The Internet’s Own Boy, Aaron Swartz | A Documentary Review
9 / 10 Star Rating!
You will be incredibly inspired by the genius and the drive of Aaron Swartz. Humbled by his inner moral code that never wavered, the courage he had to fight the established corporate machine, and saddened by the loss of a brilliant, gentle soul who had already had a profoundly positive impact on our lives, yet less than it should have been.
This is the story of one of the most brilliant and creative minds of our generation who died at the tragic and unnecessarily young age of 26.
Aaron Swartz – ‘The internets own boy’ was a computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer and Internet hacktivist. He either founded or was instrumental in Reddit, Creative Commons, the RSS Feed and so much more.
He had the ability to learn very quickly and was possibly the best Hacker ever – not in the sense of breaking into other systems, but of assimilating the key fundamentals and processes of any system and just how to manipulate, improve and influence them in a highly scalable way.
Aaron was driven by a strong moral code of right and wrong and realized very early in his life that he could make a difference and that if he could, then he should.
One of his defining features was his curiosity – more than just curiosity – his inner sense to always question and challenge everything. To not just accept the way of things at face value but to always ask, why, why, why.
No matter what he achieved or created (at such a young age), he always continued to produce, to create, to think and to challenge.
His belief was that knowledge and the open and free sharing of that knowledge was a moral imperative. He fought for this and achieved things that almost everybody else, would never have been able to (stopping the passing of the SOPA legislation in Congress)
To get a better understanding of what drove Aaron, read the full text of his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt
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