Transcription: Taren at Aaron Swartz's Memorial - 2013 January 19 ============================================================================== Description: Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman's eulogy at the Aaron Swartz NYC Memorial Service. Taren was Aaron's partner, and is the founder and executive director of SumOfUs.org. Canonical URL: http://mretc.net/~cris/swartz-transcripts/taren-transcript.txt Last updated: $Date: 2013/01/23 14:59:52 $ Transcribed January 20, 2013. Please send any corrections/improvements to The video from which this transcript was created is available from Democracy Now! LiveStream of the memorial service: ============================================================================== TAREN STINEBRICKNER-KAUFFMAN: Aaron would have loved to have been here. There are so many people in this room and watching online in whose company he delighted. And as much as he didn't like to admit it, he really loved being the center of attention sometimes. Of the two of us he should definitely be the one on the stage. He loved public speaking. He was so proud of that Freedom to Connect speech. He loved story telling. Aaron if you want to walk right in and take over for me at any point, just please do so. Ira Glass, David Foster Wallace, Louis CK, these are some of the people he admired most in the world: consummate story tellers. I remember once last year we took a trip to DC together just 'cause he'd been invited to speak at some techy conference -- I don't even remember the name of it. We spent a whole day in transit and with him working on his speech and his Power Point just to give a talk to a few dozen programmers about why they should apply their skills towards politics. "You can do magic!" he told them with a snap of his fingers and a picture of Harry Potter. For each anecdote he told about how programming can make the world a better place. "You can do magic," he said. Aaron really could do magic. Aaron's magic was in asking questions, first and foremost. He often told me that he thought the reason he was a fast programmer was because that he was just really good at asking Google what the right code snippets were. Aaron's magic was in asking questions and in believing that the answers were not inevitable. Why should for-profit corporations control the world's academic research? It's not a question most of us have ever thought to ask despite going through years of university where we might be reading academic research every day. But once you ask it the answer is obvious: they shouldn't. Aaron's magic was that he believed that that and so much else could change. More than that he believed that he could change it -- that he could change the world. And he was right. By last Friday he'd already changed the world in so, so many ways. I'm very sad about what happened at many, many levels, and one of them is that I'm so sad that we'll never see all the ways that he would have changed the world from here on out. Aaron would have loved to have been here and have the opportunity to speak to all of you. I have to say, though, I'm not sure that he would have like the structure of the program. He hated ceremony. But memorial services are for the living, and Aaron forfeited his right to make that decision last Friday. He hated ceremony. He hated weddings. I had three weddings to attend last summer, he refused to come to any of them despite liking and knowing all of the friends getting married. He hated ceremony. If he were here he would be wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a snarky T-shirt. When he surprised me last month with the suggestion we might want to get married, he said he'd want a Liz Lemon wedding: Long on privacy and love and short on sentimentality and speeches. I said we'd at least have to throw a party afterwards. He wasn't convinced. I said we should talk about it again after the trial. The trial. The case defined our life together. We started dating in June, two years ago, just months after his life had been turned upside down by the arrest. But while the ordeal was still completely private, he told me that there was something going on in his life that he didn't want to talk about. He called it, "the bad thing." For weeks I didn't know what it was, just that spending time with me was a good distraction for him. I had theories, wild speculation. My top guess for a while was that he had had an affair with Elizabeth Warren and was going to ruin her career. That really was my top guess for a while. He called me one night -- he was at Cambridge, I was at Frisbee practice in DC -- he told me that the bad thing might be on the news the next day and asked whether I wanted to hear it from him first. I said, Yes. So he told me he'd been arrested and was being charged with downloading too many academic journal articles. I was silent briefly and then blurted out, "That's all? That doesn't seem like a very big deal." He giggled nervously and said, "Well I guess it's not like anybody has cancer or anything." I thought about it and called him back a few hours later. "Sorry," I said, "I think I might have under- reacted a little bit. I'm sure being arrested and prosecuted is very stressful." And he said, "Actually yours is the most helpful reaction anybody's had so far. Please don't change it." For a long time we didn't talk about the case very much. He wanted to protect me and he wanted to cordon it off from the rest of his life. He was worried that I would be subpoenaed, or that his other friends would be subpoenaed, and so he kept it all to himself. He kept all of the stress and the anger and the fear to himself. We started talking more and more about it over the last few months as it became clear that the government was not going to recognize that this was just one big mistake; that Steve Heymann, the prosecutor who was hell- bent on destroying Aaron's life was not going to come to terms with the notion that Aaron was not a threat, that Aaron should not spend years behind bars, that Aaron should not be labeled a felon for the rest of his life. In December there was a hearing that I went to with him -- the trial was delayed because another hearing at this hearing -- the decision was made to delay the trial until April. And afterwards I -- we came out of the courtroom and I tried to give him a hug, and he pushed me away. And he said, "Not in front of Steve Heymann. I don't want to show Steve Heymann that." Aaron would have loved to have been here. I'm not sure he would have liked me speaking about him this way. Despite his public profile he was an intensely private person in many ways. But memorial services are for the living and last Friday he forfeited his right to decide that. I think that you, his friends, his family, his admirers in the wide world have a right to know what he faced. He faced an unfair prosecution by this man, Steve Heymann, who had no sense of proportion or justice and just wanted to rack Aaron up as a notch on his belt so that he could go into the cafeteria with the other prosecutors and high five them. He faced Carmen Ortiz, a U.S. Attorney who did nothing to reign Heymann