The Internet Archive Unveils Marble Bust of Aaron Swartz

Zara Stone, reporting for The Standard:

“There’s a renaissance happening now in Aaron Swartz-land,” said Lisa Rein, the co-founder of Creative Commons, a nonprofit devoted to expanding public access to information. She founded Aaron Swartz Day in 2013, an annual hackathon and tribute held on his birthday. There’s now an Aaron Swartz Institute in Brazil, a documentary, multiple books and podcasts — even an Aaron Swartz memecoin (“Do not buy,” she warned).

Aaron, I know, would have laughed at that.

Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch and a partner at Y Combinator, was one of the few people who knew Swartz personally. “I’m glad he’s become a symbol, he would approve of that,” he shared, his voice slightly breaking. “I really miss him.”

I miss him too. Man. But I find it weird that there were only “few people who knew him” at the event. So many people knew him. That’s part of what made Aaron Aaron — he knew everyone interesting on the internet.

I’m not so sure, either, that he’d approve of all this, his status as a symbol to a generation who never knew him, only of him. I don’t think he’d disapprove, either, because the folks holding him up as an icon — internet freedom and preservationist zealots — are, thankfully, aligned with Aaron’s own righteous obsessions. But I think he’d be a little weirded out. He wasn’t a “I hope they erect a larger-than-life statue of me” sort of guy. And if he had been, we wouldn’t have loved him like we did. It’s just a terrible thing that we lost him so young.

★ Saturday, 8 February 2025