I met Aaron in 2001, when Aaron was I guess fourteen. I was the Silicon Valley
correspondent for the Sunday Times, and I wrote the same article as many others
have written about Aaron's status as a young prodigy in the hallowed halls of
the world wide web consortium. The editor titled it "teenager in a million",
which, as is ever the case with editors, was to miss the point.

The point was, Aaron's age didn't matter. While mildly surprised at the
discovery, his peers at the W3C were not scandalised, or terrified or reached
for a rule book when they discovered that a key developer of the open web was
attending high school. They welcomed him. I strongly suspect that they were
delighted that he surprised them. An institution is not truly open until
somebody you don't imagine even exists walks through its door.

He told me then "I was worried about revealing my age and did my best to keep
it a secret. Now, I let my words speak for themselves."

So many words: some written in rhetoric for Congress, some written for
computers in Python, all of it in plain text, for anyone to read. 

And as if could not read enough words in times, his programs read and scraped
and parsed the rest. 

He loved beautiful code. The only time I think I really pained him was when I
said some program he'd written was unreadable. It turned out that it wasn't his
code at all -- it was code his code had written. And yet it still hurt I think,
He was disappointed, I think, that his child had not inherited his refined
sensibilities.

Words fail me now. Try as hard as Aaron always did, you can't encode his
experiences in words, his moral compass in words, all those connections he made
in a whole world's web of RDF triplets.

I give you here the look of Aaron's face when he played with my daughter Ada,
Even at 26 he showed a childish delight then that most of us lose at ten. I
can't tell you how much he hurt me when he totally destroyed my argument in
favour of Searle's Chinese Room, that Christmas, and no I will not forget
Aaron. Or how much pleasure and ease there was to forgive and be forgiven by
Aaron. No archive can hold those moments.

But if I cannot share with you the code that was Aaron, I can tell you the code
that makes more Aarons. 

Aaron became Aaron because of his unfettered access to knowledge. Aaron had the
support of a loving family, who let him fly to meetings, who gave him a
computer. Aaron had the privileges a young middle class man who lived in United
States of America gets just by existing. But even so, the gates of knowledge
had only just then, in that decade, swung wide enough for him to join those
mailing lists, and let him find and meet and learn from the web's own creators.

And if anything bound together all of Aaron's crusades, it was his belief that
he was not alone, or exceptional or unique, and that there was more than just
him out there with his curiousity and talent. 

People say suppose you did free academic knowledge for everyone to read, and
you put all the law online to read, what tiny fraction would really care -- who
would really read it, who cannot read it now? 

They forget. They forget that if Aaron was a teenager in a million, that soon,
very soon, when we have connected seven billion people to each other in the
great work we strive to build, then there will be 1.2 billion teenagers
exploring our world.

Even if my editor was right with his odds, which he never was, there's 1200
Aarons among them.

There is no closed archive, no carefully guarded ivory tower that can seat
billions. But the open society, the open and world wide web, the free culture
that Aaron worked for is for them all. And if we give them what they need, give
them the knowledge to feed their curiousity, and the care that we must never
forget they need, that army of Aarons will surprise us all.

Aaron told me back in 2001
"One of the things the web teaches us is that everything is connected
(hyperlinks) and we all should work together (standards). Too often school
teaches us that everything is separate and that we should all work alone."

It is never to soon to begin working with the rest of the world. We need to
stay together, and never ever leave our friends too alone.

    A boy's will is the wind's will
    And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
