On September 24, 2010, Aaron Swartz, during his fellowship at Harvard, registered a new Acer laptop on the MIT network under the alias “Garry_Host.” The client name: “Ghost_laptop.” Anyone can walk into the MIT campus, connect their computers to the network, and download articles from the digital academic library JSTOR, even without being a student—the difference was that Aaron wrote a Python script to do it faster.

While Aaron was running his script “keep_grabbing.py,” alarms went off at JSTOR and Ghost_laptop’s IP got blocked. This was trivial for Aaron; he reassigned a new IP address and kept downloading. Both MIT and JSTOR tried their hardest to stop these downloads. When nothing worked, they ended up cutting MIT access to the entire JSTOR database. But ultimately, in this game of cat and mouse, Aaron found an unlocked computer closet and just plugged his computer into the server to keep downloading.

Aaron held that academic publishers and digital libraries like JSTOR, Thompson, ISI, and Elsevier not only exploit the free labour of academics and reviewers for their own profit, but gatekeep knowledge that belongs to humanity. He believed that scientific knowledge belongs to the people, not a rent-seeking corporation. Aaron wasn’t the only one of his generation willing to put up a fight for these ideals. SciHub, a website which provides free access to millions of research papers and academic articles that are typically behind paywalls, was founded by Alexandra Elbakyan, a software engineer from Kazakhstan. Alexandra would eventually have to go into hiding or risk extradition for fines brought by Elsevier against her. 

Months before, in a talk at the University of Illinois, Aaron gave voice to these same ideals:

These licensing fees are so substantial that people studying [in places like] India […] don’t have this kind of access. They are locked out from all of these journals. They’re locked out from our entire scientific legacy. A lot of these journals go back to the Enlightenment. Every time someone has written a scientific paper, it has been scanned, digitized, and put in these collections.

 

It’s a legacy that should belong to us as a Commons, as a people, but instead, it’s been locked up and put online by a handful of for-profit corporations who then try and get the maximum profit they can out of it. […] but [as students] you have a key to those gates, and with a little of shell script magic, you can get those journal articles.”

When the Internet Was Synonymous With Freedom

I first heard of Aaron in 2011 when he was working on the campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). SOPA aimed to combat copyright infringement, but it would have allowed court orders to bar advertising and payment processing companies from doing business with “infringing websites.” It threatened free speech and innovation on our internet.

In response, “tech bros”—once a derogatory term for nerds with a “bro-ish” culture, but now accepted and reclaimed—rallied united against this bill. The ethos of “tech” back then was more than regurgitating marketing boilerplate and fundraising, but rather looking at the world and deciding to reshape it to what it should be. These were values held by the community as a whole, common to both capitalists like Steve Jobs and socialists like Aaron Swartz.

At the age of 14, Aaron co-authored the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) 1.0 specification, which revolutionized web content distribution. RSS is a web feed format invented before “social media” or “push notifications.” It creates a feed of activity and content from different websites across the internet. In this feed, you see all the material from the sources you subscribed to, nothing more, nothing less.

Aaron attended Stanford in 2004 but dropped out to do something more ambitious and at the time quite unproven. He was in the first batch of the startup accelerator Y Combinator in 2005, with his company Infogami, which was acquired by Reddit six months after both companies were created, making him part of the founding team alongside Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman. After Reddit’s acquisition by Condé Nast, Aaron had trouble adapting to the new work environment—barely showing up to work—and unsurprisingly he got fired.

With some exit liquidity, Aaron decided to focus on two types of political activism. On one side, progressive causes like healthcare, financial corruption, and ending the drug war. On the other side, causes that tech bros care about: freedom of speech and freedom of access to information, and privacy. This wasn’t an arbitrary or surprising list. These are after all the three core values of the internet. They correspond to the ability to send ideas to others, retrieve ideas from others, and to do so in relative safety from the powers that be, which might otherwise try to restrict your freedom, up to and including by destroying your life. Giving humanity this freedom unlocks incredible potential. It is also the only alternative vision of the internet to a creeping centralization of mass surveillance and social engineering.

Writing today in 2025, it seems that many have forgotten our old internet values, why those values are important, and how those values protect our internet. Freedom of speech, freedom of access, and privacy are “civilization primitives”—they are the base layer for freedom. Tech was and, at its heart, still is so much more than making money. We have to remember that while there is still time to act.

Who is MIT For?

Without Aaron realizing it, the authorities found his “Ghost_laptop” computer. But instead of stopping the downloads, they installed a surveillance camera. A couple of days later, while Aaron was replacing his hard drive, he was spotted on camera. Thinking back to the many progressive activists who broke the law in this era, you would assume Aaron was in for a slap on the wrist like they were.

Instead Aaron was made an example of, for the victimless crime of downloading files with a Python script—files he hadn’t even published at that point. As a consequence, Aaron was hit with thirteen criminal charges including wire fraud and computer fraud. At 24 years old, he was facing 35 years in prison and one million dollars in fines.

After federal prosecutors indicted Aaron, JSTOR decided to drop the case—but the U.S. government pursued it further. Aaron’s father petitioned MIT to help persuade the Boston U.S. Attorney’s office to drop the case or reduce the sentence. MIT refused to help Aaron. The whole point of institutions like MIT is to find, protect, and cultivate talented and idealistic people—people like Aaron—not to hunt them down. Under the pressure of the prosecution, on January 11, 2013, Aaron tragically took his own life in his Brooklyn apartment.

Years later, the physicist and investor Eric Weinstein would aptly summarize the depth of this institutional betrayal, addressing all members of the MIT community:

“Try to remember who you are. You’re the guys that put the police car on top of the Great Dome [at MIT]. You guys came up with the great breast of knowledge. […] What is your problem? They killed one of your own […] you should be the ones that keep the memory of Aaron Swartz alive—and all of those hackers—and all of those mutants. It’s either our place or it isn’t.”

