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3,923 words · no email, no account
No. 016 · Movements · Dissidents & Whistleblowers
The Download
a biography of Aaron Hillel Swartz
What the book is
At fourteen, he helped draft the specification that would shape how the open web syndicates itself. At twenty-six, he was facing thirty-five years in federal prison for downloading academic journals from a closet at MIT.
Between those two facts lies the life of Aaron Swartz: prodigy, programmer, reluctant millionaire, organizer, and the closest thing the early internet produced to a moral conscience. Yonatan Barzel traces Swartz's path from a Highland Park bedroom to the founding of Reddit, from the salons of Lawrence Lessig to the floor of Congress during the SOPA fight, from the Internet Archive to the Cambridge wiring closet that would end everything.
Drawing on Swartz's own prolific writing — the blog posts, the reading lists, the unfinished manuscripts — and on conversations with the family, lovers, lawyers, and fellow travelers who knew him, Levin resists the temptation to canonize. What emerges instead is a portrait of a young man who believed, with uncomfortable literalness, that information wanted to be free, and who could not finally reconcile the world he wanted with the one prosecuting him.
The Download is a biography, but it is also an argument about the cost of conviction in an age of surveillance, and about what a country chooses to do with its difficult children.
At a glance
- Subject
- Aaron Hillel Swartz
- Shelf
- Movements · Dissidents & Whistleblowers
- Written by
- Yonatan Barzel
- Chapters
- 18 across 193 pages
- Narrated by
- Eric Whitfield
- Editions
- Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Contents · 18 chapters
- 01The Boy Who Read EverythingRead free
- 02The Spec4,352 words
- 03The Commons4,042 words
- 04The Dropout4,861 words
- 05The Front Page3,013 words
- 06The Machine3,836 words
- 07Information Wants to Be Free3,050 words
- 08Demand Progress3,390 words
- 09The JSTOR Download2,307 words
- 10The Arrest2,339 words
- 11Carmen Ortiz2,888 words
- 12The Plea Bargain2,874 words
- 13The Legal Fight2,622 words
- 14The Friends Who Tried3,203 words
- 15January 11, 20132,857 words
- 16The Funeral2,272 words
- 17Aaron's Law3,486 words
- 18The Legacy4,150 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 193 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- Hardcover · $24.99
- 6 × 9 in · 193 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-019-5 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Eric Whitfield
ISBN 979-8-90623-002-7
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Download about?
Aaron Hillel Swartz. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Download — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,923 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 193 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
The writer
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