Aaron Swartz – In the Library with the Lead Pipe Skip to Main Content Open Menu Home About Awards & Good Words Contact Editorial Board Denisse Solis Ian Beilin Ikumi Crocoll Jaena Rae Cabrera Kellee Warren Nicole Cooke Ryan Randall Emeritus Announcements Authors Archives Conduct Submission Guidelines Lead Pipe Publication Process Style Guide Search Home About Awards & Good Words Contact Editorial Board Denisse Solis Ian Beilin Ikumi Crocoll Jaena Rae Cabrera Kellee Warren Nicole Cooke Ryan Randall Emeritus Announcements Authors Archives Conduct Submission Guidelines Lead Pipe Publication Process Style Guide Search 2013 20 Feb Brett Bonfield /10 Comments Aaron Swartz A photo of Aaron Swartz by Flickr user Quinn Norton entitled, “Florence” (CC-BY 2.0) In Brief:This article discusses Aaron Swartz’s life and legacy, especially his contributions to libraries. Via video, narrative, and archived email discussions, it conveys a sense of Swartz’s values and conversational style. It concludes with a detailed timeline of his life. by Brett Bonfield This is a living article about someone who died. This version is complete, but it’s not finished because I’m not yet ready for it to be finished. I want to write about Aaron Swartz now because of what libraries meant to him and because of what he means to people who care about libraries. As much as has been written about Aaron since his death, I don’t think that story has been fully told. I think it may be best to start with a video. There are no images of Aaron in this video, just his voice. We had a camera pointed at him as he delivered this presentation on Saturday, January 12, 2008, at the American Library Association Midwinter meeting in Philadelphia, but this is the version he liked best. http://youtu.be/BvJqXaoO4FI The talk is called “Picking Winners,” a topic my colleagues and I from ACRL’s University Libraries Section “Current Topics” committee requested, and he used it as a chance to talk about technologies and other projects he cared about, including Open Library. This video was never posted anywhere because neither of us could get the slides and the audio to line up. I’ve gotten the video to the point where it’s mostly watchable, but it’s still kind of a mess in terms of synchronization. If you’re a Keynote expert and want to give it a shot, I’d be happy to share the .key file with you. A few weeks later, on Wednesday, February 27, 2008, he gave a different talk about Open Library at the code4lib 2008 conference hosted by Oregon State University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV-P2uzzc4s I’ve been writing about Aaron and his connection to libraries since I was in library school. On July 17, 2007, for LISNews, I wrote a post called  “Aaron Swartz Announces the Open Library.” Here’s how it began: What are you supposed to feel about Aaron Swartz? He co-authored RSS, served on the W3C’s RDF Core Working Group, helped the wonderful John Gruber design the amazing Markdown, and developed and gave away software like rss2email that many of us use every day… and then he graduated high school. He went to Stanford, naturally, at which point his already fascinating blog, Raw Thought, began alternating even more maddeningly between precocious, annoying, honest to the point of painfulness, and legitimately brilliant. Aaron’s comment on the post: “Thank you for the kind words. And I’m sorry for the annoying blog posts.” The fact that I’ve been writing about Aaron for years1 is not intended to give me credibility. As has become obvious since his death, a lot of people admire Aaron and a lot of us believe he had the capacity for greatness. I was consistently surprised and delighted by his thought processes and how he chose to spend his time. His curiosity, idealism, charisma, and productiveness gave me hope. Maybe that explains the overwhelming sense of sadness I feel several times each day, and expect to for a long time. I also feel a lot of anger at the decisions made by MIT and the prosecutors who were responsible for his case, and expect to live with that anger for a long time as well. It hurts to read that some people feel the memorials to Aaron are canonizing him or treating him as a martyr. I feel like those characterizations question the sincerity of those who knew him or admired him or agreed with him or simply believe he was mistreated. It represents a callousness that I hope people can allow themselves to leave aside. It would be awful for me to tell anyone else how to feel about Aaron’s death. I think those of us who are mourning are owed that same level of respect. I met Aaron in person for the first time on January 12, 2008, when he presented at ALA. And I saw him in person for the last time the next night. The two of us got together at the Convention Center and talked for a couple of hours, then I drove him to West Philadelphia, where he was staying with friends. A couple of days later, he emailed to make sure he had the correct reference for a book I had recommended about nonprofit management and a week or so later we resumed our conversation via email. I’ve uploaded our email correspondence (direct link to the PDF) to the Internet Archive’s Aaron Swartz Collection. At the time, Aaron was beginning to assist with the formation of Change Congress (now called Rootstrikers), an organization that sought to end corruption in the U.S. congress by reducing the influence of lobbyists and PACs, ending earmarks, supporting public finance for political campaigns, and promoting transparency. I was in favor of making it easier to prosecute corrupt officials by creating technology that ensured anonymity for whistleblowers and helped bring attention to the most credible and useful tips. There are a few things our email exchange illustrates: The nature of our in-person conversation that preceded this exchange. We were looking for practical ways that we, or a few people like us, could change the world for the better. Which is not what I had planned to talk to him about. I wanted to know more about the diet he’d recently used to lose weight. I wanted the inside story of his time at Reddit. I wanted to know what it felt like to leave Stanford after a year. I wanted to know what Paul Graham was like once you get to know him. But I didn’t drive the conversation, Aaron did. And he did it by asking questions. This style comes through in the emails he sent as well. It should be obvious how hard I’m working to keep up with him, to come up with ideas that he has not already thought of and dismissed. I can usually at least hold my own in these kinds of conversations. But I was badly outclassed, in person and via email, by someone roughly half my age. For instance, my case is centered around the idea that corruption would end if it were easier to report and more frequently prosecuted. Aaron’s response: “I tend to disagree with the if-only-they-knew-the-truth school of thought. Watergate happened not because the story came out — COINTELPRO started in 1956; stories like this came out all the time in the independent press — it was because Nixon went after someone powerful (the DNC) who could fight back. Had it been Nixon burglarizing the Socialist Worker’s Party offices again, the Post never would given the story such attention and Woodward and Bernstein would have been stayed on the cub beat. So airing the stories is good, but it’s nowhere near enough. We need an alternate system for making them interesting and getting them to people. And that’s much harder.” He took me and my ideas seriously. Because Aaron seems to have known everyone who was anyone, it can be easy to think of him as someone who had no time for you if you were less accomplished than Tim Berners-Lee or Paul Graham or Lawrence Lessig or danah boyd. That wasn’t the case. When we met, I was a recent library school graduate working part-time at a couple of libraries, a guy in his late thirties struggling to find my way in a new profession. It didn’t matter. He wanted to figure out what he could learn from talking to me or exchanging messages. And also what he could help inspire me to do. For instance, he suggests that I help make the nascent Wikileaks website easier to use. There is foreshadowing in this exchange. His connection to Wikileaks is rumored to be one of the reasons the prosecutors were so keen on a conviction in the JSTOR incident. And I display a great deal of naivete about prosecutors as well, which Aaron doesn’t