Part One: Christmas Hero Episode: Aaron Swartz

Mexico border near Yacoomba, California. While you're hopefully warm and dry, the border patrol is detaining thousands of migrants, including children and the elderly, in the desert without food, water, or shelter when overnight temperatures drop below freezing. Volunteers provide hot meals, blankets and toys for children. They build shelters even though the Border Patrol destroys them, and keep rebuilding them so that people have a place to sleep out in the

freezing wind. Everyone there, including James, has spent a lot of their own money supporting this effort, and you can hear more about the efforts of volunteers over on It Could Happen Here, But your support would mean the world to James and the other people trying to help migrants over at the border. Of course, those migrants themselves. You can donate to this effort at GoFundMe. If you just type Yakumba Jacumba Migrant Camps go fund me, Yakumba Migrant

Camps go fund me, you'll get it. Or you can use the link TinyURL dot com slash border agfm that'll take you right to the fundraiser. So thank you. Ah what a happy Yule Tie Mary Xmas to all of you listeners out there in radio land. It's not radio land.

Radio is a dead medium. It's a podcast Behind the Bastards where normally we talk about the very worst people in all of history, but once a year, one glorious day or week out of the year, instead of talking about the worst people in all of history, we talk about some of the best people in all of history.

And today, as our guest on this This Yule Tide episode, our only returning Christmas episode, guest Margaret Killjoy, who talks about cool people who did cool stuff for a living in a podcast with that name.

those of us. This is kind of less of a case for people who have been radicals that entire time, but those of us who started from a more centrist, moderate, you know, liberal kind of background, this period of like, wow, you know, the internet is going to be this incredible tool for democracy and spreading knowledge. The tech industry they're they're like this progressive force in a lot of ways

in society. There's a bunch of things that are going to be made better by connecting people all over the world to oh, not only does all this technology not work the way that we thought it, and not only is it a lot more toxic, does they have more negative consequences for people's mental health, for the health of societies, But it increases the arsenal of authoritarians. And most of the people who are running the tech industry now want

that right, are fundamentally on the side of authoritarians. There's this kind of movement. The New York Times just did an article on it, because that kind of the mainstream is starting to be aware of some to an extent of which it kind of came out of some of

the effective altruism stuff. That's that's the effective accelerationists, right e ff slash acc is kind of how toll be written a lot in the ideas like we need to accelerate without thinking of the consequences, you know, AI effective AI, you know, and push it in every aspect of society, and it doesn't matter who it hurts, it doesn't matter what the consequences are, because fundamentally this is what human beings need. And these people are also getting into eugenics.

A lot of these are the folks around Elon Musk. It's deeply reactionary in many ways, but it came out of and a lot of some of the people who are involved in it are folks who came out of in the early two thousands, the late nineties. You would have thought a lot differently of them, right, You would have thought that these people were, if not on the side of angels, then broadly speaking, part of a positive

trend in our culture. And today. The hero we're talking about is a guy who's a personal hero of mine. He was a dude who was to an extent on this side. But yeah, yeah, he was a dude who was to an extent on you know, we don't know because because of when he died, fundamentally where he would have ended up now, I don't think he would be in league with any of those guys. He's a guy a fundamentally view as a hero. And his name was Aaron Schwartz.

And so from a very early age there are computers in the Schwartz house and eventually Aaron and all of his brothers he has two younger brothers, will have computers as kids in the early I mean in the late eighties, early nineties.

early nineties. If you followed our stories of tech billionaires guys like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, or you've done your own reading on Steve Jobs. We haven't covered yet. We will one of these days. I definitely do consider him a bastard, although I have kind of more admiration for him as a in terms of just his capabilities than those other guys. He is a terrible person, don't get me wrong, right, but.

most of our big tech founders do today. Right, broadly speaking, you know, he's gonna wind up being a very different person, but he does come from kind of the same starting position. One of the real differences with him. All of these guys get kind of framed as and I think probably believe of themselves as child geniuses. None of them were. They're all smart, don't get me wrong. Jeff Bezos, smart guy,

Bill Gates, smart guy, Steve Jobs, smart guy. None of them are are geniuses, right, Steve Wozniak, I think, you know, very fair to call that man a technical genius, like one once in a generation brain. None of these guys are technical geniuses. They're pretty smart. They're pretty smart, and they have enough insight to understand where things are going to go to take advantage of people who are geniuses.

