Everything ever written about Aaron and everything Aaron ever wrote are part of one continuous humming noise that no one can hear. The difficulties Aaron lived need to be judged or diagnosed or both. There is neither redemption nor responsibility, but guilt and symptoms of a larger social or spiritual sickness.

I've spent a large portion of my life blaming everyone including Aaron for everything and looking for heroes who would be able to make good on any of what seemed reasonable in his promises. In considering the worth of all these hours of reflections, I can't say I have changed my opinions but I have changed.

What has been written about Aaron's life and accomplishments, let it suffice. The meta text is all now. Not "who was he?", but "what do we think of him?". This is what he wanted, and possibly because it concerns him, he was basically wrong, and this conversation is mostly unhelpful. I propose to ask "what do we think of what we think of him?".

Those who could never see the value in information and knowledge have their knives out for a largely harmless and innocent man, while those who think hacking JSTOR would have unleashed a new age of enlightenment have yet to become cynical and stupid. His friends and family have largely avoided these debates and tried to elevate his achievements and explain his incongruities with compassion and grace, without taking sides, either out of fear of further government overreach or out of a sense that no one can speak to Aaron's entire belief set, and whether it was or would have been coherent and effective.

As much as he held strong opinions on the subjects, he was trying to open a conversation about data, privacy, freedom of information etc., and he encountered a lot of people who realized that that conversation has extremely negative implications for data-driven business models, whether those were content publication models or user data ad-tech models. The corporate-academe was never willing to discuss any of it openly or honestly and was never going to leap to his defense as he might have thought at the time, as a socially-underdeveloped young man.

He probably got it too late that corporate academics are not conservative so much as cowardly, not so much concerned as paranoid, not unaware but purposefully ignorant. And he certainly understood, too late, that the government is these things to an entirely incomprehensible degree. Whatever the personal motivations or ideologies of whichever prosecutor threw the book at Aaron, "the government" wanted him punished.

Ultimately information is the scariest possible thing for any government, and Aaron had spent too much of his life knocking on the doors of the most closed-rank, insular and self-protecting people on earth, demanding a better public understanding of and regulation of data. He did this at a time when NSA et al. were harvesting unprecedented volumes of personal data and while trillions of private-side investment dollars were being spent on doing the same with no accountability.

The hero-thief debate, and the autist-scumbag debate are for kids and morons like the New Yorker. Viz the fact he struggled socially---and to such an extent!--- is a "dark-side", warping his personality traits, his social and personal disorders, and his policy recommendations into a nice big meaningless pile.

As another commenter here noted, like anyone with a soul he was a complex person.