really call me on. That conversation ended, but we continued to correspond. He served as a reviewer for one of my first Lead Pipe articles before it went live. When the Lead Pipe editorial board was first discussing the possibility of a Lead Pipe 501(c)(3), I asked Aaron for advice, and he put me in touch with his friend SJ Klein. I sent Aaron the MARC records for the Collingswood Public Library, which he described as being received by his colleagues at the Open Library with “much rejoicing” during their annual meeting. When my friend Gabriel Farrell and I created a website to promote the HarperCollins self-destructing ebook boycott, Aaron made some suggestions on how we could improve it. Aaron was an ally, one of the first people I would go to for advice on some of the projects I cared about most deeply. Though we met that one time in person, Aaron was really just an Internet-friend. We were friends on Facebook, contacts on LinkedIn, and shared a few songs with each other on Spotify. The last thing he listened to on Spotify, the day before he died, was a Flying Nun-era Sally Field singing a song called, “Optimize”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td1WfqKUJxU That song breaks my heart. I can’t help but attach a narrative to it. I picture him feeling down. I picture someone trying to do something to pick him up. That’s what this sort of song is best at. Find a goofy song, send it to Aaron, brighten his day. It always worked until it didn’t. When the only explanation anyone seemed to have for Aaron’s death was that he was clinically depressed, I tried to accept that idea. It fit with the David Foster Wallace narrative. At the time of his death, Aaron was writing a summary of Wallace’s masterpiece, Infinite Jest. He’d blogged about it in two separate posts, “What Happens at the End of Infinite Jest?“ and “On Finishing Infinite Jest.” Wallace was clinically depressed. Aaron, like Wallace, chose to hang himself. Many of the things I’ve read about him since his death cite his short story about suicide as evidence of his clinical depression, his disinterest and lack of participation in Reddit’s success as evidence of his selfishness and melodramatic tendencies, and his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto as evidence of his intention to distribute the JSTOR database online. When it seemed like it was the only narrative available, I tried to make it fit with my limited understanding of Aaron as a person, with what I knew about his behavior leading up to his death. This narrative might be the most accurate one we will ever have, but I hope not. We all contain multitudes. That’s obvious, perhaps trite, but it’s also something we tend to forget when we follow our natural tendency to explain why others behave the way they do. Which is why the portrait of Aaron that Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman is creating on Tumblr feels more believable, on an emotional level, than anything else I’ve read about him since he died. For instance, she doesn’t think he was clinically depressed. I wonder if she’s right, and what else she will be right about in the days ahead. We know there are going to be books about Aaron Swartz. The story of his death has been too big, and his life has been too well documented, for there not to be multiple biographies. I wouldn’t be surprised it there were a few already being seriously negotiated. I hope one of these biographies gives him the No One Here Gets Out Alive treatment, something like what Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugarman did for Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors, in their 1980 biography. It might be nice to see Aaron’s life turned into a series of melodramatic anecdotes that appeal to adolescents and inspire a decade or two of dorm room posters (assuming there are still dorms and posters in the years 2023 through 2038). I want to live in a world in which disaffected teens are at least as interested in coding and activism as they are in loud music and flattering pants.2 Even more than that, I hope one of these biographies gives Aaron his own Robert Caro, a biographer whom Aaron held in great esteem; he called The Power Broker, Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, “one of the very best books ever published,” and he admired Caro’s four-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson as well. Aaron’s life was far shorter than that of Robert Moses or Lyndon Johnson, but he was present as history was being made, and he collaborated with many of the people who I believe will define our present age. I think his life is worthy of the Caro treatment. The question I have is whether the world Aaron helped to create will be a world without Caros or, for that matter, without his other favorite authors, including David Foster Wallace and Noam Chomsky. These writers and their works have been heavily subsidized by the education and publishing industries. Much of Aaron’s work threatened the publishing industry and, given that he dropped out of both high school and college, he also embodied a threat to traditional education. While he loved books, I have yet to see how he reconciled that love with his desire to make information open and accessible. I’m sure Creative Commons was part of that vision. I wish I could ask him if there was more to it. Assuming traditional education and publishing continue to struggle, assuming a void develops where they have prospered for the last century or so, we have no way to know if anything will replace them. That may be good, on balance, just as an increasing number of teen activists seems likely, on balance, to be more beneficial than harmful. Yet its seems that some of the things we love about education and publishing may soon become anachronisms, if they are not already. So it’s possible that the best we will ever get is a web-based article. Fortunately, we already have a very, very good one: on February 7, 2013, Slate published “The Idealist: Aaron Swartz wanted to save the world. Why couldn’t he save himself?” by Justin Peters. At least for now, I think this is the closest we have to a definitive telling of Aaron’s story. Since Aaron died, I’ve been trying to figure out how to honor him in a library-centric way. Many of the other ways that people have chosen to honor him overlap with libraries. For instance, at his memorial in New York City on January 19, 2013, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman said that a way to honor Aaron is that “All academic research from all-time should be made public and free and open and available to anybody in the world.” I want to see that happen, and I intend to help with that process, but I also want something more immediately achievable. And what I’m good at, as a librarian, is organizing information. Justin Peters did a good job, for Slate, of creating a basic timeline of Aaron’s life. My plan is to expand on that project, to create a much more detailed timeline. This project is not intended as an end unto itself. I see it as a resource for subsequent researchers, as a way to make Aaron’s “Robert Caro biography” just a little bit easier to write.  Like any library, it will always be complete, but also unfinished. As I learn more about Aaron’s activities or come up with more illustrative or stable links, I’ll add them to the timeline below. At present, the timeline is just well formatted HTML. Once I have a better sense of what else should be added, I hope to publish it in a format that’s more conducive to being remixed, and perhaps host it in a way that makes it easier for others to contribute, perhaps as a Git repository or as a wiki. For now, I want this to be like John Mark Ockerbloom’s Online Books Page, my own to edit, but something I hope everyone finds useful. Aaron will never respond to another of my emails. But he may still have answers to questions I never got to ask him directly. For me, this timeline has a second purpose. As I read more texts he wrote, learn about additional conferences in which he participated, and discover additional projects he found compelling, it’s my way of having the conversation end later, when I’m more ready for that to happen. I’m not yet ready. Thanks to Laura Quilter, and to Lead Pipe colleague Erin Dorney, for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Aaron Swartz: A Timeline 1999 1999: Joined the RDF Core Working Group. Stayed on until 2000. 