82 lines
4.2 KiB
Text
82 lines
4.2 KiB
Text
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I met Aaron in 2001, when Aaron was I guess fourteen. I was the Silicon Valley
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correspondent for the Sunday Times, and I wrote the same article as many others
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have written about Aaron's status as a young prodigy in the hallowed halls of
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the world wide web consortium. The editor titled it "teenager in a million",
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which, as is ever the case with editors, was to miss the point.
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The point was, Aaron's age didn't matter. While mildly surprised at the
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discovery, his peers at the W3C were not scandalised, or terrified or reached
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for a rule book when they discovered that a key developer of the open web was
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attending high school. They welcomed him. I strongly suspect that they were
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delighted that he surprised them. An institution is not truly open until
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somebody you don't imagine even exists walks through its door.
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He told me then "I was worried about revealing my age and did my best to keep
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it a secret. Now, I let my words speak for themselves."
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So many words: some written in rhetoric for Congress, some written for
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computers in Python, all of it in plain text, for anyone to read.
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And as if could not read enough words in times, his programs read and scraped
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and parsed the rest.
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He loved beautiful code. The only time I think I really pained him was when I
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said some program he'd written was unreadable. It turned out that it wasn't his
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code at all -- it was code his code had written. And yet it still hurt I think,
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He was disappointed, I think, that his child had not inherited his refined
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sensibilities.
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Words fail me now. Try as hard as Aaron always did, you can't encode his
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experiences in words, his moral compass in words, all those connections he made
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in a whole world's web of RDF triplets.
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I give you here the look of Aaron's face when he played with my daughter Ada,
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Even at 26 he showed a childish delight then that most of us lose at ten. I
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can't tell you how much he hurt me when he totally destroyed my argument in
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favour of Searle's Chinese Room, that Christmas, and no I will not forget
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Aaron. Or how much pleasure and ease there was to forgive and be forgiven by
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Aaron. No archive can hold those moments.
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But if I cannot share with you the code that was Aaron, I can tell you the code
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that makes more Aarons.
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Aaron became Aaron because of his unfettered access to knowledge. Aaron had the
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support of a loving family, who let him fly to meetings, who gave him a
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computer. Aaron had the privileges a young middle class man who lived in United
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States of America gets just by existing. But even so, the gates of knowledge
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had only just then, in that decade, swung wide enough for him to join those
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mailing lists, and let him find and meet and learn from the web's own creators.
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And if anything bound together all of Aaron's crusades, it was his belief that
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he was not alone, or exceptional or unique, and that there was more than just
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him out there with his curiousity and talent.
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People say suppose you did free academic knowledge for everyone to read, and
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you put all the law online to read, what tiny fraction would really care -- who
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would really read it, who cannot read it now?
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They forget. They forget that if Aaron was a teenager in a million, that soon,
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very soon, when we have connected seven billion people to each other in the
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great work we strive to build, then there will be 1.2 billion teenagers
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exploring our world.
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Even if my editor was right with his odds, which he never was, there's 1200
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Aarons among them.
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There is no closed archive, no carefully guarded ivory tower that can seat
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billions. But the open society, the open and world wide web, the free culture
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that Aaron worked for is for them all. And if we give them what they need, give
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them the knowledge to feed their curiousity, and the care that we must never
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forget they need, that army of Aarons will surprise us all.
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Aaron told me back in 2001
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"One of the things the web teaches us is that everything is connected
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(hyperlinks) and we all should work together (standards). Too often school
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teaches us that everything is separate and that we should all work alone."
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It is never to soon to begin working with the rest of the world. We need to
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stay together, and never ever leave our friends too alone.
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A boy's will is the wind's will
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And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.
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