When he was 14, he co-developed RSS 1.0.
Today, his family burying him after his girlfriend found him dead by suicide in his Brooklyn apartment.
He was 26 years old.
Now, an argument can be made that his pending court case led to his taking his own life. For those of you not familiar with Aaron Swartz’ situation: Aaron was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. If found guilty on all charges, he was looking at a possible 35 years behind bars.
What did he actually do? He hacked into a JSTOR account, which is basically a digital library of academic journals. He downloaded a couple million articles and was going to post them in the public domain. JSTOR actually dropped the charges against him, and he returned the files, but an overzealous U.S. attorney’s office decided they were going to make an example of him.
Now, I could go on a rant about how it is completely arbitrary the way our system works sometimes, wherein a twenty-something is looking at a possible 35 years in prison for providing access to educational articles for the masses, and not a single person is charged when banks are found laundering over $1B dollars for drug cartels and terrorist organizations… but that is not what this blog is about.
This blog is about suicide, and Aaron Swartz is now a statistic. Like David, Aaron decided that life was no longer worth living and hung himself in his apartment.
Aaron appears—appeared—to be a very smart, decent-looking guy who had the world ahead of him and a thousand opportunities. This sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?
I am not going to discount the impact the case probably had on his decision. When you make the switch to suicide, there is always something that drove you to that point. The questions remains: Is there anything we could have done or provided to Aaron that may have resulted in a different outcome?
Even with the pending case, wasn’t Aaron’s life worth living? I think so. What tools could we have provided him in his time of need?
I mourn the loss of Aaron Swartz and extend my deepest condolences to his family and friends. I want to thank him for all of the contributions he made to the digital community in so much as his work makes stuff like this blog possible.
