Mourning for a hacktivist: grieving the death of Aaron Swartz on a digital memorial

Abstract

This study examines the discursive and semantic patterns underpinning the collective mourning activity on the digital memorial for Aaron Swartz (hacker/software developer/activist). More specifically, it questions if and how online mourning for hacktivists might result in a cultural reconfiguration of cyberspace through the grassroots and collective redefinition of the limits of users’ agency. To this end, all the comments present on Swartz’s digital memorial are collected, coded and, subsequently, analysed to detect their narrative and semantic structures. The results of this linguistic analysis are interpreted through a topological information model. Accordingly, the study discusses (1) the hero-making processes underlying online mourning for hacktivists and (2) the related redefinition of the Internet as the domain of a value-based community of users.

Keywords

Aaron Swartz digital artefact digital topology Hacktivism hero making online mourning online territorialization topological object

Introduction: stealing fire from the Gods of the information age

In Brooklyn (2013), the night between 10 and 11 January, Aaron Swartz, a brilliant hacker and political activist, commits suicide in his apartment. A few days before, he was arrested by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police for using his guest account to automatically download thousands of academic articles from Journal Storage (JSTOR) with the intention of releasing them on online open-access platforms. Charged by federal prosecutors with two felony counts and 11 different violations, he refused a plea bargain which would have allowed him to serve a 6-month term in a federal prison instead of the 35 years of imprisonment and US$1 million fine required by law. All charges were dismissed after his death.

Aaron Swartz was a research fellow at Harvard University and a guest scholar at MIT. A major contributor to the development of Markdown, RFC 3870, Tor2web, web.py, Creative Commons, Wikipedia and Rich Site Summary (RSS), he became known to a wider public for being one of the minds behind popular political advocacy websites, such as Reddit, Watchdog.net and Demanding Progress. In addition, he took part in various social movements against governmental censorship becoming, in 2012, one of the key leaders of the successful anti-Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) campaign. At the time of his death, he was 26 years old.

Aaron’s suicide provoked a wide range of reactions. From anonymous hacker-collective to academic scholars, different communities honoured his death through public commemorations, memorial gatherings and even hacker attacks. An online petition to the White House publicly demanded the removal of the District Attorney in charge of Aaron’s case, and academics from all around the world were invited to release their articles for free on a dedicated website (PDF tribute). In recognition of his social and political commitment, Aaron’s partner and family created a memorial website, titled Remember Aaron Swartz (rememberaaronsw.com – hereafter RASW), which was first made publicly accessible on 12 January 2013 just 1 day after his death.

The case of Aaron Swartz

The promptness, effectiveness and large variety of grassroots actions undertaken to honour the memory of Aaron Swartz, as well as the particular coverage this event received from the mass media, highlighted the progressive popularization of an anti-establishment attitude which integrates independent software development, political activism and superhero narratives. In explicit opposition to the legal system, its definitions and its values, single users and communities expressed through various means an alternative interpretation of the events which, with prudence, was also progressively embraced by most of the mass media. For example, the New York Times did not hesitate to define Aaron Swartz as a ‘data crusader’, while The Guardian managed to sneak in the word ‘martyr’ next to ‘hacker’ and ‘genius’. The popularization, or even vernacularization (Bell and Taylor, 2016; Chouliaraki, 2010), of the debate around issues such as Internet freedom and free information is somehow epitomized by the fast grassroots development of an anti-institutional and folk-tale-like rhetoric within public opinion. Indeed, the almost immediate creation of a counter-narrative, as well as its massive circulation on social networks and eventual adoption by mass media, highlights the quick rise of a new sensibility towards the Internet, its users and its narratives.

From this point onwards, this article examines the nature of mourning on RASW as a vernacular and collective recreation of a heroic imagery. More specifically, it enquiries if and how the result of digital memorial practices (i.e. comments and pictures) might be regarded as the self-descriptive effort of a scattered transnational community to reaffirm and renegotiate its values and worldview by converging on a specific network node. Shedding light on these digital mourning practices will enable a better understanding of the ways Internet users collectively renegotiate the boundaries of their legitimate online activity in relation to the restrictions imposed by established authorities. Accordingly, this study asks the following question: can online mourning for hacktivists redefine the limits of legitimate users’ agency and result in a cultural reconfiguration of cyberspace?

To this end, I will first collect and code all the comments present on RASW and subsequently analyse them to detect their narrative and semantic structures. The results of this in-depth narrative analysis will be subsequently interpreted through the topological information model developed by Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman (1984). This model, designed to account for the life cycle of information within cultural communities and its structural implications, will allow us to understand under which circumstances an online memorial page is redefined by the discursive activity of the users as a topological artefact. Indeed, the public celebration of the legacy of a famous hacktivist gives us the possibility of studying the value negotiation and community-building processes underpinning the development of alternative worldviews in a networked society.

