“Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.I imagine Aaron Swartz battled that same tension in his bright short life. Probably on a daily basis. The tragedy of his death has been discussed elsewhere, it is a great loss. Thankfully, he had a good friend in Laurence Lessig. Today Lessig writes a fairly succinct piece that cuts to the chase.At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey.
It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.”
~ Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary
It won't bring him back. But the loss of the Internet activist has prompted a bill in Congress that would protect others from the same kind of prosecutorial abuse.