Aaron is a legitimate child genius. There is there is no argument with that statement that I have ever seen. He is, like, for an idea of how intelligent he he is, he teaches himself to read and his parents

don't realize has done it. His mom realizes it when they have a sign on the fridge that's like cliped out of the newspaper that's like there's you know, a free family entertainment you know thing nearby, and he he asked his mom, hey, mom, what is and he like reads the thing out and she's like, what are you talking about? And he points the fridge and she realizes that he's reading it. At age three, she has no idea that he's he's learned her This is how she

learns that he knows how to read. Yes, he's reading novels by the time he's in kindergarten, and likewise, around the same time he teaches himself to read. A little bit later, he teaches himself to code. You know, just a phenomenal mind by again, have never heard any sort of debate on this question. Yeah, so obviously with the resources they have. Realizing how fucking smart their kid is, his parents decide to send him to a private school

for gifted children, which he attends through middle school. He teaches himself to program pretty early on. His first project is a Sudoku like puzzle game. At one point, just as like a thing for fun, he builds and programs an ATM machine like out of cardboard, and like, I don't know what he uses for the computer but he gets access to some computer bits he like makes an ATM machine.

novels when I was in third grade. I read faster and got onto that stuff faster than most people. But that's the kind of thing. All of the adults around me my family are big readers. I saw them reading big books and bigger books than me. So like I was doing a thing, I'm like, oh, I'm doing a thing that's kind of like the adults, but they are still doing that thing, and they're doing it better. Aaron

is doing a thing adults can't comprehend. Most adults can't comprehend coding, especially not on a level he is at. And you know that gives him a healthy respect for his own intellect, and sometimes it gives him kind of an unhealthy respect for his own end. And his younger brother has said, like he was kind of a brat, right, Yeah,

he was smarter than most people. He knew he was smarter than most of the adults around, and he could be a snotty rat about it, right, Like, that's pretty inevitable when you've got a kid who's this smart, they're going to go through that. It seems to have been a phase for him. This is not, like, I don't think a lifelong thing for him. Most people say he was a very down to earth guy most of his life, but he has his brat period. I think that's kind

of inevitable when you're this smart. His parents were part of a reform synagogue, but when he was pretty young, their dad moved them to a HBBAD synagogue, which is a kind of Orthodox synagogue. Fairly early on, but they're not you know, Aaron doesn't find himself compelled by organized religion, and when he's pretty young he tells his parents I don't believe in God, and they let him drop out. Right. They don't seem to have fought him on this right,

not longer. Not long after that, when after he finishes the eighth grade, he's like, hey, I don't want to keep going to high school. I want to drop out. So he drops out of the ninth grade, and his dad lets him do this because he's like, yeah, I actually I hated high school too. I got bullied. Aaron gets bullied. He's he's mostly thin, but he's kind of like pudgy around the middle. He has some body image issues, and he's like, he's too smart. Any kid who's that smart,

it's kind of get bullied. Right. He's a little bitty and he's weird. He's going to get bullied, you know. It's also inevitable. And he's like, I don't want to keep going to high school. I don't think I need this. So his dad he gets to drop out and he starts taking college courses at a nearby college. And Aaron

is as good as his word. He is the kind of autodidact who has a he's got a wide ranging series of interests, and he's good at teaching himself things, and unlike a lot of tech wunderkins, he's not just obsessed with code. That's kind of his first love. But it's honestly, it's right up there with books. He would he would read kind of as a young adult, upwards of one hundred books a year, and he very quickly gets interested in novels by guys like George Saunders, David

Foster Wallace. These are kind of like some of his favorites where he comes up short. He's good at teaching himself anything he's interested in. One of the problems he's going to have that's kind of a lifelong thing for him, is he can't focus on anything that's not really his top obsession at the moment. Right. He doesn't have generally to kind of long term stay interested in a specific thing. He doesn't have a lot of discipline, right, And that lack of discipline is kind of married with a basic

lack of social skills. That again, very much what you'd expect from a kid whose parents let him drop out of school to raise himself on the internet. One of his childhood friends told an interviewer he needed a couple of years to be stuffed in a locker to get his social stuff together. And I think his friends being a little bit, you know, a facetious there, but I think the point is that it's not that being bullied is good, but the friction. Experiencing friction and having to

work through it with your peers is good. That is necessary. Right, You don't need to get beaten the shit out of you, but you do need friction. You need to You need to be in situations where like, well I don't like the people here, but we have to accomplish a thing together. That's necessary. You know, I'm optimal health.

the opposite of Steve Jobs. He hated fruit. He like wouldn't eat fruit basically, and he pretty much didn't eat vegetables other than fried potatoes because basically one hundred percent of people will eat fried potatoes, right, Yeah, no, there's no Yeah, yeah, I don't know that I've ever met anyone who won't eat French fries. Yea, so for health reasons obviously, but like, I don't know any all the picky eaters. I note, like fries tend to be a

thing there. I don't know. I'm sure there are people who don't, but that is like weird how many people are like, yeah, but I'll eat fries.

