Aaron Swartz was born in Chicago, Illinois before his parents quickly whisked him away to the northern suburb of Highland Park, where he was kept safe from the infectious effects of the lower classes for over a decade.
He was enrolled for a short time at the Creative Children's Academy but then was moved the North Shore Country Day School of Winnetka. After providing the correct answers on a standardized test he was offered a scholarship to the same school for high school, which he reluctantly accepted but only for a year.
After a year of high school he found it intolerable and refused to go back. His family told the state of Illinois that they were "homeschooling" him and he enrolled in a handful of classes at nearby Lake Forest College (Physics, Chemistry, Logic, and Number Theory) but spent most of his time on his own.
After taking a course from Philip Greenspun, he built his first database-backed web site (based around the same idea as what is now called Wikipedia) and entered it in the ArsDigita Prize, where he received runner-up status. As part of his second project, an early web-based news aggregator, he joined the RSS-DEV working group where he co-authored the RSS 1.0 spec.
RSS 1.0 was based around a technology known as RDF, which was being developed as part of the Semantic Web project at the W3C, the standards body for the Web. Aaron learned more and more about RDF, eventually becoming a member of the RDF 1.0 Working Group, where he wrote RFC3870.
In 2002 he read an article about the Creative Commons project then being started by Lawrence Lessig. He wrote Lessig an email saying that he thought RDF would be appropriate for the project and Lessig invited him to become the project's RDF lead.
In subsequent years he became increasingly interested in the law, the major part of Creative Common's work, and then in politics. The summer before college he became especially engaged in radical politics.
On the recommendation of Lessig, who is a professor of law there, he was accepted to Stanford University, where he planned to study sociology. He documented his first year at Stanford extensively on his blog.
Towards the end of the year, he received an email from Paul Graham who suggested he apply for his Summer Founders Program. With Simon Carstensen, he did, and was accepted, and moved to Cambridge for the summer, where they stayed in beautiful Simmons Hall.
Simon left at the end of the summer to return to school in Denmark but Aaron decided to stay in Cambridge and take a leave of absence from Stanford after receiving several funding offers. However, he spent months trying to find a new partner and close down a funding deal, eventually giving up and merging with Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian of Reddit to form Not a Bug.
He was a co-founder of Reddit, whose traffic doubled six times from when he joined in October 2005 to when it was purchased by Condé Nast in October 2006.
He left in early 2007 to work full-time as a member of the Long-Term Planning Committee for the Human Race (LTPCHR).
originally written July 18, 2006