#52 / Swartz

Ava Kofman, a New York based writer and journalist, has most recently written an article about Aaron Swartz (pictured above). Swartz committed suicide at age twenty-six, two weeks before the beginning of his trial on two counts of wire fraud and eleven separate charges that he violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, by downloading several million articles from JSTOR, a database of academic journals.

If you click the JSTOR link, you will notice that JSTOR wants you to log in with "your personal account, or get JSTOR access through your library or other institution." Better believe they're serious!

Speaking of "serious," Kofman's story, published in the February 22, 2016 edition of The Nation, was titled, "A Serious Man," and is, in essence, a review of a new book compiling some of Swartz' writings, The Boy Who Could Change The World. 

I am recommending the review, and then you can go from there on the book itself. I personally appreciated Swartz' evaluation of blogging: 

"I don’t consider this writing, I consider this thinking,” he wrote about blogging in a 2006 post. “I like sharing my thoughts and I like hearing yours and I like practicing expressing ideas, but fundamentally this blog is not for you, it’s for me. I hope that you enjoy it anyway.”

My sentiments (about blogging) exactly. 

And, what about that "changing the world" idea? When it comes to changing the world, I think we need to reverse the polarity of Swartz' perspective on blogging. 

That changing the world idea is not "for me."

It's for us.

Image Credit: 
http://en.r8lst.com/extraordinary%20pictures%20of%20Aaron%20Schwartz