Concept edit
Aaron Swartz, known here as User:AaronSw, is gone. The nobility of his cause lives on. We leave our memorial notes at User talk:AaronSw. Recently it was proposed that Wikipedia have a memorial day.
I would suggest another idea. There are many people who mourn this loss, and agree with his ideas, and find what he had to say interesting. The question then for us while we on Wikipedia might be: what would Aaron do? What articles would he be editing? What would he be saying? Meanwhile, the buzzards are circling.[1][2]
If we can join together so that, between all of us, we collectively understand his thinking, if we write what he would have written, and communicate collectively so that these continued works continue to be shared among us, then he is not dead at all. He will have achieved Wikiimmortality.
Practicalities edit
See history at [3]. Now if only I could remember what the site is that sorts out what articles someone has edited into neat little piles...
- The first step is to list the articles Swartz edited before, and have a group of willing volunteers see what they can do to improve them.
- Next, have a forum where people track the developments they think would have interested him and work on those.
- Last but most important - hope for a meaningful gestalt to form that delivers to its participants true inspiration.
Metaphysical underpinnings edit
(these unusual musings are only for the pleasure of those who like to think about such things)
One fundamental concept here is that all people are manifestations of the universal Atman. If you remember and feel and do what I remember and feel and do, there is no difference between us. Our experience of consciousness occurs via the Atman. It is the CPU that actually does the calculations - we are merely tasks sharing time on that architecture.
Another concept is that this universe is not the first version, and not the last. God has rewritten history from beginning to end before, and will do it again. On the first day of the writing of the world, as it says in Genesis, it was a very simple place. In future versions, every tear will be wiped away.
The relevance to us is that there is a parallel universe right beside us, like our own, in the direction of Paradise. There is a place where this tragedy did not happen. In order to reach it, we need only to have something about ourselves worth preserving, so as not to be written out of or too radically transformed in the dramatis personae. The nondeterminacy of physics allows that despite our changing decisions from one version to the next, events at all points of past and future are similar from one version to the next. An aspiration of the project therefore (though I do not say I know it is possible) is to create a gestalt which has a level of reality that reflects that it is the incipient platform for the long and happy life of a Benjamin Franklin of our era, in a better and nobler America that exists in the spiritual future. We could seek to take a small portion of our own minds and bring them into a spiritual conjugation with that of our lost comrade.
Explanatory note edit
I do not use the term "suicide" here because it is very hard for me to believe in it. I don't regard it as proven. Why not take refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy? Heck, he could have defected to China and helped them hack us... given the level of freedom he was due to experience, what would be to stop him? I don't suggest those options seriously, but when the plan is suicide, any other plan makes more sense. I think most murders are committed by idiots, and the rest are accidents and suicides... and while he was in great danger of legal action, so were wealthy interests whose ability to enforce copyright might have been reduced by a favorable precedent on appeal.