2000 2001 2001: Interviewed by Lew Koch, WBEZ 91.5. October 2001: Published (with James Hendler), “The Semantic Web: A Network of Content for the Digital City,” Proceedings of the Second Annual Digital Cities Workshop, Kyoto, Japan. (Based on “The Semantic Web in Breadth“). 2002 2002: Joined Creative Commons as a Metadata Advisor. Stayed on until 2004. January 2002: Published “MusicBrainz: A Semantic Web Service” in Intelligent Systems (IEEE), 17(1), 76-77. October 8, 2002: Camped out at the U.S. Supreme Court the night before it heard oral arguments in Eldred v. Ashcroft. 2003 2004 January 23, 2004: Interviewed by Jesper (Waffle.net). April 20-24, 2004: Attended 14th Conference on Computers, Freedon, and Privacy in Berkeley, California (see photo of him participating in a mock vote during the conference). December 17, 2004: Assists John Gruber in publishing the definition for Markdown, “a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers.” 2005 May 15, 2005: Posted “What’s Going On Here?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 20, 2005: Attended Free Culture: Phase Two conference at American University in Washington, DC (see photos of him at the conference). June 1, 2005: Posted “Getting Back On Track” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 1, 2005: Posted “The God Who Wasn’t There (And The One Who Was)” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 4, 2005: Posted “Stanford: Season Finale” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 6, 2005: Posted “Sneak Peek” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 9, 2005: Posted “SFP: Home, Sweet, Home” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 11, 2005: Posted “Stanford/SFP: Leaving on a Jet Plane” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 15, 2005: Posted “SFP: First Contact” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 16, 2005: Posted “SFP: Dinner with Dan” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 16, 2005: Posted “SFP: Fire Alarm” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 17, 2005: Posted “The Immorality of Freakonomics” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 23, 2005: Posted “The Intentionality of Evil” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 3, 2005: Posted “Of Washington And Worcester” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 5, 2005: Posted “SFP: The Spirit Inside” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 14, 2005: Posted “Help Wanted: Programmers for Startup” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 16, 2005: Posted “Change of Course” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 20, 2005: Posted “Our Next Superjumbo” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 21, 2005: Posted “Serious Social Science” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 22, 2005: Posted “Faces of Fame” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 26, 2005: Posted “Simon Arrives” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 26, 2005: Posted “iCommons Summit” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 2, 2005: Posted “Eat and Code” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 8, 2005: Posted “Behind the Rant: Maciej Ceglowski” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 25, 2005: Posted “FOO Camp” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 26, 2005: Posted “Reflections on Cultural Fragments” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 16, 2005: Posted “Narcissism Notice” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 21, 2005: Posted “Paul Graham is Wrong” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 24, 2005: Posted “The Republican War on Science” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 24, 2005: Posted “Serenity” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 29, 2005: Posted “Serenity: A Review” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 5, 2005: Posted “David Lynch and Vedic “Science”” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 12, 2005: Posted >The New McCarthy: Bill O’Reilly” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 16, 2005: Posted “Founders Unite for Startup School” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 26, 2005: Posted “The Startup News” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 28, 2005: Posted “Trials of Testing” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 8, 2005: Posted “Birthday Thoughts” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 25, 2005: Posted “Understanding Economic Jargon” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 6, 2005: Posted “Rewriting Reddit” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 2005: Merged Infogami with Reddit and became a Co-Founder of their new parent company, Not A Bug. Stayed on January, 2007. December 22, 2005: Posted “A Brief History of Ajax” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 28, 2005: Posted “HOWTO: Be more productive” to his weblog, Raw Thought. 2006 January 4, 2006: Posted “Colombia is Bleeding” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 5, 2006: Posted “Some Announcements” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 8, 2006: Posted “Say Goodbye to Embarrassment” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 17, 2006: Posted “In His Own Words 2” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 27, 2006: Posted “More MLKJ Day” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 28, 2006: Posted “The Disappearance of Thought” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 27, 2006: Posted “Wassup?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 17, 2006: Posted “What It Means To Be An Intellectual” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 23, 2006: Posted “Do Faces Cause Depression?: Self-Experimentation in Science” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 26, 2006: Posted “The Miracle Diet” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 28, 2006: Posted “A Future Without Fat” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 7, 2006: Posted “Book Reviews” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 7, 2006: Posted “Fat Backlash” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 10, 2006: Posted “Public Service Announcement” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 15, 2006: Posted “The Book That Changed My Life” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 22, 2006: Posted “The Conservative Nanny State” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 24, 2006: Posted “Introducing feeds.reddit” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 27, 2006: Posted “A Non-Programmer’s Apology” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 31, 2006: Posted “Gmail Down” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 1, 2006: Posted “Legacy” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 6, 2006: Posted “An Inconvenient Truth” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 6, 2006: Posted “Shifting the Terms of Debate: How Big Business Covered Up Global Warming” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 7, 2006: Posted “Making Noise: How Right-Wing Think Tanks Get the Word Out” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 8, 2006: Posted “Endorsing Racism: The Story of The Bell Curve” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 9, 2006: Posted “Spreading Lies: How Think Tanks Ignore the Facts” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 10, 2006: Posted “Saving Business: The Origins of Right-Wing Think Tanks” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 11, 2006: Posted “Hurting Seniors: The Attack on Social Security” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 15, 2006: Posted “Fighting Back: Responses to the Mainstream Media” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 16, 2006: Posted “Life in Suburbia: Land of Cliche” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 20, 2006: Posted “In Offense of Classical Music” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 20, 2006: Posted “A Clarification” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 23, 2006: Posted “What’s Freedom?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 5, 2006: Posted “Release Late, Release Rarely” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 11, 2006: Posted “The Hard Sciences” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 12, 2006: Posted “The Attraction of the Center” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 17, 2006: Posted “What Makes a Personality Scary?