Aaron Swartz is a teenage writer, hacker, and activist. He was a finalist for the ArsDigita Prize for excellence in building non-commercial web sites at the age of 13. At 14 he co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification, now used by thousands of sites to notify their readers of updates. He's a member of the W3C's RDF Core Working Group which is developing the format for the Semantic Web and Metadata Advisor to the Creative Commons. He's also the author of rss2email, xmltramp, HTML diff, and html2text. [More...]
I think deeply about things and want others to do likewise. I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people. I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication. Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time on things that won't have an impact. I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously. I don't hold grudges (it's not productive) but I learn from my experience. I want to make the world a better place.
I have heroes. I believe in good and bad. I support free software and limited copyright. I fight laws that restrict what bits I can put on my website. Politically, I'm lower-left (-5.50, -7.69 as of 2003-08-23) (huh?) but I enjoy any well-thought-out political views. I'm a pacifist. I don't believe in the science-humanities schism. I want to be an artist. I have several annoying habits: I misremember things and misestimate the accuracy of my memory; I assume I am right, even in areas I don't know much about; and I misleadingly answer personal questions when I think a more truthful answer would cause confusion or strife. More: Weblog, School, Photos, Movies, Attic, Stuff.
Interests: law, politics, and technology. Hobbies: news/journalism, media reviews.
from Aaron's Weblog
Eat and Code
Dear Diary: Sorry I haven't written so long. Running a startup is hard! That and finally having people to talk to sort of takes some of the time and d...
iCommons Summit
Saturday, June 25 -- Harvard Law School Campus After wandering around stupidly for about an hour, I see a crowd of people outside the one door I didn...
Simon Arrives
Wednesday, June 22 I originally made a short-term reservation at Simmons Hall, both because I had to get authorization for a longer-term stay and bec...
Faces of Fame
In his book Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (a relatively moderate book, despite the title) James Fallows asks (p. 94): ...
Serious Social Science
I once attended a psychology lecture in which the speaker argued that Freud was really a brilliant psychologist, but the field had passed him by becau...
Contact
I greatly prefer email (PGP key). I try to answer all my email but currently I'm struggling. If it's important or time-sensitive, don't hesitate to send it again if I'm not answering in time. I'd prefer not to use the phone. If you have some reason you want to call me, please warn me first by email.
Where
- Places I've been...
- Before: Student at Stanford University
- Now: MIT (Cambridge, Mass.) for the Summer Founders Program
- Late August: Sebastapol, CA
Projects
- School
- Startup
- Writing a book
- Writing a weblog
- SICP with Zooko
- Working on Psychology lectures
