I was going to post something else here, about time and travel. But all I really want to say now is that our world is less bright without Aaron Swartz in it. He helped make RSS, Markdown, Creative Commons, OpenLibrary, and Reddit. He did critical work in the open access world. He was extraordinarily generous with his time, which turned out to be heartbreakingly short.

He was a maker and an activist. He helped stop SOPA and founded Demand Progress and illustrated so clearly that change in the world is about more than shouting on the internet.

Rick Perlstein explains a few of the ways in which Aaron strung together our web:

smart, dedicated people like him worked very hard, often with no thought of personal profit or gain, making ours a world of useful data, making data useful, making it possible to have a record of the world as it goes by, making the world more meaningful by making data more human and shapable and direction-ful

There’s so much more, but this isn’t a list. I have no personal remembrances; we never met. The world was better with him in it. There is so much left to be done.

This post was originally published at the Pastry Box Project.