Calling someone—or oneself—an idealist is not always a compliment. It suggests impracticality, or a certain detachment from reality; it suggests a propensity to dream. The tech industry is rife with idealism, for better or worse; it has always been this way. Early programmers and technologists saw a world in which technology could be a great leveler, a tool to mitigate inequality and oppression while fostering creativity and connection. In the current startup universe, there’s still a lot of chatter about changing the world, an objective that has become so cliché—and ridiculed—that it’s easy to forget that those voicing this desire genuinely, vehemently believe it. From the outside, the prospect of a world-changing software product is either very exciting or completely delusional, depending on who’s talking.

What is often absent from the conversation about world-changing technologies is whether these technologies will actually create a world that people want to inhabit. This can be especially unnerving in cases where there’s evidence of an expanding distance between the world and those who actively pursue its alteration. When the rhetoric of technological idealism is co-opted by capitalism—by companies offering, say, networked home appliances or behavior-tracking programs or communications software—its original sister concerns, like ethics and morality, can get left behind.

Idealism about technology as a democratizing force currently looks a lot like defense: protecting digital civil liberties, and fighting against further erosion. This is the side that Justin Peters is most committed to documenting in his book The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet, a partial biography of the late activist and Open Access advocate. It’s bittersweet that the book is more interested in the past than in the present and future, as there have been a number of cases in the last few years that readers might be interested in, such as “Blurred Lines” vs. Marvin Gaye (Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams were ordered to pay $4.7 million to Gaye’s family last spring), or journalist Matthew Keys’s entanglement with Anonymous and the Los Angeles Times. Another omission, this one strange, is that of one of the biggest players in this field: the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

It also bears mentioning that the political dimension of free culture can obscure some of the inquisitiveness, creativity, and whimsy that characterize the movement, on both grassroots and institutional levels. Last week, the New York Public Library added 180,000 public-domain images, maps, photographs, documents and pieces of ephemera to its digital collection; among other things, there’s a robust archive of historical menus. The Public Domain Review is an online publication providing “an ever-growing cabinet of curiosities for the digital age, a kind of hyperlinked Wunderkammer.” And in another corner of the Internet, Parker Higgins, an activist with the EFF, runs a side project dedicated solely to unlocking a collection of over 7,500 high-quality scans of historical, pomological watercolors held by the United States Department of Agriculture. Recently, I filed a request with the USDA, for a watercolor of a pomegranate. I have to say, it’s beautiful.

An undated, unsigned fragment of a Walt Whitman essay from the digital collection of the New York Public Library. The New York Public Library Digital Collections

One of the best qualities of The Idealist is that the book is hardly about Aaron Swartz’s life at all. Those looking for an intimate narrative of his life would do well to look elsewhere, as this is not a definitive biography, nor does it aspire to be as much. The Idealist does not shed new light on Swartz’s life or death; what it does—and does very well—is put Swartz’s work in context. The book gives an engaging, if knowingly incomplete, account of the history of intellectual property and copyright law, the archaic roots (and current implications) of cyberlaw, and some key players in the ongoing fight between open-data philosophy and the federal government.