I don’t remember the first time I heard about Aaron Swartz. It probably was from reading Dave Winer’s blog more than 10 years ago when I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. The guy effused glowingly about Swartz as a young teenager.

“Aaron is the brightest 13 year old I've ever met on the Internet,” Winer wrote in February 2001. “It's not just bit smarts, he marshals power very well and is persistent. Eventually you come around to his way of thinking, or he comes around to yours. These are the essential ingredients in good technology. We're looking for the right answer, not to be proven right, or to prove the other guy wrong.”

There’s a slew of early mentions on Winer’s blog about Swartz. By the fall of 2002, Swartz may have been the youngest speaker at Comdex, ever. I remember reading about this guy, who was hobnobbing with some of my tech heroes and was actively getting involved in the RSS 1.0 specification. I identified with Swartz—I saw him as a magnified, younger, nerdier, more-articulate, more-talented version of myself.

“In terms of my personal history, I learned how to program myself through reading programs others had written, and asking questions about them on the Web,” Swartz wrote in early 2001.

“Responses to my naive questions were generally courteous and almost always helpful. I got back responses extremely quickly—rarely longer than a day. And through this method I eventually learned to program. I took no pre-set course, and had no usual instruction. However, while I was able to learn to program through this method, there is no similar system to learn to program well, which is usually something altogether different.”

Sure, I fancied myself a geek, but I never learned to program (beyond rudimentary HTML)—and I occasionally tinkered in games on my TI-85—but really, I was a poseur, an observer. I spent many nights in high school staying up late, trolling IRC warez channels, and listening to Art Bell on the radio. But rather than (like me) being on the periphery of the geek crowd (and beginning my career as a tech journalist), Swartz was deep in the center of it.

"Show your hack"

Many people forget that Swartz also helped popularize the short-lived tech meme known as warchalking, where people would mark Wi-Fi networks in chalk on the sidewalk. Swartz was an inspiration to me, and I helped propagate the meme via Warchalking Berkeley. That faded away, and by 2003, Swartz was making nifty Web apps and was warning us about Google. In other words, he was unstoppable—and I kept an admiring eye on him.

By summer 2004, when I went to journalism school in New York, I penned my first-ever article for Wired magazine. It was a short “front-of-the-book” profile of Aaron Swartz. Sometime later, when I was living in Oakland, I gave him a ride from the Rockridge BART station to a conference he was attending at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley.

"Four years ago I probably would have said I'd be some kind of startup guy," Swartz told me in the summer of 2004, as he was about to enter his freshman year of college, "but the law seems really interesting to me. It's a system of rules, like computers are and you can hack it by finding the implications of those rules. Go to a judge, show your hack, and the judge has the power to change the world based on your conclusions."

And that sort of set the tone for what he would do later in life, as I followed him from a distance. Swartz dropped out of Stanford. Founded two startups. Made boatloads of money when one of those (reddit) sold to Condé Nast (Ars’ parent company). Founded an organization, Demand Progress. Spent his next few years trying to better the intersections of technology, politics, and law and stood up for his beliefs.

By 2009, Swartz had decided to liberate loads of articles off of PACER, and published his own FBI file stemming from that escapade. (My colleague Tim Lee chronicled Swartz’ later years on Ars.)

I last saw Swartz in person in September 2010, on the sidelines of the “Internet at Liberty” conference in Budapest—he, Evgeny Morozov, and I joked on the street for a few minutes between sessions. (Less than a year later, Swartz popped up again, getting himself arrested for accessing JSTOR.)

"Oh, and BTW, I'll miss you all."

I found out on Saturday that Swartz—chillingly—had the foresight back in 2002 to give away his most valuable possessions in the event of his death.

“I ask that the contents of all my hard drives be made publicly available from aaronsw.com,” he wrote.

Source Code: Copyright for my GPLed source code should revert to the Free Software Foundation. They seem to have a reasonable policy about letting people use the code. Websites: Please keep the websites operational where possible, with content written by me kept untouched where appropriate. Appropriate pages (e.g. on aaronsw.com) may contain a notice about what happened with a link to more info. The front page of aaronsw.com should be redone as appropriate with a link to the old page. Grave

I'd like to rest someplace that won't kill me. That means access to oxygen (although direct access would probably be bad) and not having to climb through six feet of dirt.

Appropriately, he concluded: “Oh, and BTW, I'll miss you all.”

We miss you too, Aaron—your number is still in my phone. May you find the peace you always sought.

If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts or ideation, please take advantage of the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255.