The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #13

and the threat of jail, which they pounded him with a lot,

was terrifying to him.

Completely exhausted his financial resouces,

and it cost us a lot of money also, and he raised a substantial amount of money,

so it was, you know, it was in the millions of dollars.

[Interviewer] The legal defence?

- Yes.

-Was in millions?

- Yes.

I think he didn't want to be a burden to people.

I think that was a factor like, "I have my normal life,

and then I have this shitty thing I have to deal with,

and I try to keep the two of them as separate as possible,

but they were just beginning to blur together and everything was becoming shitty."

Swartz faced a tough choice that was only getting tougher:

Do you admit guilt and move on with your life,

or do you fight a broken system?

With his legal case, the answer was simple:

He rejects a final plea deal and a trial date is set.

Aaron was resolute that he didn't want to knuckle under and accept something

that he didn't believe was fair, but I also think he was scared.

I don't think they would have convicted Aaron.

I think we would have walked him out of that courthouse, and I would have given him a big hug,

and we would have walked across that little river in Boston, and gone and had a couple of beers.

I really thought that we were right. I thought that we were going to win the case.

I thought that we could win the case.

He didn't talk about it very much, but you could see

the enormous pain that he was going through.

[song]

No time in his childhood did Aaron have any severe mood swings

or depressive episodes or anything that I would describe as "severe depression"

and it's possible, you know, he was depressed. People get depressed.

[music]

Very early in our relationship, three or four weeks in or something,

I remember him saying to me

that I was a lot stronger than he was.

You know, he was brittle in a lot of ways.

Things were a lot harder for him than for a lot of people.

That was part of his brilliance, too.

I think he probably had something like clinical depression in his early twenties.

I don't think he did when I was with him.

He wasn't a "joyful" person, but that's different from being depressed.

He was just under such enormous pressure for two years straight.

He just didn't want to do it anymore.

He was just--I just think it was too much.

[song]

I got a phone call late at night.

I could tell something was wrong, and then I called, and I realized what had happened.

A co-founder of the social news and entertainment website "Reddit" has been found dead.

Police say twenty-six-year-old Aaron Swartz

killed himself yesterday in his Brooklyn apartment.

I just thought, we've lost one of the most creative minds of our generation.

I was like, the whole world fell apart at that moment.

It was one of the hardest nights of my life.

I just kept screaming, "I can't hear you! What did you say? I can't hear you!"

I can't. That's it.

[Interviewer] Okay.

Yeah, none of it made any sense,

and really still doesn't.

I was so frustrated, angry.

[exhales]

You know, I tried to explain it to my kids.

My three-year-old told me that the doctors would fix him.

I've known lots of people that have died, but I've never lost anybody like this,

because everybody feels, and I do too, there is so much we could have--more to do like...

I just didn't know he was there. I didn't know this was what he was suffering and...

He was part of me.

And I just wanted it to not be real, and then...

and then I just looked at his Wikipedia page and I saw the end date:

"to 2013".

[quote on screen]

My first thought was: what if nobody even notices?

You know, because it wasn't clear to me how salient he was.

I had never seen anything quite like the outpouring I saw.

The Net just lit up.

Everyone was trying to explain it in their own way, but I've never seen

people grieve on Twitter before.

People were visibly grieving online.

He was the internet's own boy,

and the old world killed him.

We are standing in the middle of a time when great injustice is not touched.

Architects of the financial meltdown have dinner with the president, regularly.

In the middle of that time, the idea that this is what the government had to prosecute,

It just seems absurd, if it weren't tragic.

The question is:
Can we do something, given what's happened,

to make the world a better place,

and how can we further that legacy?

That's the only question one could ask.

All over the world there are starting to be hack-a-thons, gatherings,

Aaron Swartz has, in some sense, brought the best out of us, in trying to say:

How do we fix this?

He was, in my humble opinion, one of the true extraordinary revolutionaries

that this country has produced.

I don't know whether Aaron was defeated or victorious,

but we are certainly shaped by the hand of the things that he wrestled with.

When we turn armed agents of the law on citizens trying to increase access to knowledge,

we've broken the rule of law--we've desecrated the temple of justice.

Aaron Swartz was not a criminal.

[applause]

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability,

it comes through continuous struggle.

Aaron really could do magic,

and I'm dedicated to making sure that his magic doesn't end with his death.

He believed that he could change the world, and he was right.

Out of the last week, and out of today, phoenixes are already rising.

[applause]

Since Swartz's death, Representative Zoe Lofgren and Senator Ron Wyden

have introduced legislation that would reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act--

the outdated law that formed the majority of the charges against Swartz.

It's called "Aaron's Law".

Aaron believed that you literally ought to be asking yourself all of the time:

What is the most important thing I could be working on in the world right now?

And if you're not working on that, why aren't you?

[Protesters] This is what democracy looks like!

[crowd chants] We are the people too!

Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?

Stand up, fight back!

Internet freedom's under attack, what do we do?

Hey, hey! Ho, ho! NROC has got to go!

I wish we could change the past, but we cannot.

But we can change the future and we must.

We must do so for Aaron, we must do so for ourselves.

We must do so to make our world a better place, a more humane place,

a place where justice works, and access to knowledge becomes a human right. [applause]

So there was a kid, back in February, from Baltimore, fourteen years old,

who had access to JSTOR, and he'd been spalunking through JSTOR after reading something,

and he figured out a way to do early tests for pancreatic cancer,

and pancreatic cancer kills the sh*t out of you because we detect it way too late

by the time we detect it, it's already too late to do anything about it,

and he sent emails off to the entire oncology department at Johns Hopkins,

you know hundreds of them, and every--

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