The Boy Who Could Change the World

An incredibly compelling, deeply moving and ultimately disturbing book. It's compelling on two distinct levels: first, the content of Aaron's thoughts - the clarity of his vision, his impressively singular focus on a moral north star, his intelligence and passion - and, second, the “meta” of Aaron himself. I read this and then immediately this piece by the New Yorker, and I want to watch the documentary now as well.

A bit of personal background: I worked at MIT from 2010-2013. MIT has a long, respected tradition of “hacks” - i.e. pushing (legal) boundaries to make political points or have fun (e.g. putting a police car on the dome). The wifi at MIT is free and open - if you're somewhere near Kendall Square in Cambridge, you will get access to MIT's network, and thus access to JSTOR and all the paywalled academic articles. So, as Aaron would say, if you're wealthy and live in the 02139 zip code, you have access to top scientific articles for free. If you live in Accra or Bogota or Dar es Salaam, you do not.

Anyway, at MIT there's a general vibe of “hacker counter-culture” (Richard Stallman hangs around at CSAIL, apparently refusing to use the key fobs to enter buildings since they can be tracked). So Aaron's action was, in my 2010 view, a completely normal and unremarkable “MIT hack” that was a bit more political, but making a generally benign/admirable point (paywalled academic articles are absurd, after all).

This is all to say that the Federal prosecution of Aaron has been rightly criticized for being so anti-human and dystopian.

Anyway, about this book: I felt like I knew the “story” already - but I found this book still so surprising because, (a) I didn't realize Aaron touched SO MANY things I consider important (and even use frequently!) like Markdown (!), RSS (!), Reddit (!) and (b) I felt like I got a much better (but still incomplete, no doubt) picture of who Aaron was as a person. I was amazed and inspired by his absolute clarity of thought: his posts on governance, corruption, copyright, education (!) are righteous and true. They just make sense. But I was also bummed by the “darker” patterns: his absolute conviction which felt like moral perfectionism, his humorlessness, the intensity of his righteousness. And I was irked by some of the “brilliant young dude” traits like his worshipping of David Foster Wallace and Noam Chomsky, and his - like Cory Doctorow - sometimes condescending explanation of econ principles.

But! Honestly, those flaws just enriched this whole reading, since they made Aaron seem more human and imperfect, and therefore made his achievements even more impressive.