A number of people came to that realization, and many of them went on to monetize the Internet in ways that have contributed to a great deal of harm. Aaron's interests from the beginning had a lot less to do with money and a lot to do with the sharing of information. In nineteen ninety nine, at age twelve, he

created the Info Network, a user generated encyclopedia. Wikipedia didn't launch until two years later, a fact that always seemed to so again when he's twelve, he creates Wikipedia right like, with the same basic idea. It doesn't take off Wikipedia does, and that fact kind of you get the feeling it kind of peeves him a little bit, he would later tell an interviewer. It was basically Wikipedia, except long before

Wikipedia had launched. But I was in middle school at the time, so my site didn't make it into the New York Times. And that's kind of and he's probably right, right, yeah, Now, totally Wipedia got the early you know interest And that's why.

Internet and should get out of the Internet. Right, And you know, Wikipedia, not that there aren't some critiques of it, but like one of the very best things the Internet's ever produced, one of the most important and useful things the Internet's ever.

degree of early recognition. He became a finalist for the rs Digital Prize, which recognized young people who built valuable non commercial websites. He wins a thousand bucks for this, and he wins a trip to MIT, where for the first time he meets some of the genius coders and

engineers he admired in person. Now, Aaron had already started communicating online with some of the luminaries in his field, but meeting guys like Philip Greenspun, who developed one of the very first photo sharing sites and is kind of he's a pioneer in the concept of how digital communities are going to work. He's he's a guy who is thinking, lays a lot of the groundwork for what becomes social media.

You know, Aaron has his first conversations with this guy about the open source movement, which is popular among the nerds who are still the center of gravity in online technology,

and he becomes entranced. He decides he wants to join the World Wide Web Consortium today it's the main international standards organization for the Internet, and he has turned down for joining because he's thirteen years old, Right, you know, they're like, well, we don't we don't let you know, this is like, yeah, we don't let their dan the yarrel's in. I don't think they're trying to be shitty, they're just yeah, it's a sensible rule for a kid

who's not Aaron. Aaron refuses to take no for an answer, and I'm going to quote from a write up in The New Yorker here. Undaunted, he read through the rules of the Consortium and found that every member was allowed to send a delegate. He looked through the lists to find somebody who hadn't sent a delegate, and he found one, the HTML Writer's Guild. He emailed the group and asked if he could participate in a W three C work group as its delegate, and it had no objection. So

he kind of finds a sideways way in. Right, he hears there's a rule against this. He finds a way around it. You know, this is going to be a pattern in his life. This willingness, first off, an unwillingness to take no for an answer he doesn't think there's a good reason for it, and second an unwillingness to listen to rules that he thinks are stupid. Right, that's

going to characterize a lot of his future. Another thing that's going to characterize his life from this point forward is an understanding that unpleasant aspects of life, specifically the bureaucracies that we all have to engage in to some extent to survive, can be avoided. Right, And this is the thing that has positive and negative outcomes for him. Right. His dad's going to later trace the attitude back to his upbringing and the decision he made to let Aaron

drop out of school. Quote, this is his father. He also never learned to do anything that he didn't want to do. College is very important that you're forced to study stuff you're not interested in. But he hated the bureaucracy of it, the dumb rules, the pointless assignments. He just rejected that. It was like getting him to eat vegetables.

And again there's a lot of value in understanding. I run into this with some of my friends who kind of were more on the anarchist punk side of thing. When when you have to deal with the legal system and stuff, because I've had a lot more dealings with it where it's like there's just ways that you have to approach it to deal with it. It's the same thing with talking to when when my close friends or whatever have an issue with like a company they need

to get like a refund or something. I know how to talk to representatives and shit to make things happen, right, I just I have learned that shit over the years. It's a skill.

the mayor's curfew exempts media. We're you know, press with badges and stuff on, and you know there's other people who's trying to argue with the cops, and I just you know, yelling at them, and I just kind of keep engaging him in conversation. He's like, I don't care, I'm go to arrest you. And finally what I say is like the mayor has said that we're exempt. Are you countermanding the mayor's orders? And he's a switch flipped

in his head. Yeah, And not only did my partner and I not get arrested, but like the protesters behind us did not because it was just like, yeah, you had to you have to. Like, it's just this understanding of how bureaucracy and the people who make up bureaucracy like function.