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 18, 2006: Posted “The Fruits of Mass Collaboration” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 19, 2006: Posted “The Techniques of Mass Collaboration: A Third Way Out” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 26, 2006: Posted “I Love the University” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 26, 2006: Posted “On Losing Weight” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 26, 2006: Posted “What Does Blogspace Look Like?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 28, 2006: Posted “Nutrition Basics” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 29, 2006: Posted “What is going on here?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 31, 2006: Posted “Simple Tips for Longer Living” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 8, 2006: Posted “Solidarity for the Shy: Achieving Critical Mass” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 11, 2006: Posted “Growth” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 16, 2006: Posted “The Smalltalk Question” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 31, 2006: Posted “Wikimedia at the Crossroads” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 4, 2006: Posted “Who Writes Wikipedia?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 5, 2006: Posted “Who Writes Wikipedia? — Responses” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 5, 2006: Posted “False Outliers” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 7, 2006: Posted “Who Runs Wikipedia?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 11, 2006: Posted “Making More Wikipedians” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 14, 2006: Posted “Making More Wikipedias” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 18, 2006: Posted “Code, and Other Laws of Wikipedia” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 22, 2006: Posted “(The Dandy Warhols) Come Down” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 24, 2006: Posted “Weekend Update” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 25, 2006: Posted “of the MBTA” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 26, 2006: Posted “Alone in the Hospital” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 27, 2006: Posted “A Feminist Goes to the Hospital” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 28, 2006: Posted “A Unified Theory of Magazines” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 29, 2006: Posted “Take the Easy Way Out” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 1, 2006: Posted “Life in the Hospital” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 2, 2006: Posted “Fashion Notes” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 3, 2006: Posted “The Awfulness of College Lectures” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 4, 2006: Posted “The Greatness of College Lectures” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 4, 2006: Posted “What’s Radical About the Liberal Arts?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 6, 2006: Posted “College: Commodity or Community?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 8, 2006: Posted “Mamet on Auditions” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 9, 2006: Posted “Visiting Mission Hill” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 10, 2006: Posted “Visiting Olin College” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 11, 2006: Posted “iz r childrens lrnng?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 12, 2006: Posted “Getting it Wrong” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 13, 2006: Posted “Getting It Right” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 15, 2006: Posted “Blast from the Past” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 16, 2006: Posted “The Sexual Life of Savages” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 17, 2006: Posted “Talking Right” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 18, 2006: Posted “Science Summaries” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 19, 2006: Posted “The Invention of Objectivity” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 20, 2006: Posted “I Hate the News” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 22, 2006: Posted “The Archives” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 18, 2006: Posted “That Isn’t Science!” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 24, 2006: Posted “A Night at the Coop” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 25, 2006: Posted “Somerville’s Oddest Park” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 26, 2006: Posted “Google and the Gradient” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 27, 2006: Posted “Founder’s Syndrome” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 29, 2006: Posted “What is Elitism?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 30, 2006: Posted “Up Against Love” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 31, 2006: Posted “And Now, The News” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 1, 2006: Posted “The Aftermath” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 2, 2006: Posted “The Afterparty” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 3, 2006: Posted “Everybody Tells Me So” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 6, 2006: Posted “Mr. Millionaire” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 7, 2006: Posted “The Early Days of A Better Website” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 8, 2006: Posted “Robert Walker, Road Warrior” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 9, 2006: Posted “The Millionaire’s Ball” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 10, 2006: Posted “Life at the Office” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 12, 2006: Posted “The Meaning of Borat” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 13, 2006: Posted “Meeting Peter Singer” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 14, 2006: Posted “The Existential Terror of San Francisco” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 15, 2006: Posted “Office Space” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 16, 2006: Posted “Kahle v. Ashcroft write-up” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 18, 2006: Posted “Ostensible Networks vs. Friendship Networks” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 19, 2006: Posted “San Francisco: Silicon Valley’s Ghetto” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 20, 2006: Posted “Disinfecting the Sunlight Foundation” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 21, 2006: Posted “Identity Fetishism” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 23, 2006: Posted “Bread and Cheese” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 23, 2006: Posted “Free Speech: Because We Can” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 5, 2006: Posted “Pay it Forward” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 27, 2006: Posted “Why It Makes Sense to Bite the Hand that Feeds You” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 27, 2006: Posted “A Trip to the Courthouse: Part 1” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 28, 2006: Posted “A Trip to the Courthouse: Part 2” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 29, 2006: Posted “Lazy Backup” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 1, 2006: Posted “Two Conceptions of Taste” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 2, 2006: Posted “Never Back to School” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 3, 2006: Posted “Drop Out” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 4, 2006: Posted “The Genius is in the Details” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 5, 2006: Posted “The City with No Heart” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 7, 2006: Posted “Competition of Experimentation?