The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #3

and you'd think, this is a kid that's really

going to get somewhere if he doesn't die of scurvy.

Aaron, you're up!

I think the difference is that now you

can't make companies like dotcoms.

You can't have companies that just sell

dog food over the Internet, or sell dog food over cell phones.

But there's still a lot of innovation going on.

I think that maybe if you don't see the

innovation, maybe your head is in the sand.

He takes on this, like an alpha nerd personality, where he's

sort of like, "I'm smarter than you, and

because I'm smarter than you, I'm better than you,

and I can tell you what to do."

It's an extension of, like, him being kind of like a twerp.

So you aggregate all these computers together

and now they're solving big problems

like searching for aliens and trying to cure cancer.

I first met him on IRC, on Internet Relay Chat.

He didn't just write code, he also got people

excited about solving problems he got.

He was a connector.

The free culture movement has had a lot of his energy.

I think Aaron was trying to make the

world work. He was trying to fix it.

He had a very kind of strong personality that definitely ruffled feathers at times.

It wasn't necesarily the case that he was always comfortable in the world

and the world wasn't always comfortable with him.

Aaron got into high school and was really just sick of school.

He didn't like it. He didn't like any of the classes

that were being taught. He didn't like the teachers.

Aaron really knew how to get information.

He was like, "I don't need to go to this

teacher to learn how to do geometry.

I can just read the geometry book,

and I don't need to go to this teacher to

learn their version of American history,

I have, like, three historical compilations here, I could just read them,

and I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the Web."

I was very frustrated with school. I thought the teachers didn't know what they were talking about,

and they were domineering and controlling, and the homework was kind of a sham,

and it was all just like all about a way to pen students all together and force them to do busywork.

And, you know, I started reading books about the history of education

and how this educational system was developed,

and, you know, alternatives to it and ways that people could actually learn things

as opposed to just regurgitating facts that teachers told them,

and that kind of led me down this path of questioning things, once I questioned the school I was in,

I questioned the society that built the school, I questioned the businesses that the schools were training people for,

I questioned the government that set up this whole structure.

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