in. He faced indifference from MIT, an institution that could have protected him with a single public statement and refused to do so in defiance of all its own most cherished principles. And he faced a deeply dysfunctional criminal justice system. One that he is far from the only victim of. There are millions of Americans who face the kinds of ordeals that he did, most of them with many fewer resources and much less support than he did. And last Friday he faced the prospect of yet another three months of uncertainty and ups and downs and being forced by the government to spend every fiber of his being on this damnable, senseless trial with no guarantee that he could exonerate himself at the end of it. He was so scared and so frustrated and so desperate, and more than anything else just so weary. I think he just couldn't take it another day. Aaron once told me early on when we were trying to navigate a long- distance relationship and I was sort of apologizing for, you know, I can't come to Boston this weekend but I'd love it if you came to DC, but it's okay if you don't want to, I understand if you don't want to. And, I think he'd had enough of my, sort of, caveats and said, "Look, I'm not in the habit of doing things I don't want to do." In the end that independence was one of Aaron's core traits and part of his brilliance. No one could tell him what to do. Unlike most of the world he refused to let social mores funnel him on auto pilot into doing things that don't make sense. He refused to let establishment conventional wisdom of, "This is how it's done," stop him from asking to hardest questions. He never let his youth define who he was or constrain what he did. And in the end, he couldn't allow Steve Heymann and the U.S. Attorney's office to control him, either. We now live in a world without Aaron, but the legacy he would have wanted to leave is clear. That's why I'm here today. That's why all of you are here today. Cause I still believe that the world can change, even though Aaron's not here to do the changing himself. Aaron's last two years were not easy. His death was not easy. And the things I'm going to say are not going to be easy. But they are what he believed, and if anything good is to come out of his death, they're the lessons we must learn. "You can't rest comfortably. You have to think big and think tiny," Aaron once said. "The revolution will be A-B tested." Which, I think is the big, the revolution, and the tiny. He wanted to make sure that each small step along the way was being done right. You have to recognize that no one knows what they're doing. Other people telling you you're doing a good enough job isn't good enough, because they don't know what's possible. Seek out people who push you, not just people who support you. Look up and not down, Aaron said. Aaron didn't believe he was smarter than anyone else, which is hard for -- it was very hard for me to accept that he really believed that. He really, really believed that he was not smarter than anybody else. He just thought he asked better questions. He believed that every single person in this room is capable of doing as much as he did, if you just ask the right questions. Whatever you're doing, are you confused? Is there anything that doesn't quite make sense about what you're doing? What is it? Never assume that someone else has noticed that niggling sense of doubt and already resolved the issue for themselves. They haven't. The world does not make sense, and if you think it does it's because you're not asking hard enough questions. If you're in the tech sector, why are you there? What do you really believe in? If you believe that technology is making the world a better place, why do you believe that? Do you really understand what makes the world a bad place to begin with? I'm serious. If you're in this room and you work in the technology sector, I'm asking you that question. Do you understand what makes the world a bad place to begin with? Have you ever spent time with and listened to the people your technology is supposed to be helping? Or the people it might be hurting? If you work in social change, how do you know that what you're doing is helping the world? When you go to funders or to your email list to ask for money, do you really believe in the core of your heart that you're spending it the best way it can be spent? Do you find yourself telling stories you don't fully believe? Aaron believed there's no shame in admitting failure. It's why he loved GiveWell among other things. But there's a deep, deep shame in pride that prevents you from admitting failure. There's a deep, deep shame in caring more about believing that you're changing the world than actually changing the world. Aaron would have loved to have been here, because out of the last week and out of today, phoenixes are already rising from his ashes. The best possible legacy for him is for all of us to go out from here today and do everything we can to make the world a better place. A thousand flowers are blooming in his name already. Some of the most important that we'll be fighting for -- David Segal and many others of us -- are organizing around. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts must be held accountable for its actions. MIT must ensure that it's never complicit in another event like this. All academic research from all-time should be made public and free and open and available to anybody in the world. We must strengthen and pass Aaron's Law, which would amend the CFAA to make sure the prosecutors don't have this kind of discretion over computer crimes in the future. And we need fundamental reform to our criminal justice system. Aaron would have loved to be here, but he wouldn't have liked that I'm going to end with a poem. Aaron didn't like poetry. He thought it was too intense for him. I sent him a poem I'd written -- not for him, but that I'd written previously -- to him a few weeks into our relationship and he never read it, despite my asking. He thought it would be too hard. But memorial services are for the living, and last Friday he forfeited his right to decide that. This poem a friend sent me touched me in a way that few other things have in the last eight days. It's called "When Great Trees Fall," by Maya Angelou. When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety. When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence, their senses eroded beyond fear. When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile. We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity. Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines, gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken. Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us. Our souls, dependent upon their nurture, now shrink, wizened. Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away. We are not so much maddened as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves. And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms, slowly and always irregularly. Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration. Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us