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 11, 2006: Posted “Business “Ethics”” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 11, 2006: Posted “The Politics of Wikis” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 12, 2006: Posted “The Politics of Wikipedians” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 12, 2006: Posted “Seven Habits of Highly Successful Websites” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 12, 2006: Posted “Eight Reasons (Some) Wikis Work” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 13, 2006: Posted “The Goog Life: how Google keeps employees by treating them like kids” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 14, 2006: Posted “Think Bigger: A Generalist Manifesto” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 15, 2006: Posted “Tips for Better Thinking” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 17, 2006: Posted “The Grim Meathook Future” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 19, 2006: Posted “Medium Stupid” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 19, 2006: Posted “Drugs and Guns” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 21, 2006: Posted “Museums and Exploratoriums” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 22, 2006: Posted “Cliche Finder” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 23, 2006: Posted “Sociology or Anthropology” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 24, 2006: Posted “The Journalist’s Creed” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 27, 2006: Posted “Cultural Imperialism Sucks: a visit to Berlin” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 27, 2006: Posted “Wither the Two Cultures?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 28, 2006: Posted “Welcome to the Panopticon” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 28, 2006: Posted “Causes of Conformance” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 29, 2006: Posted “Products That Should Exist” to his weblog, Raw Thought. 2007 2007: Joined Open Library as its Tech Lead. Stayed on until 2009. January 2, 2007: Posted “Happy New Year” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 2, 2007: Posted “The Sociologist’s Creed” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 10, 2007: Posted “The Capital of Scandinavia” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 18, 2007: Posted “A Moment Before Dying” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 22, 2007: Posted “Last Day of Summer Camp” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 23, 2007: Posted “The Fundamental Law of Sociology” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 24, 2007: Posted “Fired” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 30, 2007: Posted “Cities” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 30, 2007: Posted “Dresden” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 30, 2007: Posted “Berlin” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 31, 2007: Posted “Stockholm” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 1, 2007: Posted “Cambridge” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 3, 2007: Posted “San Francisco” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 6, 2007: Posted “Justifications for Myself” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 7, 2007: Posted “The Logic of Open DRM” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 7, 2007: Posted “Neurosis #9” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 8, 2007: Posted “The Enemy Too Close to Home” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 8, 2007: Posted “Getting Past” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 9, 2007: Posted “Our Underachieving College Presidents” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 11, 2007: Posted “The Activist’s Creed” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 12, 2007: Posted “It’s Faust!” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 12, 2007: Posted “Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 14, 2007: Posted “Average People” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 16, 2007: Posted “God Is My Dungeonmaster” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 17, 2007: Posted “Bandwagon” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 18, 2007: Posted “Classism at Google” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 11, 2007: Posted “Ode to a Blue Bicycle” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 13, 2007: Posted “Why You Shop At Wal-Mart: Economics Eats Itself” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 13, 2007: Posted “Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 14, 2007: Posted “Hating John Searle” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 16, 2007: Posted “Write Web Works With Me!” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 18, 2007: Posted “How Quantum Mechanics is Compatible with Free Will” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 23, 2007: Posted “This Television Life” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 25, 2007: Posted “Newspeak™” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 26, 2007: Posted “The Secret Behind The Secret” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 27, 2007: Posted “Aaron’s Patented Demotivational Seminar” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 28, 2007: Posted “John Hockenberry on Reporting the War at NBC” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 29, 2007: Posted “Everything Good is Bad For You” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 22, 2007: Posted “Secured Leisure” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 24, 2007: Posted “A Call for Science that Matters” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 6, 2007: Posted “The Incurable Romantic” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 7, 2007: Posted “Lengthy Interview” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 14, 2007: Posted “Follow Your Heart” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 23, 2007: Posted “Discrimination and Causation” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 30, 2007: Posted “That Vision Thing” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 28, 2007: Posted “Books I Recommend Without Reservation: 2006” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 4, 2007: Posted “Real Good Books” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 10, 2007: Posted “Fear and Loathing in Biotechnology Firms” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 16, 2007: Posted “Announcing the Open Library” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 18, 2007: Posted “Fear and Loathing: A Correction” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 1, 2007: Posted “Consciousness Clarified” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 4, 2007: Posted “Sci Foo 2007 Gossip Liveblog” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 5, 2007: Posted “Improving the Foo Camp Format” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 20, 2007: Posted “The Interrupt-Driven Life” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 31, 2007: Posted “Perfectionism” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 7, 2007: Published “A Non-Programmer’s Apology” in The Best of Technology Writing 2007. September 16, 2007: Posted “Sweating the Small Stuff” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 20, 2007: Published “Rachel Carson, Mass Murderer?” in Extra! September/October 2007. September 21, 2007: Posted “Was Rachel Carson a Mass Murderer?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 27, 2007: Posted “The Joy of Public Speaking” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 12, 2007: Posted “Dear Colleagues: Orders from China’s Minister of Internet Censorship” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 22, 2007: Posted “Area Scientist’s Study Confirms Own Prejudices” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 25, 2007: Presents on Open Library at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. October 29, 2007: Posted “How to Build Decent Productivity Software” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 31, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Preface” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 1, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 1” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 2, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 2” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 3, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 3” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 6, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 4” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 6, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 5” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 