Allow me to make a confession: I didn't think much of Aaron Swartz while he was alive. Most of his writings seemed self-absorbed to me. I had difficulty unders

Allow me to make a confession: I didn't think much of Aaron Swartz while he was alive. Most of his writings seemed self-absorbed to me. I had difficulty understanding how someone with his politics could be a mac fanboy. People I think highly of (Chris Webber, John Sullivan) thought highly of him so I was induced to give him some benefit of the doubt on those grounds, but I certainly couldn't understand what they saw in him. I assumed he was a millionaire with enormous resources that he was using to thumb his nose at powerful people. I felt that if I had the resources (I assumed that) Aaron had, I would use them differently. I saw the thread about Aaron's campaign fund and I didn't post, but I did read it. And I read Edward's comment and I agreed with it. I knew very little about Aaron's case. But the way that fund was being put together seemed underhanded to me, like he wanted to take people's money without really acknowledging it. Is he a millionaire or not? I wondered, and if not, why doesn't he come out with it and explain what happened? Of course now I know of the existence, from Lawence Lessig, of the bizarre Kafkaesque muzzle the judge had on Aaron, but how could anyone who wasn't very closely familiar with Aaron and his case know about that? There's a sort of sick serendipity in this for me. Just last week I read Kafka's The Trial. The word "Kafkaesque" keeps getting thrown around but it's stunning---stupefying to me, how many parallels there are between that book and Aaron's case. In Kafka, after the protagonist is arrested he's immediately released. The police even escort him to work and tell him to go about his life. At first he thinks that's an great thing that he wasn't hauled off in custody, but as the trial grinds on he comes to realize that being forced to live every day as the facsimile of a free man being required to do what free men are inclined to do while carrying the additional burden of dealing with his trial, is itself torture. If anyone remembers the bruhaha around Dmitry Sklyarov, or before that DVD John or Kevin Mitnick knows that this community rallies around men sitting in jail while the authorities try to come up with a crime to charge them with. There's no doubt in my mind that if the prosecution had hauled Aaron off to jail "for downloading some PDFs" the reaction would have been swift and boisterous. I've learned a great deal about this country's "justice" system over the past two days, and mostly I've learned about the special sort of hell it put Aaron in, and I've come to realize that I was complicit in its work through my ignorance and indifference. And all I can say about that is I feel a little bit sick. And that it won't ever happen again.