skills as early as he maybe otherwise would have. Yeah, so you know, a lot of positive stuff happening for him in his early adolescence. A less positive thing that happens during this time is that when he's twelve, so kind of the same year he makes his Wikipedia thing, he's diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. This may help to exchange to explain some of his pickiness as an eater. Obviously, it's never a pleasant condition to deal with. Aaron seems

to have particularly struggled. He would often lose days or entire weeks to abdominal pain intense it would leave him curled up on the floor. So he's always got this regular thing in his life where like sometimes he just won't be able to work because he's got he's in so much pain. You know, this is a regular thing he struggles with. That said, when he's able to work, he's so much smarter than most people that he still accomplishes much more than people who are not dealing with

this kind of physical stuff, right well accomplish. In August of two thousand, Aaron finds himself on an email discussion thread for a group of programmers who are designing something called RSSI, which stands for Real Simple Syndication. It is a web feed that lets users build their own news aggregators, like pushing content from various sites into a single feed. And it's also it's one of the backroun like foundational

technologies of the Internet. Every website you go to basically uses RSS to push, you know, and collect and stuff the things that they're publishing on a regular basis. You know, this is one of the most significant develop lipments in the early Internet, right if you're thinking about like the invention of like electricity, it's almost like a power transformer, I think might be a good way to describe it.

It is absolutely foundational to how the Internet is used. Yeah, yeah, so Aaron is going to be, and there's a whole team of people. All of the others of him are adults who are working on this, but he's going to be one of them, right, So he gets into this group, and again it's just kind of the nerds that find themselves are working on this. They're all handling different parts of the project. And Aaron quickly becomes involved. And I

think everyone who was there agrees he contributed. It's not like he did not invent RSS, right, A lot of people did, but his contributions were substantial to this thing that is a fundamental undergirding of how the Internet functions today.

much less invent some disruptive technology. I'd skipped college, says Kevin Burton, who first met Schwartz through the RSS group. The fact that I couldn't access materials available to college students was why open access was always important to me. So Aaron is an not a what did act? So are a lot of these guys, and he goes from just kind of like this is just how it I am and how I learned to thinking about this more long ideological lines. Right, this is not just a thing

for me, but this is a thing for other people. Right. This is fundamental to allowing human beings to progress. Is making sure that information is accessible. I know, yeah, as much as possible. If you go through enough recollections of Erin during this period, people who were in this working group with him will note that he was again, he could be a little bit of a brat, right. His questions are always good, but he could be kind of haughty.

He could be kind of aggressive sometimes, and how he asked them, you know, he has a lot of this attitude. He doesn't understand where you're doing something. He's like, why are we doing this? Does this doesn't seem like the best thing to do? What about doing this? This is coming from a mix of genuine curiosity and he's he's he could be a little bit of snotty, right like he's he's a kid, you know, yeah, yeah, And he also he also this is you know, not entirely a

negative thing. He fundamentally he doesn't have kind of a baseline level of respect based on people having greater experience, right, because he doesn't have this assumption that that means they know more than him, and often they don't, you know, right anyway, you know who does know more than all of us?

of the in person meetings. And yeah, and so I'm asking like, hey, man, like why don't you ever show up whenever we meet in person? He's like, well, i'd have to ask my parents because I'm fourteen. And then

they're like, oh shit. I had a version that happened with Garrison when we started like working with them, right, like one of our mutual friends, like we had been hanging out with them, you know, after a horrible riot where all nearly got arrested, and like the next day, our friend texts me and is like, do you know that they're seventeen? I was like no, in fact I did not.

the most luminous names in technology, right he. But he meets and becomes to some extent a little bit of a protege of a guy named Tim berners Lee. Berners Lee is an MIT professor. He invented the world Wide Web. This is not one of those things when people say so and so invented this and it's like bullshit. It's like, well they invented no, no, he The world Wide Web

is Tim berners Lee's invention. He created this, right, He, in a very literal sense, created this starting in nineteen eighty nine, he sketches out he's working for CERN at this point. And here one of the things that CERN, which is a big research institute. All these colleges, universities, they all have things that are versions of like what

the Internet is going to be. These electronic communications networks that allow them to communicate on campus, allow them to communicate with each other and to some extent with other organizations, but none of them are built around the same standard, so letting everything call is a huge fucking mess. And berners Lee is like, we need a standard solution for how electronic communication is going to work, and he sketches

out he designs the world Wide Web. That's literally the thing that he makes, Like, he comes up with a plan for it's going to be a global web of individual pages, each of which has their own address. They're all coded in HTML, and because they're on the same standard, all of these websites and whatnot can communicate with each other. This is the foundation of everything that makes the modern

Internet possible. And when berners Lee creates this, he has this choice, which is that's a patentable idea, right he could have been the man with the patent for the Internet.

