Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz could read before most kids could tie their shoes. By 14, he helped design RSS. By 19, he co-founded Reddit. But the thing that defined him wasn’t what he built — it was what he fought for. Aaron saw a world where publicly funded research sat locked behind paywalls, where knowledge was hoarded by those who could afford it, and he couldn’t stomach it. He downloaded millions of academic articles from JSTOR. The federal government responded with 13 felony charges and the threat of 35 years in prison. He was 26 years old, facing the full weight of a system that wanted to make an example of him. On January 11, 2013, he chose to leave. The open internet lost its fiercest advocate. His legacy lives in every open-access paper, every bit of code shared freely, every person who believes that access to knowledge is a right, not a privilege.