Reviewing The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

By Tina L. Vu

04/19/2020

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz a documentary about a 26 year old boy named Aaron Swartz. The documentary starts off with the news about the boy’s death at the age of 26 which shocked me. Even before I learned anything about this name, I first knew that he died at a very young age of 26. As I continued on into the documentary I learned about his charges, and then his life from a young age and his passion for programming as he grew up. At 12 year old he made a program that allowed people to share information and edit it, like wiki but before wiki came out, which was really mind blowing to me. Later he joined RSS and helped work on it, he was one of the people that drafted RSS, but he never joined their face-to-face meetings. The workers asked him about, and that was when they learned that their co-worker had just turned 14 years old! Later in life he started questioning about how students were taught which led him down the lanes of questions about schools, the society that built the school, the government, and social society. This was when he was working on copyrights. He went to talk to Harvard’s law professor who was challenging copyright laws at the supreme court, flew to Washington to listen to the hearing, and helped program the Creative Common License so that machines could process it! Throughout the documentary I just kept getting more and more shocked and amazed to see how such a young boy could do so many amazing and impactful things in his life. Many of these programs that he worked on and gave ideas to were huge applications that greatly impacts life. I, for one, as I can assume many other students, also use RSS often for school work, and CC is also another important database I use often so I just couldn’t imagine life without it.