He makes a key decision he chooses not to. He decides, I am not going to have a patent on this, so anybody can do this because because he's definitely a cool dude, right as far as I'm aware of and as a because he makes this fundamental decision, he's kind of viewed as a saint within the open source movement in a lot of ways, right.

like endorses him as like this is my successor. Right, this is going to be the guy who takes the Internet into whatever it becomes in the future. That elevates Erin immediately. It kind of int like, immediately he's in the inner circle of people who are inventing the Internet, which is definitely happening at this period of time, and Erin gets kind of suddenly thrown into the tech conference circuit where he is kind of an object of marvel among the mostly much older men who had helped to

build the foundations of the Internet. There's videos of this time of him, you know, speaking at conferences and stuff, and they tend to show Aaron who is absurdly small, almost especially next to these grown men, giving pretty thoughtful and complex answers while men decades his seniors sit next to him on stage. At age fifteen, he sends an email to a guy named Lawrence Lessig. Lessig is a legal scholar who is an early prominent activist for what we call the open Internet, and Lessig is in the

process of inventing something called the creative commons at this point. Right, Lessig is the creator of the creative comments, which basically gives creators. You and I've both used creative comments, right, So, most people who make things that are cool. Yeah, And it allows creators of all kinds of meat the ability to copyright their work in ways that allow for adaptation and distribution much more easily without involving a publisher or whatever. Right.

You don't have to have that, like, you have this kind of ready made kit for figuring out the rights status of your work and setting that up. So Aaron sends this guy an email, and I'm going to quote from an article in Rolling Stone for what happens next. Lawrence Lessig, now a professor at Harvard, gave Schwartz his first job, flying him out to San Francisco to write code for Creative Comments, a nonprofit that allows users to

copyright the material in less restrictive ways. When the site celebrated its launch on December sixteenth, two thousand and two, Schwartz was invited to speak to the crowd of six hundred, which included Internet luminaries like cred Neumark, the founder of Craigslist. So Aaron gets up. This is Lessig talking. So Aeron gets up. He's not even big enough to stand over the podium, and he explains what the architecture of the site is, and the audience is just amazed that this

was a fifteen year old kid, So he is. He helps to create creative comments. It's less ex idea. He does the coding for it, right, So he is fifteen teen two of the things that are fundamental underpinnings of the Internet. To this day, he's had a significant hand in making RSS and creative comments fifteen years old. Now, it is worth noting that Lessig is at this point in time, like a lot of us was, not, like a lot of people were at this period of time,

one of the wild eyed optimists of the Internet. Right, he is actually not someone who feels it's inevitable that the Internet will lead us into a golden age of freedom. As a legal scholar, he is well aware of the weapons available to the enemy, and he knows that they are terrible in nature and inexhaustible nearly in quantity.

fucking law. Lawrence had gotten famous in hacker circles for a book he wrote nineteen ninety nine called Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, And again he is a kind of definitely a visionary. His book argues that programmers are going to have more influence than laws on the development

of the Internet. And to explain kind of where his thinking is going and why it is relevant to us today, I want to read an extended quote from Noah Scheiber writing for The New Republic, because it describes an extremely important moment in our early conceptions of the Internet. Quote. The law could tell you who to associate with and who not to, but you could always ignore it. If, on the other hand, a programmer decided it should be impossible to connect with a certain type of website, the

average person had no way around it. The programmer was god. Suffice it to say, audiences were intrigued. In the late nineties, Lessig taught a class about the Internet that was open to both Harvard law students and MIT engineers. Early in the term, he asked, how do you know if something you're doing is wrong. The lawyer said that an action was wrong if it was against the law. The hackers said, it was only wrong if you failed to accomplish it.

It was the most fundamental statement of the hacker ethos, and it seemed, and it teemed with idealism. If it were possible to increase human welfare through engineering, through delivering more social interaction or knowledge or happiness to more people than it would be a moral not to. There was only one hitch, which Lesseig dutifully explained, but which often went unheeded. The law would not be standing by idly.

