Aaron Swartz at the Creative Commons Salon, San Francisco, in 2006. (credit: Buzz Andersen)

January 11 is a somber day for many in the Ars community. On January 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz tragically took his own life as he continued to face hacking charges stemming from an attempt to liberate the JSTOR archives in 2011. Today, others continue to pursue his goals of open access for academic research and literature. So in remembrance of the man, we’re resurfacing Cyrus Farivar’s memories of Swartz that originally ran on January 12, 2013.

I don’t remember the first time I heard about Aaron Swartz. It probably was from reading Dave Winer’s blog more than 10 years ago when I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. The guy effused glowingly about Swartz as a young teenager.

“Aaron is the brightest 13 year old I’ve ever met on the Internet,” Winer wrote in February 2001. “It’s not just bit smarts, he marshals power very well and is persistent. Eventually you come around to his way of thinking, or he comes around to yours. These are the essential ingredients in good technology. We’re looking for the right answer, not to be proven right, or to prove the other guy wrong.”