6, 2007: Posted “GPhone Announced, Morons” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 8, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 6” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 14, 2007: Posted “Cooling the Mark Out” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 15, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 7” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 18, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 8” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 19, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 9” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 19, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 10” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 27, 2007: Posted “Sick” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 6, 2007: Posted “The Handwriting on the Wall” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 10, 2007: Posted “Judgment Day” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 14, 2007: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 11” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 17, 2007: Posted “No Superpowers” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 24, 2007: Posted “The Theory of The Game” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 28, 2007: Posted “Starting Out in the Morning” to his weblog, Raw Thought. 2008 2008: Founded Watchdog.net. Stayed on until 2009. January 2, 2008: Posted “2007 Review of Projects” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 5, 2008: Posted “2007 Review of Books” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 15, 2008: Posted “Introducing theinfo.org” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 19, 2008: Posted “How Dumb is Daniel Dennett?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 28, 2008: Posted “A Very Speculative Theory of Free Will” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 4, 2008: Posted “Election Slate: February 2008” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 22, 2008: Posted “Very Good Introductions” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 2, 2008: Posted “The Visible Hand: A Summary” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 9, 2008: Posted “Review: The New Ruthless Economy” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 16, 2008: Posted “Banff” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 14, 2008: Posted “Welcome, watchdog.net” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 15, 2008: Posted “Slaves of Some Dead Sociologist” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 20, 2008: Posted “Money and Worth” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 20, 2008: Posted “Money and Control” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 11, 2008: Posted “The Toolbox Does Not Shrink” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 12, 2008: Posted “How to Fix the News” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 12, 2008: Posted “Science or Philosophy?: Jon Elster and John Searle” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 13, 2008: Posted “Simplistic Sociological Functionalism” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 14, 2008: Posted “Tectonic Plates and Microfoundations” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 19, 2008: Posted “The False Consciousness Falsehood” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 9, 2008: Posted “How to Promote Startups” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 12, 2008: Posted “Is Undercover Over?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 16, 2008: Posted “Moving On” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 19, 2008: Posted “Scenes” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 19, 2008: Posted “Last Goodbyes” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 30, 2008: Posted “Capital and its Complements: A Summary” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 2008: Publishes “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto“ July 21, 2008: Posted “The Percentage Fallacy” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 11, 2008: Posted “Utilitarian Equilibriums” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 19, 2008: Posted “The Predator State: A Summary” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 22, 2008: Posted “How To Launch Software” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 24, 2008: Posted “Everyday Utilitarianism: Who Gets the TV First?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 25, 2008: Posted “My Life With Tim” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 10, 2008: Posted “A Theory of Change” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 14, 2008: Posted “A Saipan Story” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 15, 2008: Posted “Obama’s Next Move” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 16, 2008: Posted “My Slate” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 18, 2008: Posted “High Gas Prices Are Reagan’s Fault” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 15, 2008: Posted “Blame the Terrorist Black Muslims” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 24, 2008: Posted “In Defense of Anonymity” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 31, 2008: Posted “What Could Happen” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 1, 2008: Posted “Whatever It Takes?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 7, 2008: Posted “November 4” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 13, 2008: Posted “Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 15, 2008: Posted “OCLC on the Run” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 15, 2008: Posted “The Credibility Gap” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 16, 2008: Posted “Kafka for the Kindergarten Set” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 18, 2008: Posted “An Obama Story” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 19, 2008: Posted “Inside GE” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 22, 2008: Posted “Obama’s Strategy: A Debate” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 25, 2008: Posted “Blogs I Would Like to Read” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 11, 2008: Posted “The Forgotten Sidekick” to his weblog, Raw Thought. >December 15, 2008: Published “Sokal Affair” in Encyclopedia of the Culture Wars: Issues, Voices, and Viewpoints, Roger Chapman, ed. December 29, 2008: Posted “Bubble City: Chapter 12” to his weblog, Raw Thought. 2009 2009: Co-Founded Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Stayed on until February, 2011. January 3, 2009: Posted “2008 Review of Books” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 5, 2009: Posted “The True Story of the Telephone” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 8, 2009: Posted “Felten for CTO?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 12, 2009: Posted “Why are online ads cheaper?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 16, 2009: Posted “Cass Sunstein, Concern Troll” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 28, 2009: Posted “Economic BS Detector” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 3, 2009: Posted “Belém” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 4, 2009: Posted “How Depressions Work” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 13, 2009: Posted “NYT Personals” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 16, 2009: Posted “Non-Hierarchical Management” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 21, 2009: Posted “RSS Hits the Big Time” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 4, 2009: Posted “A 24 Puzzle” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 5, 2009: Posted “The Intellectual’s Creed” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 9, 2009: Posted “In Defense of Elections” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 16, 2009: Posted “Journalistic Capture and Fixing CNBC” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 23, 2009: Posted “Who Really Rules?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 24, 2009: Posted “Margo Seltzer” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 13, 2009: Posted “The Logic of Loss” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 14, 2009: Posted “What Are Intellectuals Good For?