By Jacobo Nájera
Translated by Alex Argüelles
A year ago, while WikiLeaks founder suffered the struggles of being captive at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, after his long persecution headed by United States of America’s government; the lifeless body of a scientific was found in Chicago, it was the corpse of activist Aaron Swartz, who was about to face a sentence of 35 years for downloading the investigations of the renowned JSTOR.
Sometimes a science promoter, others an artisan; Aaron is a key to approach and observe generations in paths of manifestation through ideas and science as guiding principle. Not only for his impeccable work as a scientist, but also for using the scientific labour as a socialization process itself.
As an architect, he always kept a relation with machines that was put into question: he said they were brain-gelatinizing. Due to this, he sought moments to be with himself and was keen on the idea of getting back to the world of paper and books, although he also recognized the capacity of the digital environment to interact and collaborate with others in order to construct things.
An engineer who established many patterns for the way we relate with knowledge on the web, he collaborated on the development of the code layer of the Creative Commons licenses. At the same time, he was defending reinvention and not allowing any simple criticism for the use of technically different practices: philosophy and engine approximation of Open Library’s code.
Promoter, divulger and developer of the Semantic Web, defined by Tim Berners-Lee as “an extension of the actual web, in which information is given a solid meaning that allows computers and people to work in cooperation”. Thus Swartz preferred to think about himself as a performer of applied sociology and called it, amongst other ideas, “The Programmable Web”.
Aaron’s curiosity took him to explore a path he always shared, so much that he declared himself for humanity’s access to knowledge and it’s free flow on the networks, by promoting the campaign that weakened the Stop Online Piracy Act initiative. This was his struggle, which he developed with his code and his word.
His migrant mind have left cellular life, but his ideas, work and affection have permeated the neuronal networks of Internet and, most likely, the ones of its inhabitants, life that we could only be able to feel in so far as computer scientists, technologists and architects visualize that it is necessary to build new environments of digital creation with the capacity for being inhabited socially, starting by their development.
This shows up that the socially unfinished programmable web, designed by the walker Aaron, can be completed as long as we can be critic to reflect and work on the tools that interlace knowledge networks in order to draw attention to processes, diversity and curiosity