The belief had always been that lawyers can say what they want and will always have the technology to route around it, says Been Adida, a programmer who worked with Lessigan Schwartz. To the hackers, the law was at best anachronistic, at worst arbitrary, even cruel. Lesseg was one of the first folks to say, you know the power that code has over the way people interact online, You would be foolish to think the law is not going to regulate it. Adida recalls kind of a key key moment there.

that's our fucking legacy, you know. Yeah, but like this idea that and also this idea that like something is only wrong if you fail to do it right a sketchy you know. And it's like it's interesting and you can see how it was often or often intended as a force for freedom twenty years ago and is now that same concept is just.

you know who we're talking about now. Aaron is certainly on the side of the light side of that fork, absolutely, And the fork again, as a spoiler, you could if you wanted to split the fork at his death when it occurs.

sees it for the sham that it was. He writes at the time that Stanford is quote an idyllic little school in California, where the sun is always shining, and the grass is always green, and the kids are always out a tan. After three days at Stanford, Aaron decides to attend a party, he kind of forces himself to go. An article in The New Republic makes it seem like this was kind of an anthropological experiment by Aaron, more of that than an attempt to enjoy himself.

lack of social skills. Aaron is angry that Stanford required ID cards with RFID transmitters, which can be used to track students. He hates the library because of how it's organized. He thinks it's an efficient and I'm sure he's right about that. And he was disgusted by the hygiene levels

at the shared student facilities like the laundromat. As a consequence of this disillusionment, he spends most of his time in college hanging out with adults, particularly Lawrence Lessig and friend of the Pod Corey, doctor Rowe Lessig is again the guy who funded Creative Commons, and Corey is an activist and a wildly prolific author, very good author. They were,

in short, good influences. But one also has to assume any seventeen year old who's hanging out with these guys and out their fellow teenagers, they're not going to get better at.

for him. Right. The sheer odd confidence guys like Tim Berners, Lee and Lessig have for Schwartz is at that's a lot to put on the shoulders of a seventeen Yeah, right, being told you're the future of the Internet, You're going to be critical in this thing that is we believe necessary for the development of the human race. To be told that before you're even seventeen, that's a lot to

have on your shoulders. Right. Aaron has absolutely shown an appetite for this work, but that doesn't mean there's not a burden there, right. Lisa Rain, one of Lesseg's aides, later told New Republic, with his intellect, we wanted to harness it for good instead of evil. I was worried that Microsoft would get a hold of him, which, again, for these adults, not an unreasonable thing to be concerned about.

and that's going to be difficult for him. That's going to be an added stress in his life. It is also worth noting here that Aaron is one of the most prolific bloggers of his generation. His need to create pros and work his thoughts and feelings out through the written word is as strong, if not stronger, than his desire to code, and in fact, there will be a point in his life when he's like, I don't I think I'm done with coding. I want to become an author.

I would rather be like a middling author than a great coder. Like that's the thing he expresses at a point that's real.

this deep desire for privacy. All of his friends will say he had a lot of issues sometimes with his friends knowing each other because he hated the idea that people would be talking about him, even if it was positive, when he wasn't there, Like, he just really had a gut revulsion of that This was kind of ward in him with his need to publish every single thing that he thought on the Internet under his name. Right, this

is a complicated thing for this kid to deal with. Yeah, and I'm going to quote from Rolling Stone again here. On his blog, he had told this story about having a crush on this girl and stalking her. Lessig recalls, not in a gross way, it was cute. Anyway. He came to a reception at the law school whe Lessig was a professor, and I recount this during a conversation. He takes me aside and he goes, why would you do that? I said, what do you mean? He said,

tell the secret? I said secret? You blogged it? He said, yeah, well I blogged it, meaning I blogged it for the people who read my blog. I didn't blog it so the whole world would know. And he is he's dealing with an early version of what we're all going to deal with as the Internet goes from this thing that only a few weirdos are on, do this thing that everyone is on by default, where he's like, you know, Lesseg's like, well you published this, right, why can't I

talk about this? And he's like, well, I published it for the Internet, now for the real world.

you create your own website and it's your website. I'm just creating a centralized set of tools for you to build your own websites.

the day's Aaron could work again. He's able to accomplish so much work that it all kind of shakes out well in the long run. And eventually why Combinator pairs him with two other founders, para dudes named Steve Huffman and Alexis o'hanian, who were working on their own product Reddit,

Serena Williams's husband, That's right, yes, Serena Williams's husband. So they are basically a lot of Aaron's ideas for Infogomi get folded into Reddit, and you know, Reddit kind of has started to exist, but it doesn't work it boogie, it's unstable. It can't be adopted on any meaningful scale because it's like, it's not good yet. Aaron comes in and he fixes all of the code, right, and so he becomes one of the founders of Reddit, which is, of all of the big modern social media sites, the

closest to the old Internet. It still exists on the new one.

