The title of a new posthumous collection of Aaron Swartz’s writing is tricky: The Boy Who Could Change The World. It could refer equally to a boy who changed the world and one who could have but did not. The title doesn’t take a position one way or another, and neither does the book, which is not a biography. With the exception of some short section introductions The Boy is made up of Swartz’s own writing, mostly from his personal blog.

Boy might be a stretch, but Aaron Swartz will always be a young man. As a teenager he helped develop the RSS feed technology that made the rise of blogs possible. Merging a startup with Reddit in 2005 set him up to pursue his interests beyond programming in politics and media. After an unsuccessful foray into Democratic electoral politics, Swartz had his biggest victory when he organized to halt the Stop Online Piracy Act, a Congressional lunge down the slippery slope toward Internet censorship.

Then in 2011, Swartz semi-surreptitiously connected a laptop to a network switch in a MIT closet to mass-download academic papers. When he was found out, the U.S. Attorney charged him under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In January 2013, after two years of expensive and draining prosecution and with at least some prison time looking inevitable, Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment.

I didn’t know Aaron well enough to speculate on how he’d feel about his book, but I knew him well enough that calling him Swartz feels wrong. We hung out maybe a handful of times, he interviewed me for his podcast. When he killed himself I think I felt more grief than I was entitled to, and I tried not to think about him too much. Aaron was so devoted to public service that I found it impossible to separate my personal sense of loss from the collective one. Even though we disagreed about a lot, I still feel like part of the we that was counting on Aaron, at least to be around down the line.

The Boy Who Could Change The World is a hard book to review; I get the sense that’s not what it’s for. Picking apart Aaron’s thinking about the media or money in politics feels ugly, like criticizing the flowers at a wake. Instead of arranging the writing chronologically, or even chronologically within its thematic sections (free culture, computers, politics, media, books and culture, and unschool), The Boy’s editor has made the perplexing choice to fragment and scatter Swartz’s intellectual path. Skipping from Swartz as a 14-year-old to 21 to 17 makes it hard to track what ideas he’s absorbing and what he’s leaving behind. The collection doesn’t present Swartz as a thinker whose evolution is important for the rest of us to understand; it’s an elegiac project about a young man who had a good heart, unlimited potential, and wanted to help people. Except for the occasional reference to David Foster Wallace’s suicide a few years before Aaron’s, a reader who picked up the book might wonder what happened to him.