The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #5

about the platform that he'd created for Creative Commons,

and they were all listening to him, just...

I was sitting at the back, thinking: he's just a kid, why are they listening to him?

But they did...

Well, I don't think I comprehended it fully.

Though critics have said it does little to ensure artists get paid for their work,

the success of Creative Commons has been enormous.

Currently on the website Flickr alone, over 200 million people use some form of Creative Commons license.

He contributed through his technical abilities, and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him.

Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog:

I think deeply about things, and I want others to do likewise.

I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people.

I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication.

Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time

on things that won't have an impact.

I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously.

I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience.

I want to make the world a better place.

In 2004, Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University.

He'd had ulcerative colitis which was very troubling, and we were concerned about him taking his medication.

He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail of pills every day,

and one of those pills was a steroid which stunted his growth,

and made him feel different from any of the other students.

Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship

and finds himself in effectively a babysitting program for overachieving high-schoolers

who in four years are meant to become captains of industry and one-percenters

and I think it just made him bananas.

In 2005, after only one year of college,

Swartz was offered a spot at a new start-up incubation firm called Y Combinator, lead by Paul Graham.

He's like, "Hey, I have this idea for a a website."

And Paul Graham likes him enough, and says, "Yeah, sure."

So Aaron drops out of school, moves to this apartment...

So this used to be Aaron's apartment when he moved here.

I have vague memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease

'cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college.

Aaron lived in what's now the livingroom and some of the posters are leftover from when Aaron lived here.

And then the library...there are more books, but a lot of them are Aaron's.

Aaron's Y Combinator site was called "infogami", a tool to build websites.

But infogami struggles to find users, and Swartz eventually

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