Twelve years ago, Aaron Swartz was driven to suicide after being harassed by the state for making scientific knowledge accessible to all, and devoting his life to the cause of internet freedom from corporate domination. Although we hadn’t met in person, he was one of my peers, and we worked together on the Open Web. As a programmer, he helped develop the web feed format RSS, the open standard for cross-platform sharing, and the technical architecture for Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses for which I was a designer and educator for. His passing was during a time of major cultural shift where the promise of an open culture was being increasingly privatized and repressed;