Online mourning: grassroots practices, digital artefacts and memorial design

The presence of the deceased within a society rests on the possibility to produce, conserve and circulate information about them. Accordingly, the modes of their persistence as part of the community depend mostly on available communication technologies and their affordances (Walter, 2015). In this vein, this study adopts an informational approach to the study of mourning and hero-making practices as a means of community building. This approach, which focuses on the negotiation/transmission of cultural values through collectively constructed narratives, originates from the encounter between the study of collective memory (cf. Assmann, 2011; Halbwachs, 1992) and the Semiotics of Culture developed by the Tartu-Moscow school (cf. Lotman, 1984, 1990; Lotman and Uspenskij, 1973).

In the last 20 years, the migration of mourning practices to the digital world has progressively become an object of careful investigation. While some pioneering studies date back to the late 1990s (Geser, 1998; Roberts, 1999; Sofka, 1997), it is with the new millennium that online memorials have attracted the attention of scholars from different disciplines. This renewed and multidisciplinary curiosity towards memorial rituals has resulted, in the course of time, in the production of a vast yet diversified corpus of literature on the subject. While early memorial websites were created and designed by the institutions to work as online sites of mourning, at present, Internet users tend to transform pre-existing webpages into online memorials (DeGroot, 2014; Phillips, 2011). Nonetheless, despite the various levels of intimacy enabled by digital environments (Kjeldskov et al., 2004; Rosewarne, 2016), the distinction between private and public sites of mourning still plays an important role. The significance of this cultural dichotomy is reflected not only by the technological limitations created by websites but also by the different modes of communication adopted by users in relation to different digital architectures. As noted by several scholars (Gibson, 2015; Gibson and Altena, 2014), this kind of grassroots production is aimed not only at commemorating a private loss but, at the same time, also at communicating this personal experience to a wider and mostly unknown audience. Discussing the public dimension of YouTube memorials, Patricia Lange (2013) pointed out that participation in the mourning activity does not necessarily imply personal relationship with the departed or their relatives. The progressive accumulation of public comments under YouTube videos generates a sense of collective mourning which is generally not present on social networks due to the personal and exclusive nature of the relationship each single user had with the deceased.

Reflecting on the grassroots nature of this vast array of online mourning practices, as well as on their power of reshaping the meaning and use of digital architectures, several scholars from the field of Social Computing and Human–Computer Interaction have recently addressed the need to meet the necessities of users through appropriate design. This line of research focused on two main issues. On one hand, some scholars have investigated the possibility to develop digital systems able to deal with the death of users. This includes not only alterations in the users’ profiles and their affordances (Massimi et al., 2011; Meese et al., 2015) but also the need to properly define the limits of the privacy of the deceased (Locasto et al., 2011). On the other hand, the creation of digital spaces designed to host mourning practices has also been investigated. From this perspective, online environments should be able to support the deceased’s loved ones in dealing with the loss (Massimi and Baecker, 2011; Odom et al., 2010). There is then a third and less well-defined line of study which, in a way, integrates and expands the previous two. These seminal researches approach online spaces of mourning as digital artefacts, memorial marks which exist in the digital space (Graham et al., 2015). While memorials created on massive multiplayer online games visually mark a fictional 3D landscape (Gibbs et al., 2012; Haverinen, 2016), memorial pages and websites exist as nodes constructed by the practices of memorialization they are able to catalyse. From this perspective, the design of digital monuments, in both technical and aesthetic terms, define their position, role and durability in the cyberspace (Banks et al., 2012; Moncur and Kirk, 2014).

In this line of research, this study aims at investigating how the collective mourning activity on RASW constructs the topological value of the website as a digital memorial artefact. Drawing on previous studies (Lury et al., 2012; Shields, 2012), this specific form of value is defined by the capacity of an artefact to express a certain cultural topology, that is, to define the structure of a cultural universe and demarcate the limits of human agency within that structure (Lotman and Uspenskij, 1973). Indeed, the digital mourning site under scrutiny distinguishes itself from the ones discussed above in three main aspects. First, it celebrates the life and legacy of a contested activist whose deeds deliberately infringed the law, brought into question the equity of the academic system and publicly challenged established authorities. Second, the memorial was created by his partner, family and friends

to provide a way to share their memories that (1) uses free and open source software wherever possible; (2) licenses its content under the Creative Commons; (3) is open to the technical community to hack on and contribute to; (4) leverages tools that Aaron used and contributed to, like Markdown and RSS.¹

In other words, the website was designed consistently with Aaron’s philosophy and conceived as a tribute to its legacy in both technical and moral terms. In this regard, it should be noted that the webmasters invite other programmers to contribute to the improvement of the site and provide them with the necessary technical details. Third, in this case, the Internet is not only a means to create a shared and global site of mourning but rather the actual environment in which the main activity of the deceased took place. Indeed, as an activist and ‘old-school hacker’, Aaron contributed to the development and improvement of the same digital environment which is now hosting his memorial, an environment he protected and fought for.

