Aaron who could have changed the world

Aaron Swartz, born on November 8, 1986, a blogger, programmer, activist and an online prodigy, who died in 2013, left behind strong writing that still has the power to rally others behind his causes of  freedom of information, revolutionising government and fighting corruption.  Some of his quotes strike a raw nerve “Information is power. But Like all power, there are those who wanted to keep it for themselves. Most people, it seems, stretch the truth to make themselves seem more impressive. I, it seems, stretch the truth to make myself look worse”. “With the death of bin Laden, it’s finally time for Congress to bring back the pre-9-11 legal norm, before we decided it was okay to toss out our civil liberties if the ‘bad guys’ were scary enough.” ” Now the typical way you make good things happen in Washington is you find a bunch of welathy companies who agree with you.”

  Aged 13, he created his own version of Wikipedia months before the online encyclopedia was founded.  In 2011, Swartz  was indicted by Federal prosecutors after trying to download every academic journal in the online library JSTOR. He took his own life aged 26 after facing 35 years in prison and $1m in fines.

His topics included everything from online piracy to failure of schools, was well read, resourced and builder of bridges between several different people from different parts of the world.  At Stanford he was taught by Rebeca Sandefur, who described his writing as confident, unpretentiously brilliant and sincerely engaged”. His work also battled against copyright, as he was advocating the sharing of information as a “moral Imperative”. His proposals for “rebooting democracy”  by Steohen Shalom’s system of “Parolity”, with nested councils of 25-50 people send representative up the chain maintaining accountability. His works on “How Congress Works”  highlighting the complexity of corruption in the US politics, could have changed the world for better which he delivered as a seminar at Harvard in 2011. His writing highlights open flow of information to address all the problems he saw in the world with simple solutions.

 The Boy who could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz published by Verso £15.99/the New Press $17.95, 368 pages