Aaron Swartz was born in Chicago on November 8, 1986. His father, Robert Swartz, is a software expert, and his mother, Susan, is a knitting, sewing and fiber material artist. . In an interview, he once said: "I have been surrounded by computers since I was born. Our family already had the earliest Mac shortly before I was born, because my father ran a company that manufactured computer operating systems. I don't think I What great computer skills? I just have a very high starting point.”
Aaron Swartz’s influence on the Internet world is immeasurable. He started programming when he was two or three years old. At the age of 13, he established his first non-profit website by himself, called get.info (The Info.org), which is a free online encyclopedia that everyone can access on the website. Add, edit, and organize content. Similar to Wikipedia, but several years older. As a result, it won the ArsDigita Prize and the site became one of the best web programs of the year. It was precisely because of this award that Aaron had the opportunity to visit Cambridge. The second website he made was called "my.info". The main problem this idea wanted to solve was that instead of getting news from different places on the Internet, why not have a program that automatically collects all the news from the web into one place? After the website was completed, he found that many people were working on it. A new technology called syndication is very similar to his idea. A group of people separated from it and planned to establish a technical standard called "RSS 1.0" for it, so he joined it. And has been a member of the W3C RDF Core Working Group since then. Later, he met Professor Lawrence Lessig of Harvard, built the Creative Commons technology platform, and gave a speech at the conference. He was only 16 years old that year.
In 2004, Aaron entered Stanford University. A year later, he dropped out after being invited by Paul Graham (the founder of Y Combinator, a famous American incubator) and established the Infogami website, which is a tool for building websites. Due to the small number of users, it was merged with Reddit. Reddit later became one of the most popular websites in the United States and was eventually acquired by Condé Nast. As a result, Aaron became a millionaire before the age of 20. Even so, Aaron has always only used technology to do good things, not to make money.
However, for Aaron, the period afterward was extremely dark. "I couldn't stand San Francisco, I couldn't stand office life, I couldn't stand Wired. I got sick and contemplated suicide. I ran away from the police station. When I came back to the office Monday morning, they told me to resign." He said this in a later speech.
Later, Aaron devoted himself to social activities, founded the Open Library, and participated in TV programs to discuss Internet issues. Aaron Swartz is an activist who believes in Internet freedom. He became a major protester against the U.S. government's bill to ban online piracy. In his view, this bill will lead to large-scale Internet censorship and deprive the public of Internet freedom. . In 2010, Aaron Watts established the "Demand Progress" (Demand Progress) to promote Internet freedom and privacy, and became the soul of the organization, vigorously opposing the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) and the "Protect Intellectual Property Act" 》(PIPA). The organization organizes people through emails and other media to express opinions and put pressure on members of Congress and other opinion leaders on specific issues. In the end Aaron achieved this incredible victory.
Aaron got caught up in a complicated case because of his "hacking behavior", and finally chose to commit suicide, leaving us and the world he worked hard to change during his lifetime.
On January 11, 2014, the anonymous hacker group invaded MIT's website and used the slogan "Today we fight back" to commemorate the great Aaron Swartz.