Anyone familiar with Swartz’s record could see how lost he was. “He was seeking,” said John Summers, the editor of the leftist political journal The Baffler, which Swartz began helping to edit around this time. “He didn’t get too long on anyone.” Swartz later confessed to David Segal that he had never achieved anything in his life that mattered. That the statement wasn’t remotely true was beside the point. Swartz was convinced, and doomed.

Other hackers have killed themselves, too. Before there was Aaron Swartz, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, a 22-year-old founder of the social-network site , frequently described as the “anti-Facebook” because it gives users control over their personal data rather than packaging it for advertisers. Before Ilya, there was Len Sassaman, a brilliant cryptographer who helped make Internet communications anonymous, especially when governments or powerful corporations might want to nose in on them. Before Sassaman, there was Christopher Lightfoot, who was revered for his daring, Swartz-style bulk downloads of British government data. And before Lightfoot, there was Gene Kan, who made a name for himself in the peer-to-peer movement—the technology used to swap music and video files outside the reach of their copyright holders.

The particulars of each case were different, of course. Like Swartz, Sassaman had the occasional run-in with the government over his online exploits. Kan seemed to briefly make his peace with the powers-that-be by going to work for Sun Microsystems, the Silicon Valley giant. And, in any case, who can really say why anyone might take that tragic, irreversible step? But all in their own way came across as highly concentrated distillations of computer hacker culture: precocious, technically brilliant, bracingly idealistic. All were prone to disillusionment when reality fell short of their vision for it.

The irony is that, by the time Swartz took his own life in January, he really had begun to change the world. The same week he started downloading JSTOR, in September 2010, he learned about a Senate bill called COICA, the , which would give the government sweeping powers to shut down websites for even the most innocent copyright violations.Within a few weeks, Swartz had collected 300,000 signatures for an online petition opposing the measure. This helped delay it until the next session of Congress and gave the resistance time to organize. When the final version of the measure died in early 2012, Swartz deserved a real share of the credit.





Starting in the fall of 2010, Swartz began to seem more grounded and less manic than he had been as a younger man. In June 2011, he entered a long-term relationship with another progressive activist named Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman. He was eating well and working out every day, a practice he’d previously scorned. They talked about getting married. Swartz had resumed writing the book he’d started and was busy researching drug-treatment policy for a nonprofit foundation.

But the JSTOR case was like a cancer, according to Stinebrickner-Kauffman. The U.S. Attorneys’ office went to extraordinary lengths to make an example of Swartz, threatening him with decades of prison time for what was at worst a minor offense. He was overwhelmed by hearings, motions, delays. Each Monday for the first few months after he moved to New York City in 2011, Swartz boarded a bus back to Boston to demonstrate that he hadn’t fled the country. The case was bankrupting him, and even the prospect of a plea bargain offered little hope. The government was insisting on six months of jail time and a 13-count conviction if he wanted to sidestep a trial. Lawrence Lessig had been right all those years ago: In the battle between law and code, the law was a shockingly persistent adversary.

The day Swartz killed himself, he told Stinebrickner-Kauffman he was too tired to get out of bed. She played music, tickled him, even splashed him with water—nothing would break his funk. Swartz said he wanted to take it easy and didn’t respond to her texts after she reluctantly left for work. She discovered his body hanging from a belt when she got home.

Swartz’s old friend Ben Hammersley has an expression about the computer language HTML, which is critical for making Web pages, but which aficionados considered a mess until the mid-2000s. The expression is that HTML was used for a good decade or so before it was finally invented. That’s how long it took for the hacker community to control it. But during that time there were no great alternatives, and so everyone used HTML, with occasionally disastrous results.

Like too many other computer prodigies of his generation, Aaron Swartz was used long before he was invented. He hadn’t lived long enough to know that not every mistake he made would reverberate for all time or haunt him until the end of his days. In this, he was not so different from any other teenager who sweats the pop quiz he failed or the fender he banged up. What distinguished Swartz was that, from a young age, he was handed a fantastically powerful set of tools—“you can do magic,” he would exhort his fellow programmers—and told it was his destiny to create a more free and just society.

For Swartz and his fellow computer prodigies, this was a deeply isolating existence. “Ilya was made to feel that he was the only hope to save the world from Facebook. Len was one of few cryptographers who understood the threat of global digital surveillance. Aaron was this great hope for fighting things like [COICA],” says O’Brien. The pressure was intense when they screwed up, because it meant they had failed in their historical mission. It could be downright unbearable when they succeeded. “The flip side of everyone telling you, ‘Wow, if you hadn’t been there, everything could have gone wrong,’ is, ‘If I go to prison, it destroys not just me but my whole vision of how much better the world could be,’ ” O’Brien says.

We want people doing this work, of course—in many cases, we need them doing it. It’s just far from clear that we want them doing it before they can drive a car or buy a beer. In Aaron Swartz’s case, too many adults refused to see that a child isn’t a messiah or even a leader of men, however brilliant he may be. A child is just a child.