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 15, 2009: Posted “A Non-Local Revolution” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 23, 2009: Posted “Transparency is Bunk” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 28, 2009: Posted “Investigative Strike Teams” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 5, 2009: Posted “A New Kind of Writing?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 17, 2009: Posted “How Policy Gets Made: A Primer” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 18, 2009: Posted “This Month in Sociology” to his weblog, Raw Thought. May 18, 2009: Posted “A Life Offline” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 20, 2009: Posted “Namedropping” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 24, 2009: Posted “My Life Offline” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 27, 2009: Posted “Writing a Book: Part One (Ambition)” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 28, 2009: Posted “The Median Voter and the Mixed Voter” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 31, 2009: Posted “Hot Girl Syndrome” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 2, 2009: Posted “Life in a World of Pervasive Immorality: The Ethics of Being Alive” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 6, 2009: Posted “Writing a Book: Part Two (Structure)” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 8, 2009: Attended Boston Wikipedia Meetup (see photos at Wikipedia and Archive.org. August 11, 2009: Posted “Reading Samuel Bowles” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 12, 2009: Posted “Poverty Kills” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 17, 2009: Posted “Scenes 2” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 18, 2009: Posted “How to Save A Life” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 20, 2009: Posted “What Kind of a Thing is Twitter?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 24, 2009: Posted “The Newswipe Manifesto” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 25, 2009: Posted “Google Voice Security Flaw” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 27, 2009: Posted “Why I Won’t Use Rimuhosting” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 7, 2009: Posted “The Trouble with Nonprofits” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 8, 2009: Posted “A Political Startup” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 8, 2009: Posted “Why I Am Not Gay” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 14, 2009: Posted “A Short Course in Ethics” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 15, 2009: Posted “Honest Theft” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 16, 2009: Posted “On Finishing Infinite Jest” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 16, 2009: Posted “What Happens at the End of Infinite Jest? (or, the Infinite Jest ending explained)” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 18, 2009: Posted “Tim DeLaughter and the Boundary of Spectacle” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 21, 2009: Posted “The New Science of Causation” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 23, 2009: Posted “Redesign” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 24, 2009: Posted “Keynes, Explained Briefly” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 22, 2009: Posted “A Summary/Explanation of John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 5, 2009: Posted “Wanted by the FBI” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 19, 2009: Posted “djb” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 19, 2009: Posted “Subjectivism” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 20, 2009: Posted “Disciplinary Bubbles” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 20, 2009: Posted “Because We Can” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 3, 2009: Posted “Election Ballot 2009” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 3, 2009: Posted “The Logic of Google Ads” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 14, 2009: Posted “Is the DMCA a scam?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 29, 2009: Posted “How I Hire Programmers” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 14, 2009: Posted “Googling for Sociopaths” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 27, 2009: Posted “Researcher Job” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 30, 2009: Posted “Against Reflective Equilibrium (or, What is ethics for?)” to his weblog, Raw Thought. 2010 January 3, 2010: Posted “A Backup Solution?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 3, 2010: Posted “2009 Review of Books” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 8, 2010: Posted “Should our cognitive biases have moral weight?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 8, 2010: Posted “Do It Now” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 27, 2010: Posted “Is Apple Evil?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 30, 2010: Posted “Fewer Representatives or More Monitors?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 10, 2010: Posted “The Vioxx Story” to his weblog, Raw Thought. February 11, 2010: Posted “When Is Transparency Useful?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 1, 2010: Posted “HOWTO: Lose weight” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 2, 2010: Posted “HOWTO: Read more books” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 4, 2010: Posted “On DIRFAs” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 8, 2010: Posted “Philosophical Puzzles Resolved” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 14, 2010: Posted “Theory of Change” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 14, 2010: Posted “The Reason So Many People Are Unemployed” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 16, 2010: Posted “The Anti-Suit Movement” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 29, 2010: Posted “A Reading Machine” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 7, 2010: Posted “How to Get a Job Like Mine” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 18, 2010: Posted “That Sounds Smart” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 20, 2010: Posted “The Political Philosophy of Toy Story 3” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 21, 2010: Posted “Brought to You by the Letter S” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 29, 2010: Posted “Management, Organizing, Mobilizing” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 1, 2010: Posted “The Perils of Parfit 1: Credible Commitments” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 27, 2010: Posted “You Don’t Know John (Maynard Keynes)” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 4, 2010: Posted “Campaigners, Please!” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 7, 2010: Posted “Rethinking Hyperbolic Discounting (or, The Percentage Fallacy, Continued)” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 8, 2010: Posted “The Real Problem with Waiting for “Superman”” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 18, 2010: Posted “When Brute Force Fails” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 18, 2010: Posted “Outline of a Digital Preservation System” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 2010: Joined Demand Progress as its Executive Director. Stayed on until June, 2011. December 21, 2010: Posted “A Censorship-Resistant Web” to his weblog, Raw Thought. 2011 January 3, 2011: Posted “2010 Review of Books” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 4, 2011: Posted “My Twitter Viewer” to his weblog, Raw Thought. January 6, 2011: Posted “Squaring the Triangle: Secure, Decentralized, Human-Readable Names” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 6, 2011: Posted “Individuals in a World of Science” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 2012: Joined Avaaz as an Advisor. Stayed on until February, 2012. June 22, 2011: Posted “New Homepage” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 18, 2011: Posted “Goods, Services, and Delegations” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 18, 2011: Posted “Watch That Space” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 22, 2011: Posted “How Apple Works” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 18, 2011: Posted “Understanding Groupon Means Understanding ACSOI” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 22, 2011: Posted “What Does Google Mean by “Evil”?