the creative commons. Right, nineteen year old kid, you know, kind of verging on I think twenty. At this point, his contributions are undeniable. But for the other folks at Reddit, his co founders, he is becomes increasingly frustrating to work with because while when he's working he gets a lot done, I think in total he gets as much done as anyone. He has this habit of dropping out of contact for days or even like a week or so at a time,

and like hiding in his apartment. And when he does it, he's just reading books NonStop generally, or he's in too much pain to do much, but he doesn't. He's not good at communicating with the team about this stuff.

much he gets. He seems not to have told anyone specifically about it. Probably somewhere a million or north of a million, right. Yeah, it's enough money, especially back then, that he does not have to work. You know, he would eventually have to make more money. Right. You can't live generally, probably off your whole life, for your whole life, off a million dollars if you're young. Right, But that's enough money that he doesn't have to worry about money

for quite a while, right. And it's also you know, I found this interesting New Yorker article that is kind of a more a bit of a more critical take on Aaron and his legacy than some of the others that talks spends a lot of time talking about how much he loves money, which I don't think is fair.

It does quote him talking about, you know, making some kind of bratty statements about like, oh, you know, I lose that much money in my couch cushions or whatever, and talk about how cool it is to have like money, and it kind of makes the claim that like, oh, yeah, Aaron loved money, which is not borne out by the rest of his life. I think he just has a reaction that any nineteen or twenty year old when they suddenly have a million dollars, which is like, fuck, that's dope.

I don't have to do a thing I don't want to do anymore sick, which I don't think is I don't think that's element evidence of him being shallow. Who wouldn't feel that way? Right?

like San Francisco, which thinks where their offices are. He stays on for a while, right, they make him move back West to work out of the office, which he hates. He hates working, he hates the corporate environment. He justlkes San Francisco. You know, it's not his place. It's not his kind of lifestyle.

subscribes to, but that's how she self describes. And by this point, according to Quinn, who is very close with him, at this period, he's growing dissolutioned with his work on Reddit. Quote. He wasn't sure if he had done a good thing. He began to see it as a way people wasted time. So he's got some issues with creating this thing that's one of the first kind of Web two point zero sort of foundations. This is also kind of going back and forth on This is part of what it's going

to become. Another common pattern with Aaron, which is that he seems to regularly find himself racked with doubt over whether or not he'd accomplished anything of value in his life. Right. This is a regular thing for him where he's like, I don't think I've ever made anything. I think some of that's just because everything he makes is part of a team, right, And he's not going to be one

of these guys like fucking Zucker. And that's true of all of these guys, by the way, all of these tech luminaries, none of them make anything on The closest you get is maybe Wosniak, right, who did legitimately sit down at a cobble together a personal computer. Right, But like none of these founders make anything on their own, you know, like that just simply doesn't happen, right, And like Aaron understands that. I think he feels kind of

insecure about it. But like Aaron is everyone who was a part of these projects is like, yeah, he was a big part of them, he'd right, but.

it's irrational. That doesn't stop that, I mean, everyone from happening, right, right exactly, And maybe that can help you if you deal with imposter syndem knowing that, like yeah, this guy who literally no one can deny his contributions to science and technology felt that way too. So yeah, again, he's struggling increasingly during this period, and the fact that he has to work at this office, he's in a place he doesn't really want to be, contributes to that, and

I'm going to quote from Rolling Stone again. That Christmas, two months after he'd started working in Redditt San Francisco office, Schwartz took a trip to Berlin to attend the Chaos Communication Congress, one of the most popular HA conventions in the world. On his way back home, he stopped in Cambridge for a visit when his lifelong stomach troubles asserted themselves,

leaving him writing in pain for several days. On January eighteenth, two thousand and seven, he wrote a post on his blog titled A Moment Before Dying, which began there is a moment immediately before life becomes no longer worth living, when the world appears to slow down and all its myriad details suddenly become brightly, achingly apparent. Written as a short story in the third person, the post described a young man Erin, who had decided to kill himself for Erin,

and this is him writing. That moment came after exactly one week of pain, seven days of searing, tormenting agony that poured forth from his belly. The post alarmed his Reddit partners. It was the first they had heard from him in weeks, and it appeared to be a suicide note. Ohanian, one of the original founders, called the local police department