This hostility shown towards Aaron Swartz and those like him is driven by bureaucrats that have little in common with the kind of young talent universities were meant to nurture. No wonder that they saw maintaining their relationships with various organizations a greater priority than protecting a member of the university community. No wonder then that there has since been a crackdown on the social life that once defined the culture of the universities.

I used to think that we needed to build new institutions in the frontier, away from the old. I still think that. The birth of institutions like Y Combinator and the Thiel Fellowship created an escape hatch for young ambitious people to go outside of the institutions to achieve their goals. But too much is at stake to ignore the growing hostility towards our internet from established institutions both old and new.

The “anti-piracy bills” of today masquerade as “AI safety bills.” These enable censorship of AI and will prove to be even more dangerous than previous social media censorship. Many people inside these companies are beginning to agree with the censorship—some are true believers in AI safety, others want these bills to create what amounts to government-backed monopolies. The same kinds of laws that once sought to curtail your freedom of access to information will now be used to prevent you from learning of the existence of this information through a language model. Will we allow machines to learn on the free internet as we once let people learn?

Similarly, the bank accounts of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin companies were shut down through Operation Choke Point 2.0, with the purpose of restricting transactions under the justification of fighting money laundering. The exchanges become a honeypot of personal information as well as a single point of failure. Since, ultimately, Bitcoin is just code and language—information—the question of letting people send each other Bitcoin is the same question as whether we allow them to send each other information. Can we protect freedom of speech, freedom of access, and privacy? Unless we protect these values in this case, they will fade away from the modern internet.

Honoring Our Guys

A few years ago, I saw an interview with the investor and philanthropist Peter Thiel, in which he talks about our cultural malaise, how sharply the culture has turned, and the creeping sense of dread felt by many about the future. Thiel said that the way out is to change the culture and “get back to the future.” His proposal to achieve the first step in this direction was to have a ticker-tape parade for Satoshi Nakamoto, even though he might not show up. Honoring Satoshi is a good idea. But I thought to myself that someone less enigmatic—and whose story had tragically already concluded—might be the best internet hero and martyr to honor first. Someone like young Aaron.

I decided I would find a way to build him a statue. The purpose of this statue will be to remind people that the internet, once a beacon of free expression and open access to information, is under siege. The purpose of this statue is to remind us what the stakes are. To stop the petty squabbles of “the current thing” between tech bros in these fake categories of “right wing” or “left wing,” and to remind us of higher values.

The statue will be right here in San Francisco where the internet most overlaps with the physical world. My hope is this statue will help convince my fellow “tech bros” of something that everyone else in the world already knows: that San Francisco is their city—this city, warts and all, is not just a transitory place, but the only home tech culture has. No other place in the world can compare in its economic and cultural importance to the tech industry. The city is worth fighting for and saving just as the internet itself is worth fighting for and saving.

When I reached out to Aaron’s mom and told her about the project, she was excited and gave me all her favorite pictures of her son to model the statue. I then found a great partner in the people at Monumental Labs—who make marble statues with robotic arms to reduce the cost of the pieces—and their great artist Daniel Williams. 

I then faced a cold start problem—I couldn’t get outside funding until I had secured a location, and no location would accept until I had the statue, and I couldn’t get the statue until I had the funding. I decided to do a leveraged move by breaking the bank and used all of my savings—$10,000 in Bitcoin—and paid for the initial design of the statue myself. Having signed a contract to pay $35,000 before the statue was shipped—money I did not yet have—I started the fundraising.

Daniel sculpted a 3D model in his computer of Aaron, then robotic arms carved it out from a single piece of marble from Carrara in Italy, and then the artist, by hand, polished the details of the statue. With the incredible help from my donors such as Max Novendstern, Richard Craib, Eoghan McCabe, Erik Voorhees, Riva Tez, and Martin Köppelmann, we paid for the statue just one day before the deadline, and the Internet Archive agreed to display the statue until I get the permits from the city for a permanent installation.

The reason for building the statute is to elevate guys of our tribe—the internet tribe. As the internet has grown, many may have forgotten or never known that there is such a thing as internet people. It is important that we celebrate our heroes and remember our martyrs. If not us, who will?

The work of building the statue is not yet finished, as I’m still navigating the bureaucracy of the San Francisco city government to find a public park to have first a temporary installation, and then a permanent one—for which I still need to raise money. If you, the reader, want to donate or help in any way, please contact me by email here.

MIT and other institutions like it were created by people like Aaron, with the purpose of finding, cultivating, and protecting people like him. But now, the individuals inhabiting these halls and sitting on those chairs are not the same people. Many of our institutions have been increasingly turning hostile towards people like Aaron, and tragedies like those will keep happening to our best and brightest.

There seem to be only two options for tech bros today. The first is to build something that directly disrupts the current paradigm. But in this case, elites will drop the hammer on you, just like they did to Aaron. The second option is to build something without disrupting the current structures of power. But if it becomes too successful, you will still be antagonizing the declining elites embarrassed by the contrast between their inability and your new capabilities—and for that, they will also drop the hammer on you anyway. This has already happened to Elon Musk, and the weaponization of red tape by his political adversaries now stalls SpaceX launches.

I’m proposing a third option. Our flight from institutions over the past few decades has taken the form of founding companies, rather than fighting and staying, but we have to think longer term and beyond profit if we hope to live up to our loftier values. Today, the future of our internet is again under threat. Keeping the memory of our heroes and martyrs like Aaron Swartz alive, will remind us all to defend the foundation of our new civilization—our internet. They killed one of you. And you are not doing anything about it?