From So Open It Hurts: What the Internet did to Aaron Swartz, a great piece by Noam Scheiber in The New Republic:
Tim Berners-Lee, the MIT professor whose bio immodestly (if accurately) claims he “invented the World Wide Web,†met Swartz at 14 and all but crowned him his successor. Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard law professor who was once the country’s most prominent advocate for liberalizing copyright law, took Swartz under his wing when he was 15. Swartz was welcome on any e-mail thread or chat room populated by the world’s leading hackers before he could shave.
What these adults saw in Swartz was someone who could realize the messianic potential of the Internet, someone who could build the tools that would liberate information and keep it free from the corporations and bureaucrats who would wall it off. Underlying it all was the hacker belief that the world could be perfected if enough of us tapped society’s vast reserves of knowledge and put it to proper use. “With his intellect, we wanted to harness it for good instead of evil,†says Lisa Rein, a Lessig aide who worked closely with him. “I was worried that Microsoft would get ahold of him.â€
It was a staggering responsibility. If you’re a tennis prodigy, the toll on your body and psyche is punishing.
Scheiber does something special in this piece. I’ve already noted here the tragedy and the difficulty of explaining any suicide, as well as my feeling that Swartz chose the wrong enemy in JSTOR and that prosecutors’ plea bargain was not nearly as bad a deal as Swartz’s defenders allege.
But Scheiber goes beyond the particulars of Swartz’s case — he doesn’t get caught up in the points about which reasonable people can disagree when looking at the actions that got Swartz in the legal trouble that seemed to have something to do — please note my cautious wording — with his eventual suicide.
Sheiber’s piece deeply considers how we thrust prodigies into the limelight and into positions of power before they are able to handle the pressures. He draws some broad parallels between Swartz’s experiences and those of other internet activists who took their own lives, including Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Len Sassaman, Christopher Lightfoot, and Gene Kan
Scheiber’s entire piece is well worth a read.