The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #3

He contributed through his technical abilities, and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him.

Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog:

I think deeply about things, and I want others to do likewise.

I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people.

I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication.

Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time

on things that won't have an impact.

I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously.

I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience.

I want to make the world a better place.

In 2004, Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University.

He'd had ulcerative colitis which was very troubling, and we were concerned about him taking his medication.

He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail of pills every day,

and one of those pills was a steroid which stunted his growth,

and made him feel different from any of the other students.

Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship

and finds himself in effectively a babysitting program for overachieving high-schoolers

who in four years are meant to become captains of industry and one-percenters

and I think it just made him bananas.

In 2005, after only one year of college,

Swartz was offered a spot at a new start-up incubation firm called Y Combinator, lead by Paul Graham.

He's like, "Hey, I have this idea for a a website."

And Paul Graham likes him enough, and says, "Yeah, sure."

So Aaron drops out of school, moves to this apartment...

So this used to be Aaron's apartment when he moved here.

I have vague memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease

'cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college.

Aaron lived in what's now the livingroom and some of the posters are leftover from when Aaron lived here.

And then the library...there are more books, but a lot of them are Aaron's.

Aaron's Y Combinator site was called "infogami", a tool to build websites.

But infogami struggles to find users, and Swartz eventually

merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help.

It was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, called "Reddit".

There we were, starting from almost nothing. No users, no money, no code,

and growing day by day into a hugely popular website,

And it showed no signs of letting up.

First we had 1000 users, then 10000, then 20000 and on, and on...It was just incredible.

Reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet.

There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art, and there's just people who flock to the site,

and make that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news.

reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some levels,

so on the one hand it's a place where people discuss news of the day, technology, politics and issues,

and yet there is a lot of kind of Not Safe For Work material, offensive material,

there are some sub-reddits where trolls find a welcome home,

and so, in that sense reddit has been kind of home to controversy, as well.

It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.

reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant Cond Nast,

who makes an offer to buy the company.

Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions

about like:
"How do I store this money?"

- Like a lot of money...

- Like a lot of money.

Like probably more than a million dollars, but I don't actually know.

- And he's how old at the time?

- 19, 20.

So it was in this apartment. They sat around

on what predated these couches,

hacking on Reddit, and when they sold Reddit

they threw a giant party, and then all flew

out to California the next day,

and left the keys with me.

It was funny, you know, he'd just sold his start-up so we all presumed

he was the richest person around

but he said, "Oh no, I'll take this tiny little

shoebox-sized room. That's all I need."

It was barely larger than a closet.

The idea of him spending his money on

fancy objects just seemed so implausible.

He explains it as, "I like living in apartments so I'm not going to spend a lot of money on a new place to live. I'm not gonna buy a mansion,

and I like wearing jeans and a T-shirt,

so I'm not going to spend any more money on clothes.

So it's really no big deal."

What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic

flows on the internet,

and what commands our attention.

In the old system of broadcasting, you're

fundamentally limited by the amount of

space in the airwaves. You could only send out ten channels over the airwaves, television

or even with cable, you had 500 channels.

On the Internet, everybody can have a channel.

Everyone can get a blog, or a MySpace page.

Everyone has a way of expressing themselves.

What you see now is not a question of who gets

access to the airwaves,

it's a question of who gets control over the

ways you find people.

You know, you start seeing power centralizing in sites like Google, theses sort of gatekeepers that tell you

where on the internet you want to go.

The people who provide you your sources of news and information.

So it's not only certain people have a license to speak, now everyone has

a license to speak. It's a question of who gets heard.

After he started working in San Francisco

at Cond Nast, he comes into the office

and they want to give him a computer with all

this crap installed on it

and say he can't install any new things

on this computer,

which to developers is outrageous.

From the first day, he was complaining

about all the stuff.

"Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first

day I showed up here, I simply couldn't take it.

By lunchtime, I had literally locked myself

in a bathroom stall and started crying.

I can't imagine staying sane with someone

buzzing in my ear all day

Let alone getting any actual work done.

Nobody else seems to get work done here either

Everybody's always coming into our room to

hang out and chat, or invite us to play

the new video game system that Wired is testing."

He really had different aspirations that were politically-oriented,

and Silicon Valley just doesn't really quite have that culture

that orients technical activity for the purposes of political goals.

Aaron hated working for a corporation.

They all hate working for Cond Nast, but Aaron

is the only one who is not going to take it.

And Aaron basically gets himself fired.

By not showing up to work, ever.

It was said to be a messy breakup.

Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman

declined to be interviewed for this film.

He rejected the business world. One of the really important things to remember about

that choice when Aaron decided to leave start-up

culture is that he was also leaving behind

the things that had made him famous and well-loved, and he was at risk of letting down fans.

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