Raw Thought Aaron Swartz · 1986–2013

In memoriam

Aaron
Swartz

—

Programmer, writer, organizer. For seven years he thought out loud on his blog, Raw Thought, about technology and politics, books and institutions, and how to become a better person. The original site is gone. The writing is kept here, in his memory, for anyone who wants to read it.

Start at the beginning

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.

— Aaron Swartz
449 posts May 2005 – November 2012 28 hours of reading Oldest first, always

Where to begin

Six posts to start with.

Four hundred and forty-nine posts is a lot. If you only read a few, these show the range: the practical, the political, and the late series on how to get better at being a person.

The collection

The complete archive.

Chronological ↓

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About Aaron

A short life, lived in public.

Aaron Swartz was born in Highland Park, Illinois, on November 8, 1986. He was fourteen when he joined the working group that wrote the RSS 1.0 specification, and still a teenager when he helped build the technical foundations of Creative Commons and worked with John Gruber on Markdown. His startup Infogami merged with Reddit in 2005, and he left after the company was sold the following year.

What he cared about most was access: to information, to knowledge, to political power. He led the first version of the Internet Archive’s Open Library, wrote the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, co-founded the advocacy group Demand Progress, and helped organize the campaign that stopped the SOPA bill in 2012.

In 2011 he was arrested for downloading millions of academic articles from JSTOR through MIT’s network. Facing federal charges, he took his own life in New York on January 11, 2013. He was twenty-six.

This blog is where he worked things out. The archive begins in May 2005, with a post he typed by hand into a web page after a disk crash destroyed the earlier years. It ends in November 2012, a few weeks after Raw Nerve, the series on getting better at life that many readers consider his best work.

  1. 1986Born November 8 in Highland Park, Illinois.
  2. 2000At fourteen, co-authors the RSS 1.0 specification.
  3. 2002Helps build the technical foundations of Creative Commons.
  4. 2004Works with John Gruber on Markdown.
  5. 2005Raw Thought starts over after a hard-drive crash. Infogami merges with Reddit.
  6. 2007Leads the first version of Open Library at the Internet Archive.
  7. 2008Writes the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.
  8. 2010Co-founds Demand Progress. Fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics.
  9. 2011Arrested over the JSTOR downloads at MIT.
  10. 2012Helps defeat SOPA. Writes the Raw Nerve series. Last post on November 1.
  11. 2013Dies in New York on January 11, aged twenty-six.

About this edition

How this archive survived.

Nine days after Aaron’s death, Josh Leitzel scraped every post from aaronsw.com and published them on GitHub as joshleitzel/rawthought, in Markdown, HTML, PDF, ePub and Mobi, as his contribution to the #pdftribute movement. That archive is the only reason this site exists. Every post here comes from it, and every post links back to its source file.

The aaronsw.com registration expired on September 29, 2026, and the address now shows a registrar parking page instead of the blog. This reader was built so the writing stays easy to read: in order, searchable, on any screen. The “Original post” link on each article goes to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine rather than to the expired domain.

Links inside the posts were audited in October 2026. Of 1,308 distinct outbound links, more than half are dead, and dozens now point at parked domains or ad spam. So every link in a post goes to the Wayback Machine, dated to the day the post was written, unless the audit found it still live and still pointing at the right thing. Links that go to the archive are marked with a small arrow.

The site is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no analytics, accounts, cookies or third-party scripts. Saved posts, your reading position and the theme choice live only in this browser. Archived HTML has been stripped of scripts, forms and embeds. The 34 images that survive in the archive are shown from this site’s own copy of them, each with a link to the archived file beneath it; the rest are noted as missing. The source is at Joona-t/raw-thought-reader.

This is an independent tribute. It is not affiliated with Aaron’s family or estate, nor with the archive’s maintainer, and it claims no ownership of the writing.