Reddit Co-Founder Aaron Swartz Has Died

Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who co-founded social news website Reddit and political action committee Demand Progress, committed suicide in New York City on Friday. He was 26. Swartz, who suffered from depression, was facing charges for illegally downloading 4.8 million documents from the academic archive JSTOR. He was beloved in information activist circles and beyond, and already a number of eulogies to him have popped up online — among them pieces by Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, Metafilter founder Matt Haughey, BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow and Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive.