Into The Weeds

Aaron Swartz, best known as a co-author of the RSS specification, a co-owner of pupular social news site Reddit, and a lead campaigner against internet censorship and corruption committed suicide yesterday at the age of 26.

It’s sad to see such a brilliant, creative mind and potentially positive, young, influence for good in the world and community gone. I didn’t personally know him, and I can’t say I don’t have mixed feelings about the JSTOR incident (although it has been instrumental in bringing publicity to the issue of journal access and the heavy-handedness of computer-crime law in this country).

Some may say he went too far, pushed the envelope, and was unreasonable. George Bernard Shaw said the following:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”