and officers were dispatched to the apartment. Just before they arrived, Schwartz snuck out this onto the street, and in the wake of the incident, went to links to downplay at severity, changing the original post from Erin to Alyx as if to make clear that suicide was not something the actual Erin would ever seriously consider. So that's, you know, shows you where his head is. That's worrying, right. I'm not surprised and was concerned by this. I mean, chronic illness

is an It's a real motherfucker yeeah. Now, this plus the fact that he had not been showing up to work for long periods of time, is going to be what precipitates a pretty rapid resignation from Reddit, and in short order, Erin is a free agent again. His next project would be his most ambitious, The Open Library. Along with Brewster Kahl, Alexis Rosi, a, Nan Chappotu, and Rebecca Malamood, Aaron embarked on a project to collect online digital copies

of every book imaginable. The idea is every book will have a page to the extent that's possible. The ones that are open source, that are old enough will have full scans of the book that you can like search and read. The books that we don't have access to will at least have, you know, ideally we'll get a copy or that people could check out online or something, but we'll at least have a page for it that explains who wrote it, what it is, what's in it.

And the online library is still around today. It's one of the most significant storehouses of knowledge in the history of the human race. Right, Aaron is foundational in creating the open library. He's one of the people who helps to found it. He's only on that, I think for like a year, maybe a little less, and you know, he contributes significantly, and then he finds himself drawn in

another direction and kind of bounces. Some of this is because he gets frustrated with the refusal of big libraries to share their catalogs. But as call, who's one of the founders, later told Rolling Stone, Aaron floated, that's how he worked, and you had to accept it. He didn't ask to get paid much. He really thought of himself as a volunteer for the world, and that is what

he does. He'll come into these projects, he'll help with the founding vision, he'll help make them work, and then he's going to bounce you know, yea and move on to the next thing. That's just who he is. That's how his brain works, that's how he's functional, right, And you know calls atude is like, yeah, you know, it would have been nice to have him around for longer, but he did. He did his bit, and he moved on. And that's just Aaron. You just have to understand that.

himself literally anywhere in the tech industry. There is nowhere that would not have that wouldn't have paid so much. It hurt to get this guy right. He does not have any interest in that his heart continually pulls him towards projects that serve a social good and make knowledge accessible to as many people as possible. That's not specifically his goal his entire career, but that's he is right now. In two thousand and eight, Aarin attends a retreat by

the EIFL, the Electronic Information for Libraries. It's a nonprofit that seeks to increase access to knowledge in developing economies around the world. The event, which is held at a former monastery in Italy, seems to have had a somewhat evangelical air to it. Erin is perhaps overtaken by the sense of techno optimism in the air, and it's not

hard to see why. This was the tail end of the Bush years, this long period of neo con dominance that is eroding in the face of Barack Obama's presidential campaign, which is the most optimistic thing Americans had seen in politics in a generation. At least. Late in the event, Erin and an unknown number of co writers put together a document known as the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto. A number of people contribute, it is unclear how many. It

is unclear who they are. Erin's is the only name that winds up on the thing right, and it includes some pretty spicy lines. This is how it opens. Information is power, but like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire as scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries and books and journals is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a

handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences, you'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like read Elviser, and the document points out one of the things that's happening here is a lot of these publishers. The information in them is maybe in a lot of cases open source. It's

publicly funded studies. But unless you're able to get to one of the libraries that has it, you have to pay to get access to the documents that it's You have to pay his service like jstore to get access to it. And Aaron's like, that's fucking bullshit. You know, like this is our information, and you know, obviously the

other stuff I think should be shared too. The document points out that open access, if successful, would only ensure ongoing access for future publications, while the total of published work up to the point that open access becomes a thing would remain locked up. The document decries this as too high a price to pay, and then asks rhetorically, what can we do about this? Quote those with access to these resources, students, librarian, scientists, you have been given

a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not. Indeed, morally you cannot keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world, and you have trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. So he is basically saying what people are already doing, have access to the stuff to their buddies, we need to do for the world. We need to do this to give access, particularly to

people in the global South. You do not have the infrastructural access to this stuff in the same way that people can kind of wangle their way into getting it in the United States. In Europe. This is controversial among his colleagues at this conference. These are all people who believe in open access, but they are people who work

within the system for legal nonprofit organizations. Aaron is saying some hackers here right what he is saying could be read as an incitement to illegal activity, which.

of this episode. Magpie, how are you feeling?

important thing like that. It is just actually true, and especially talking about it in terms of like how it impacts people in the global South, like where you can't like, you know, I don't go to a fancy college, but I know some people go to fancy colleges, and so I just am like, hey, what do you think about this one thing? You know?