postmedia

Aaron Swartz was fourteen when he coauthored the RSS 1.0 specification. He worked on Creative Commons the following year. He built the tooling behind what became Reddit. He wrote a good deal of the early code for Open Library. He was one of the organizers of the campaign that stopped SOPA in 2012, which almost nobody had believed could be stopped. The consistent thread was access. He held that publicly funded knowledge should be publicly reachable and spent most of his short working life building the plumbing for that idea. He also wrote about a distinction that gets collapsed constantly: transparency for institutions, privacy for individuals. Power should be legible to the people it acts on. People should not be legible to power. These are not competing values, they are the same value pointing in the direction of whoever holds less. The collapse happens when transparency gets applied downward. A public ledger recording every ordinary person's transactions is not transparency. Institutions with resources maintain their opacity through structure and counsel. Individuals do not have that option, so a universal disclosure rule falls entirely on one side.