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 4, 2011: Posted “A Better Travel Guide for Geeks” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 1, 2011: Posted “Revolutions on the Internet” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 3, 2011: Posted “Apple and the Kindle” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 3, 2011: Posted “Steve Jobs and the Founder’s Pain” to his weblog, Raw Thought. December 14, 2011: Posted “On Intellectual Dishonesty” to his weblog, Raw Thought. 2012 February 2012: Joined Change.org as a Consultant. Stayed on until April, 2012. February 14, 2012: Posted “When will experiences replace movie theaters?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. March 9, 2012: Posted “How Python 3 Should Have Worked” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 2012: Joined ThoughtWorks as a Tech Lead. Stayed on until he died. April 18, 2012: Posted “y the power of exponents, just five levels of councils, each consisting of only fifty people, is enough to cover over three hundred million people.?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. April 19, 2012: Posted “The 2011 Review of Books” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 8, 2012: Posted “Perfect Institutions” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 20, 2012: Posted “America After Meritocracy: Chris Hayes’ The Twilight of The Elites” to his weblog, Raw Thought. June 26, 2012: Posted “New: The Pokayoke Guide to Developing Software” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 5, 2012: Posted “Thinking Clearly About Piece-Work” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 6, 2012: Posted “Libertarianism and the State” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 8, 2012: Posted “Thoughts on Citizen Kane” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 23, 2012: Posted “Is Awkwardness Avoidable?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. July 29, 2012: Posted “What Happens in The Dark Knight Rises” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 5, 2012: Posted “What do startup founders want?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 10, 2012: Posted “Do I have too much faith in science?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 18, 2012: Posted “Look at yourself objectively” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 18, 2012: Posted “Believe you can change” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 18, 2012: Posted “Take a step back” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 18, 2012: Posted “Raw Nerve” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 19, 2012: Posted “Edmund Burke Explains The Dark Knight Rises” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 22, 2012: Posted “What Happens in Batman Begins” to his weblog, Raw Thought. August 29, 2012: Posted “What are the optimal biases to overcome?” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 1, 2012: Posted “Lean into the pain” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 9, 2012: Posted “Confront reality” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 17, 2012: Posted “Cherish mistakes” to his weblog, Raw Thought. September 25, 2012: Posted “Fix the machine, not the person” to his weblog, Raw Thought. October 8, 2012: Posted “How Looper Works” to his weblog, Raw Thought. November 1, 2012: Posted “What Happens in The Dark Knight” to his weblog, Raw Thought. The LISNews post was picked up, with permission and supporting documentation, by ACCESS, Asia’s Newspaper on Electronic Information Products & Services, which republished it in September 2007. Here are a few other times I’ve referenced Aaron in library-related publications: October 15, 2007 (Library Journal): “Consuming Information.” I recommended rss2email, software that Aaron developed in his teens. Lindsey Smith has done a great job of maintaining it since May, 11 2006 or thereabouts, when Aaron handed it off to him. It remains great software, and I continue to rely on and recommend it. November 15, 2007 (ACRLog): “Aaron Swartz is Speaking at Midwinter.” November 19, 2008 (In the Library with the Lead Pipe): “A Useful Amplification of Records That Are Unavoidably Needed Anyway.” Aaron also reviewed the article before it was posted. December 12, 2012 (Letters to a Young Librarian):  “I Began Saying Yes to All the Interesting Projects That Came My Way.” [↩] As one of my readers noted, this reads like a reference to Cory Doctorow’s novel, Little Brother, and its sequel, Homeland, which was released on February 5, 2013 and for which Aaron wrote the afterword and made suggestions while it was in progress. The only reason it isn’t a reference is because I still need to read both books, something I plan to do soon. [↩] aaron swartz, aaronsw, advocacy, memorial, publishing, scholarly publishing Students As Stakeholders: Library Advisory Boards and Privileging Our Users Making it Work: Surviving as a Librarian Employed in Another Field 10 Responses caropinto 2013–02–20 at 12:16 pm RT @libraryleadpipe: New Article: Brett Bonfield on Aaron Swartz’s library advocacy + a timeline of his work. http://t.co/OrLMWjFo bohyunkim 2013–02–21 at 10:53 am Thanks for writing this, Brett! I really appreciate the post and also you making available Swartz’s “Picking Winners” video. I think there will continue to be authors like Chomsky and DFW in the world Aaron tried to realize. It will actually be a better environment where information and knowledge are easier to access and more transparent, thereby encouraging more exchange of ideas and thoughts across different areas. But it will not come by itself and we will have to work for it. I wrote about academic libraries and Swartz’s legacy in ACRL TechConnect: http://acrl.ala.org/techconnect/?p=2823 and hope more librarians/libraries would start thinking about what we can do to free access to information and knowledge as much as possible. I love the part in which Swartz talks about the desire to represent his favorite books on the Internet. Libraries need to be able to connect with those sentiments and ideas from their patrons. Thx again for this beautiful post and sharing your correspondence with Aaron. Brett Bonfield 2013–02–21 at 4:29 pm Thanks for this comment, and for linking to your article. I liked it very much, and it informed my thinking, as did the articles you link to by librarians John Dupuis, Jonathan Rochkind, and Nancy Sims. And to that list, I would add posts by library folks Myron Groover, Eric Hellman, Ed Summers, and Jessamyn West, as well as a memory from Gabriel Farrell, and the conversations I had with colleagues, especially Alexia Hudson, who created the ALA Memorial Resolution for Aaron. And there are probably several I’m forgetting. I’m particularly pleased that you discussed computer access, and access to information, in academic libraries. I realize it’s not an easy problem to solve, but that doesn’t mean we can’t figure out how to solve it. Pingback : Aaron Swartz and Too-Comfortable Research Libraries – Library Hat edorney 2013–02–21 at 10:49 pm RT @libraryleadpipe: New Article: Brett Bonfield on Aaron Swartz’s library advocacy + a timeline of his work. http://t.co/OrLMWjFo laurenpressley 2013–02–21 at 11:07 pm RT @libraryleadpipe: New Article: Brett Bonfield on Aaron Swartz’s library advocacy + a timeline of his work. http://t.co/OrLMWjFo sorfin 2013–02–21 at 11:41 pm RT @libraryleadpipe: New Article: Brett Bonfield on Aaron Swartz’s library advocacy + a timeline of his work. http://t.co/OrLMWjFo Emily Ford 2013–02–26 at 12:45 pm I don’t know how you do it, but I truly enjoy reading anything you write, Brett. This particular article is heartfelt and sincere. Your timeline must have taken quite a bit of work, but it was worth it because it adds quite a lot of value in that we can better understand Aaron’s life and influence on our work as information folks. Thank you for this article–truly and sincerely. Brett Bonfield 2013–02–28 at 9:48 am Thanks. This is one of those articles I knew could never be as good as I wanted it to be, but was worth writing anyway. I’m glad it worked for you (and, I hope, others as well) in the way I hoped it might. Pingback : Links 11/3/2013: X Server 1.14, Red Hat Takes Over OpenJDK 6 | Techrights This work is licensed under a CC Attribution 4.0 License. ISSN 1944-6195. About this Journal | Archives | Submissions | Conduct