Methodology

Starting from these premises, I aim to shed light on the collective process of heroification of Aaron Swartz, as well as on the related creation of a transnational yet ephemeral community through the grassroots expression and reaffirmation of a bottom-up defined set of values.

To this aim, I collected the 328 comments present on the website and conducted a semantic analysis of the website framework. Using software for mixed-method analysis (Dedoose), I coded the comments and organized them in clusters based on the date of publication, geographical origin of the user, designated addressee, relationship to the deceased and social role. None of these data have been obtained through data mining or website statistics, but were considered only if explicitly mentioned in the users’ comment. This choice is motivated by the need to conduct an in-depth discursive analysis which accounts for the identity and community-building processes occurring on the memorial website. Accordingly, the fact of explicitly stating (or not) the above-mentioned information represents an important indicator of the different levels of intimacy expressed by the users (Brubaker et al., 2012; Brubaker et al., 2013).

The coding process was primarily aimed at detecting the different memorial rhetorics adopted by users, the narrative roles they produced and the related renegotiation of a shared set of values which, to various degrees, opposes the official one. As previously stated, particular attention has been given to the different discursive practices of heroification centred on the figure of Aaron Swartz, namely, the euphoric redefinition of his role, his ideas and his struggle and, in broader terms, his activity on and for the Internet. Nevertheless, this iterated and multivoiced process of story-telling does not imply uniquely a progressive redefinition of Aaron’s personal characteristics but also a reorganization of all the other narrative roles. For this reason, my analysis of this digital ‘condolences book’ (Brennan, 2008) was not strictly limited to Aaron-related contents, but included the study of a series of other actors, events and values mentioned by the users.

The results of this in-depth linguistic analysis were organized to account for the semantic and narrative patterns underpinning the comments (Benveniste, 1971; Greimas, 1987; Latour, 1998). Indeed, by tracking the unfolding of the various narrative patterns, this study approaches the process of online heroification as a dynamic, collective and dialogic community-building endeavour. The interpretation and reorganization of the obtained discursive patterns as components of a cultural semiosphere (Ibrus and Torop, 2015; Nöth, 2014) indicated a process of redefinition of the users’ agency and, thus, the elaboration of an alternative cultural topology of the digital environment.

Quantitative description of the content

Users’ activity on RASW was concentrated in the days immediately after Aaron’s death, namely, between 12 and 22 January 2013. Their contributions consisted almost uniquely of written comments (328), and only sporadically pictures or meme-like images were uploaded (12). From a statistical point of view, the users’ activity on the RASW can be represented as follows.

This graph shows the percentage of comments left on the memorial website in the days immediately after Aaron’s death (Figure 1). As we can see, users’ activity is limited to a relatively small period of time and concentrated, in particular, between 13 and 17 January 2013. Indeed, the majority of contents (90.1%) were uploaded in 5 days following Aaron’s suicide. The low number of comments on the first day (12th) and the sudden re-awakening of users’ activity on the seventh day (18th) might be connected to media-related dynamics. In the first case, the news of the opening of a digital memorial had to circulate through social media and that required some time. In the second case, on 18 January 2013, mass media reported the news that a big memorial celebration for Aaron Swartz was scheduled in New York for the next day, indirectly reigniting public attention towards the website. From this point of view, these statistics highlight the problem of durability of online memorials (Hess, 2007), a durability which is not only ontological but also social and cultural. Indeed, unlike traditional monuments which occupy and mark the physical space we inhabit, digital memorials are invisible and therefore easily forgotten. Paradoxically enough, they do not work as reminders but, conversely, they have to be remembered.

Figure 1.

Percentage of comments left on the website (12–23 January 2013).

