Liberal Tech — In the Memory: Aaron Swartz
I respect very few people in this world, because life is not just about breathing, drinking, and eating. It is about evolution.
We often read about Darwinian evolution, which applies to species, but in post-human evolution dominance, the same principles have made home to different paradigm and apply to philosophies and ideologies.
It is, always was, and always will be that different philosophies compete — and the ones that benefit power and hold its fort tend to win.
This is why Aaron Swartz earned my respect.
A nerdy boy who mastered programming at an early age was destined to earn well if he became one with the system and worked according to its templates. He could have lived comfortably. He could have stayed quiet.
Instead, he noticed a dark pattern forming — knowledge being locked away, curiosity being criminalized, and learning slowly turned into a privilege rather than a right.
This is how modern control works.
Copyright monopolies, closed academic research funded by public money, inaccessible journals, and the normalization of “permission to learn” were just a few patches of that spreading darkness and Aaron chose to do most engineering thing possible — Attempt to Fix it.
The philosophy that won my heart and earned my lifelong respect was simple, but dangerous:
Liberalize knowledge.
Don’t confine it.
Don’t black-box it.
Don’t restrain it.
Aaron co-founded Reddit to give people a space where ideas could move freely. He helped shape Creative Commons so creators could share without being strangled by exploitative copyright systems and still weave the credibility.
He challenged the absurdity of academic hoarding by downloading millions of research papers — not to profit, but to expose a moral failure of elite education systems : knowledge paid for by the public was being locked away from the public.
As a teenager, he helped build RSS, a foundational technology of the modern web. He joined Y Combinator early, helped grow Reddit, and walked away from serious money without hesitation.
He wrote the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, openly calling out the injustice of knowledge hoarding.
He acted not out of recklessness, but out of principle and morals.
Honestly, while writing this, I’m getting chills.
At the same time, I wonder why so few people know about him. But also i believe that real legends survive through time, influencing people who are paying attention.
For a long time, I believed these battles ended with him. Good open source infra, creativity was not just mobilized but was also paid well to fund itself, but I was wrong.
The Saga Continues…
Today is 11 Jan, 2026.
I was reading about how Sam Altman made a deal with Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, in February 2024 but was initially proposed and inception in 2016, allowing Reddit’s data to be licensed for AI training — data scraped to build increasingly closed AI systems.
The idea that this was planned well before the public inception of the LLM race tells me something unsettling: first, a blueprint for a new tech world order was forged, and only later were the pieces assembled to activate it.
Capital.
Compute.
Platforms.
Data.
Everything aligned too cleanly to be accidental, don’t want to be a conspiracy nut man, but I question that was it always planned that way ?
Aaron understood something many still don’t:
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When openness is mined to construct closed power, it is no longer progress.
That realization pulls me back to this very day — 11 January — the same date in 2013 when Aaron Swartz took his own life, crushed under the legal and psychological weight imposed by the very systems he challenged.
This date is stand still. Only the machinery has resurrected and grown larger.
What We’re Watching Now
This is techo-fascism at its peak.
On the surface, it looks like innovation. Underneath, it is a layered collapse of philosophical foundations that most people cannot yet perceive.
First, this marks a systematic shift from a human-controlled world order to a tech-controlled world order. Initiatives like Worldcoin add a dangerous nuance to this shift. When identity, verification, and economic participation are tied to biometric systems governed by private entities, control quietly migrates away from democratic structures into technical infrastructure.
Power stops asking for consent, and play the pawns.
Second, evolution itself is being offloaded to machines. There is good in this — systems can fail fast, iterate faster, and discover patterns humans cannot. But the cost is abstraction, decision-making, value judgments, and moral trade-offs become invisible layers buried under models. When everything is abstracted, accountability evaporates.
Back to days, we fought to prevent.
Third, information attenuation becomes unavoidable. Communication has always degraded in transit, but now truth itself is filtered, summarized, optimized, and re-narrated by systems trained on already-distorted data.
Knowledge no longer decays naturally, it is actively reshaped by whoever controls the narrator which in future will surely be AI.
This future now feels inevitable. OpenAI has positioned itself to be too big to fail through cross-deals with nearly every major tech giant, and recently proposed a deal to Amazon as well (I wish this does not goes through, scoping the potential of duopoly).
Either this system prevails entirely, or it collapses catastrophically.
There is no comfortable middle ground left.
Even Elon Musk’s comment — jokingly in recent Nikhil Kamath Podcast — that “working will be optional” solidifies this hypothesis. Said humorously, but carrying a grave implication: purpose, labor, and human value are being redefined without human consensus.
Why This Terrifies Me
Right now, I don’t know how to react to this understanding which I accidentally stumbled upon. But one thing tightens my stomach — the liberty of information is on the line.
I am a product of liberal information.
I learned coding from the internet in 8th standard. I worked my way up using Reddit, Stack Overflow, lectures on Youtube, torrents and awesome GitHub Open sources repositories. I repositioned myself from a potentially dreadful limited life into one of dignity and respect.
People like me were made possible because knowledge was open and now People like me may soon go extinct.
And that thought is what gives me palpitations.
Closing Note
Looking at the past blogs I wrote, it seems that I was slowly embracing the LLMs capabilities, but now I am taking a U turn.
No, I always embrace the creativity, the thought process and the potential capabilities of the LLMs, it should be companion rather than becoming a reform for humanity in the long term positioning, that what I have problem with. Hopefully reaching there becomes impossible down the line or at least Google gives great deal of competition to at least have a duopoly which will again make this transition inefficient and Creativity again weed through this gap.
But,
Respect to everyone still choosing openness.
To those maintaining repositories.
To those sharing knowledge without being asked.
To those who contributed to Liberal tech and has prevailed over closed systems.
NO AI USED FOR THIS ONE — SIMPLY FROM THE HEART
