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\f0\fs24 \cf0 [Seth Schoen] As Lisa was just recounting, I met Aaron at the Supreme Court
in October of 2002, and we had gone to hear the oral argument in Eldred v. Ashcroft. Most
of us non-lawyers had to spend the night sleeping in the street in line in front of the court
in order to get a ticket. \
\ The line for the oral argument starts the
night before. But even though Aaron was a teenager, he was Larry Lessig's personal guest
at the argument. So since he had a ticket, he had the luxury of spending the night in
a hotel, which his parents apparently really appreciated.
\
\ But Aaron decided to spend most of the night
and most of the morning before the argument hanging out with us at the encampment in front
of the court. In part to show solidarity with the people who hadn't received a ticket, and
in part for the thrill of meeting actual, grown-up copyright activists.
\
\ [laughter]
\
\ Aaron was truly star struck to meet people
he thought of as legendary copyright reform activists. But within a decade, Aaron himself
would be among the most effective grassroots copyright activists in the whole world.
\
\ At that moment he was the little kid markup
and metadata expert that Larry Lessig admired enough to give him a front row Supreme Court
seat. And Aaron spent the evening with us as we ordered pizza, which he could actually
eat, for delivery to the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court, which was apparently not
a very unusual request for pizzerias in DC. \
\ [laughter]
\
\ And all of us gossiped about copyright law
for a couple of hours. I saw Aaron again in December. My friends Leonard and Sumana found
a picture, he's visiting my house, and I come, like some people here, from a book family
and I have a lot of books and we spent about three hours with Leonard and Sumana and Aaron
and I just sitting on my bed sort of manually following hyperlinks between books.
\
\ [laughter]
\
\ "Oh, that book! Oh, well that's a reference
to that book." Aaron was there because Larry Lessig was unveiling his Creative Commons
project in San Francisco. And Lessig had invited Aaron, clad in a T-shirt, probably the youngest
person in the entire hall, up on stage to talk about metadata. It was very awkward.
Aaron was trying to describe why it was useful to be able to represent bibliographic information
in a machine-readable format. \
\ And in fact Aaron was always trying to describe
why it was useful to be able to represent bibliographic information in a machine-readable
format. \
\ [laughter]
\
\ The audience had had a few drinks, I think,
and wasn't as focused as it might have been, and didn't really care to envision this beautiful
feature in which search engines would make it easy for everyone to find works they could
legally reuse and build upon. Which they now can, thanks to Aaron's work.
\
\ But the audience didn't seem to get it. Lessig
was very gracious and he basically said to the crowd, "See, our project is going to succeed
and it's going to succeed because we have this genius creating our infrastructure."
Aaron reminded me how frustrating it is to be curious about things that other people
don't understand. Or that other people regard as trivial or bizarre.
\
\ He wrote a blog post about a theory that one's
degree of nearsightedness is affected by blood oxygen levels, and that it might be possible
to use eye exercise to systematically reduce nearsightedness.
\
\ "Aaron," he wrote, "was already experimenting
on himself to see if it would work, and he said he wished he could meet a girl who wouldn't
laugh at this project." Later, Aaron met Seth Roberts, a researcher who advocates self-experimentation
as a way of generating potentially-useful wild ideas about health.
\
\ Roberts and Aaron got along extremely well.
I think that Roberts, like many other people, felt that Aaron naturally generated potentially
useful wild ideas about absolutely everything. I visited Aaron in his dorm at Stanford a
few years later. I was thrilled that he had the opportunity to study at such a great university.
\
\ But Aaron was alienated from Stanford. He
had few friends, and the students around him weren't curious about the things he was curious
about. This wasn't the way his Stanford adventure was supposed to pan out. I helped him pack
for his flight to Boston for his interview with Paul Graham, who was starting a fund
to invest in young people just like Aaron. \
\ It want well. Aaron dropped out of Stanford
and moved to Boston. In 2006, just after Cond\'e9 Nast acquired reddit and just before they
fired Aaron, Aaron and I were at a hacker conference together in Berlin. To Larry Lessig's
chagrin, Aaron and Lessig had, at that time, fallen out of touch. Perhaps neither of them
were deeply involved in the day-to-day work of Creative Commons, which had brought them
together. \
\ Aaron had gone off to work in the startup
world while simultaneously deepening his study of left-wind politics, macroeconomics, and
sociology. Lessig and Aaron were both planning to tell America, as matter of some urgency,
what had gone wrong with the American project, but they had slightly different diagnoses.
\
\ Our friend and I took Aaron out to Wannsee,
where Lessig was spending a year at the American Academy in Berlin. Lessig looked extraordinarily
proud to see Aaron. Their meeting had, for me, the sense of an extraordinarily poignant
reunion, as if they hadn't seen each other in 20 years. Of course they had actually seen
each other a few months before. \
\ But my friend and I left the two of them alone
for an hour or so, and I remember as we walked away, seeing Lessig and Aaron leaning a wall
at the Wannsee train station, talking animatedly to each other. It reminded me of the scene
at the climax of the German film "Goodbye Lenin!" where we can see but not hear the
actors talking about incredibly urgent matters, and we have to imagine for ourselves what
they must be saying to each other. \
\ And I thought, Lessig is so proud-his prot\'e9g\'e9
is all grown up and he's come back to show his respect for his teacher. Aaron was a free
speech absolutist's, free speech absolutist, an idealist's idealist, an activist's activist,
and, I must say, a libertarian socialist's libertarian socialist.
\
\ [laughter]
\
\ His credo was that bits are not a bug, that
come hell or high water we should celebrate, and not fear, people's ability to communicate
to each other whatever they might choose to communicate, and the infrastructure that supports
that ability. \
\ Aaron came of age a long time after the end
of the cypherpunk movement. But he always seemed like a cypherpunk movement. But he
always seemed like a cypherpunk and lived up to the notion that cypherpunks write code.
\
\ He channeled all sorts of different idealisms
of supposedly bygone eras. You would have thought he was too young to know about those
idealisms. And he did it in a way that mixed intelligence, creativity, and humor. In the
long run, Aaron felt that he was going to fix the world, mainly by clearly explaining
it to people. \
\ [laughter]
\
\ I believe Aaron grew up to be exactly the
person that he would have been most astonished and excited to meet in the line in front of
the Supreme Court. I've never known anyone else like him.}