sat in a room in 2000 and helped figure out the format. You don't think about that kind of thing until someone points it out to you, or until they're gone and everyone's writing eulogies and you realize how much of the plumbing you never see.
What's been sitting weird with me isn't really the tech trivia part. It's the prosecution. I read through some of the case stuff this weekend (not gonna pretend I read the actual indictment, I read summaries like everyone else) and the thing that keeps nagging at me is how disproportionate the whole thing felt even from the outside. JSTOR itself didn't want to pursue charges once he returned the data. MIT stayed quiet, which in hindsight looks like its own kind of failure. But the federal prosecutors kept going anyway, stacking on charge after charge under this decades-old computer fraud law that was clearly never written with something like this in mind. I don't know what was going on in his head those last few months and I'm not going to pretend I do, plenty of people who did know him are saying he'd been struggling for a long time. But it's hard not to connect the dots between "kid faces the possibility of spending the rest of his twenties and thirties in prison for downloading PDFs" and where things ended up.
Sorry, this is heavier than what I usually put up here. I was going to write something about CES this week (I've got half a draft sitting in my folder about the 3D printers that were everywhere on the show floor, MakerBot's new Replicator with the weird dual-extruder setup, all of that), and I'll probably still post it later this week because there's genuinely interesting stuff in there. But it felt wrong to just pretend this weekend was a normal news weekend and slot in a gadget post like nothing happened.
One small thing I keep coming back to: Swartz wrote a blog for years, aaronsw.com, and it's still up. He wrote about everything — books he was reading, arguments with libertarians, his own depression at points, weirdly specific stuff about how he organized his email. It reads like someone figuring things out in public, which I guess is what blogs are supposed to be for, even if most of us just use them to complain about software updates. I went back and read a chunk of the archive Saturday night instead of doing literally anything productive.
Anyway. If you've got ten minutes, go read something from Demand Progress about what they were actually asking for during the SOPA fight. It's a better use of your time than whatever I'm doing here.