Remember Aaron Swartz

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A huge loss

Oh, Aaron. I remember meeting him, after reading some of his writing, and being surprised to find the person behind the mental voice, introverted and thoughtful and a little awkward, in contrast to the boldness of his blog.

I considered him a friend, though I wish I’d known him better; I remember talking to him, often in a smaller gathering of nerds after some conference or event, about copyright, the open web, Wikipedia, social structures, and usually about some problem or another that existed in the world. And unlike almost anyone else, a short time later Aaron would have founded an organization or taken on some big project or pulled some crazy stunt to try to fix that problem, because that’s just what he did. And sometimes he succeeded.

What a huge loss.