Another statistic of interest for this study concerns the relationship between the amounts of users who knew Aaron before his death and those who heard about him only after his suicide through different media (Figure 2). As shown by this pie chart, the users were divided into three different categories based on the level of proximity to Aaron expressed in the comments. It revealed that the amount of people who actually knew Aaron before his death and subsequently decided to engage in this digital memorial activity is relatively small (A – 26.6%). The majority of the users either explicitly state that they did not know Aaron before his suicide (B – 34.1%) or do not provide any kind of information about their relationship with the deceased (C – 39.3%). However, crossing these data with the ones concerning the sharing of personal memories on the website, it can be assumed that the large majority of users belonging to the third cluster (C) entertained no personal relationship with Aaron. Indeed, in most cases (84.1%) personal memories are shared by users who intend to explicitly state their exclusive relationship to Aaron (e.g. friends, colleagues, professors and activists). This kind of comment is present uniquely in cluster A. The remaining 15.9 %, split between the other two categories (B/C), is composed of personal memories which have no actual relation to Aaron, but the parallel drawn by the user. This includes, for example, parents who lost their children in similar circumstances or people who experienced suicidal feelings. Accordingly, I conclude that most of the users who contributed to the memorial website had no previous relationship to Aaron but were moved to participate by the intense media activity around his death. The implications of this dynamic will be further explored in the following section.

Figure 2.

Percentage of users who knew Aaron before and after his death.

The last diagram represents the different audiences addressed by users. Four main addressees have been identified: Aaron, Aaron’s family, Aaron and his family and the community. The semiotic and discursive processes underpinning the collective definition of this community, which is by far the most addressed audience (74.9%), will be thoroughly discussed in the following section. Indeed, while the actual existence of such a community is implicitly implied by the users’ communication strategies (e.g. ‘a part of him will live on in all of us’ or ‘we are in need of people like him’), its demarcation in terms of values and objectives is a matter of negotiation. As for the other addressees, Aaron’s partner and family (8.4%) are usually addressed by users who want to express their condolences in a more formal style (e.g. ‘be proud of your son’s great achievements’ or ‘my deepest condolences to Aaron’s family and friends’). In a limited number of cases (1.5%), Aaron is also mentioned, with his family, among the recipients of the communication. This stylistic variation does not influence the discursive structure of the comments, which adheres to a traditional funereal rhetoric. Conversely, when Aaron is the only addressee (15.2%), the whole communication is redefined to express a face-to-face dialogue which, due to its ‘private’ dimension, is usually more informal and characterized by a higher emotional level (e.g. ‘I am forever grateful to you’ or ‘move on proudly brother’). Interestingly, this rhetorical re-enactment of a direct communication with the deceased is not common among users who actually entertained a personal relationship with Aaron during his life (6.25%), but rather among those who never heard of him before his death (19.96%; Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Audiences addressed by users.

Heroes, enemies and values: practices of enunciation on a digital grave

Aaron’s digital memorial

Before moving to the core of the analysis, it is important to briefly describe the structure and layout of the digital memorial in question. Indeed, the digital architecture of this kind of website and the rhetoric visually expressed by their user interface frames, a priori, the users’ production within a well-defined semantic framework; they set the tone of the discussion. The RASW has a simple structure. It is composed of a main memorial page where the comments are displayed, two accessory pages (‘contribute code’ and ‘about this site’), another memorial section created 1 year later for the anniversary of Aaron’s death and a series of buttons to share the website on social networks. The website’s layout is completely inert and sober. With the exception of the videos of the memorial services for Aaron, no animations or other kinds of visual content are present.

The main section of the website is its home page. When users access the website, they find themselves directly in front of the memorial which is constituted by a scroll page where various comments are displayed. The comments are not all simultaneously available but they progressively fade in, filling the empty space, as the user scrolls down the page. From a visual and discursive point of view, such organization of the contents conveys two different meanings. First, the collective nature of the memorial: the whole page is composed of users’ messages. The contribution of Aaron’s family and partner is limited to two official statements. Both these texts are located on the left side of the page, and the only element which marks their diversity is a slightly different background colour. Through this particular disposition, users’ contributions visually become the ‘bricks’ of Aaron’s memorial. A visitor who accesses the website will not find any information or pictures of Aaron, but will rather face a multiplicity of voices.

On a second level, the fading-in of comments in reaction to the scrolling activity of the user reflects a specific communication strategy aimed at presenting the online mourning as an ongoing process. Indeed, the progressive appearance of the various contributions can be considered a process of enunciation, that is, the act of producing an utterance, of initiating a communication here and now (Nöth, 1995). In opposition to the general static structure of the webpage, these contents fade in re-enacting, in a visual way, the more traditional vocal mourning practice. It is interesting to note that the discursive structure of most of the comments resembles in many ways the typical configuration of a verbal, yet formal, communication (e.g. ‘Aaron, you WILL BE remembered …’ or ‘Still, let us remember’). It could be said that the website’s enunciation strategy affects the users’ production. Before writing a comment, each user has gone through the experience of visiting the website, and this is an integral part of the commenter’s experience. The discursive structures expressed by both layout and comments are interiorized by users and, to various degrees, reflected in their writing.

