AUSTIN — You don’t know Aaron Swartz, at least not the way those assembled on Friday night at a town hall for the late Internet activist did. Colleagues, friends, associates and his partner joined on a SXSW 2013 stage to remember the complex, intense, beleaguered and sometimes troubled tech genius who took his life in January.

Despite being only 26, Swartz had already done more in a quarter-century than others do in a lifetime. He helped develop RSS, helped launch (and then sold) Reddit, founded Demand Progress, was widely known as an Internet activist (one who helped stop SOPA) and, in the last two years of his life, was the subject of a federal investigation.

While some stories have described Swartz as something of an Internet anarchist, he was, according to those who knew him, anything but.

Each of them painted a picture of an “extraordinary” young man. A person who almost compulsively asked why and would seek to activate change. It was something computer scientist (“Father of the Internet”) Tim Berners-Lee noticed early on in the very young blogger (Swartz was just 14 when he started working with him).

“He was a thinker,” recalled Berners-Lee. Swartz would think about what’s right and what’s wrong. Ultimately, said Berners-Lee, “He thought. He blogged and he took action.”

“There are not that many people who do that effectively. We lost one. If you’re wondering how to spend your time, do like Aaron.”

Demand Change

This was a common theme. Friends and associates like David Segal of Demand Progress and Tim Wu of The New Yorker remembered Swartz with a mixture of sadness and anger.

“[He was] a passionate eccentric who could have been one of the great ones. Now we’ll never know,” said Wu who still appeared shaken by Swartz’s suicide.

Of those panelists assembled before an audience of roughly 300 people, most spoke angrily about the government’s case against Swartz.

Wu, who wrote an emotional New Yorker article about Swartz, described him as a “young man who wanted to try things, disturb some shit and do things.”

“We have a criminal justice system today that makes everyone a criminal,” said Wu, adding that at the start of their careers, Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak did much more serious crimes.

All agreed that the Computer Fraud and Protection Act, the 1984 law that Swartz was prosecuted under, needs serious change.

Jennifer Lynch, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation told the audience that any change to the CFAA must include three things:

It can’t be a crime to violate a private agreement that you have no say in (like a Terms of Service Agreement on a web site). It should not be a crime to access info you already have a right to just because you do it in an innovative way. Penalties have to fit the crime.

Any of these changes, now known as "Aaron's Law," would have transformed the case against Swartz and possibly significantly reduced penalties.

His Other Side

No one was arguing that Aaron was perfect. Swartz was a person. He was, to the surprise of some, sometimes playful.

Gary DeGregorio of ThoughtWorks who worked with Swartz on one of his last projects — the “Victory Kit,” a Ruby-based tool for A/B testing petitions — described Swartz as shy, but willing to kid and be kidded.

Sometimes, recalled DeGregorio, he would sing Muppet Show tunes with coworkers and even “taunted me about my obsession with Twitter and trying to go viral with my Tweets,” remembered DeGregorio.

No one, though, spoke more passionately about Swartz and what his legacy means than his partner Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman.

SEE ALSO: Technology's Greatest Minds Say Goodbye to Aaron Swartz

As his partner for the last year-and-a-half of his life, she was witness to Swartz's arrest and the subsequent year-and-a-half of what some see as persecution by the federal prosecutors pursuing his case. Stinebrickner-Kauffman recalled his struggles, gifts and even faults.

“His particular gift was of asking questions,” said Stinebrickner-Kauffman. “He noticed when things weren’t right and asked why they didn’t make sense,” she added.

Swartz had no interest in becoming wealthy and had little interest in money. Even though he sold Reddit, he would sleep on friends’ floors and lived out of a backpack. “Sometimes he went too far. He thought it was perfectly appropriate for us to sleep on an air mattress in his brother’s bathroom,” remembered Stinebrickner-Kauffman with a laugh. He was a brilliant coder, though Stinebrickner-Kauffman said Swartz once told her the reason he was such a fast programmer was because he was expert at searching Google for the exact right piece of code.

Yet, for all his gifts, Swartz was wrong in one way: “One thing that Aaron got wrong is that you have to be sustainable. You have to be happy,” said Stinebrickner-Kauffman.

Mashable at SXSW 2013

Photo by Mashable, Boston Globe via Getty Images