This structure can in part explain the relatively high consistency of the comments in terms of style and format. While the website’s layout works as a general framework, the reiteration of defined discursive configurations in the comments establishes a stylistic pattern. This website/user interaction generates a ripple effect which supports the community-building process under analysis by progressively establishing a shared form of expression. It constitutes a set of enunciative practices which, by relying on each other, erect Aaron’s memorial on what Bruno Latour (1998) defined as the ‘paradox of enunciation’: the making present of what is actually absent.

Renegotiation of the value of values in digital mourning practices

The mourning activity on the RASW is characterized by the repetition, in different ways, of a specific narrative configuration which opposes two main actors: Aaron and the legal system. Even if this opposition is suggested by Aaron’s family, as they openly state that his death is ‘the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach’, its meaning is articulated and expanded by users far beyond its immediate narrative function.² To better understand how the re-narration of this conflict results in a process of heroification and community building, I will first detect the above-mentioned values as they are expressed in the texts and subsequently reorganize them to shed light on the semantic structure underpinning their opposition.

The positive values shared and embraced by the emerging community are usually expressed by users in relation to two main narrative components: Aaron and Aaron’s objectives. In the first case, these values are expressed as attributes of Aaron. He was ‘selfless and empathic’, ‘incredibly gifted, as well as brave’, ‘a brilliant humanitarian’, just to mention a few. However, often the celebration of Aaron’s virtues, evidently hyperbolic, goes beyond the mere enumeration of his mostly imagined characteristics (only 26.6% actually knew him). In some cases, the values associated with Aaron are articulated according to more complex narrative structures:

His interest and support helped me to recover my own interest in justice issues and for that I will remain grateful. (Ruparell, 14 January 2013)

Blazing across the dark sky of ordinary people, broken systems, a shining force for good, a maker of great things. (Berners-Lee, 14 January 2013)

Dozens, hundreds, thousands changed in ways small and large by his openness, passion, generosity and incredible brilliance (Wilson, 14 January 2013).

This limited yet representative sample of comments (mine emphasis) presents the structural traits of a typical cultural process of heroification: first users bestow a certain set of values on the hero and then, through this process of communal externalization, they re-acquire them as collective. This double movement is far from irrelevant. Indeed, it is only through this process of embodiment that the values can actually move from a personal to a communal domain, thus, being recognized as a common ground of interaction. Moreover, it is through this process that a certain narrative actor can become a hero. The social expulsion of this subject from the realm of normality and its subsequent reincorporation as an idealized entity ‘blazing across the dark sky of ordinary people’ is what allows him to become an agent of cultural homogenization. However, while the values he embodies work as a general semantic framework, the value of these values, that is, their usefulness for the community, is defined and expressed through the objectives, deeds and achievements of the hero. The hero’s strong commitment to his cause is a recurrent theme in most of the comments:

I hope that you are comforted by the fact that he did so much towards democratizing and communicating paths towards greater knowledge, and that he is an inspiration to many, myself included. (Fowler, 18 January 2013)

His strength and courage to support freedom even against the most powerful enemies have enlightened me. (Cacheiro, 15 January 2013)

I was introduced to Aaron’s dream. I instantly connected with him and his fight to protect freedoms that help shape the fabric of human interaction and learning. (Norris, 16 January 2013)

The samples reported above are far from exhaustive. However, even in these few examples, we can see how the celebration of Aaron’s activity as a hacker and political activist is usually related to more general values (in bold). In heroic narratives, values and objectives are tightly interconnected but have different functions: the first compose an abstract semantic framework, while the second represent its actualization, the narrativization of its efficacy. Indeed, these comments are also characterized by another recurrent discursive pattern: the enunciators state explicitly their loyalty to the cause. The action of the hero actualizes (and at the same time establishes) a whole system of values which can be adopted by his followers. This process is narratized by the same users as a radical change: they are ‘comforted’, ‘enlightened’, and ‘inspired’. In other words, from their perspective Aaron traced the path towards a better future, a path for those willing to accept his legacy.

Aaron’s enemies: all that he was not

The negotiation of a shared set of values as a result of the heroification of Aaron is one of the main components of the community-building process in question. As shown above, through this digital memorial practice users not only redefine Aaron and his actions but also eventually place themselves within this new framework. In general terms, the attributes ascribed to Aaron concern mostly his intelligence, his humanitarian spirit and his moral integrity. To quote a comment, he was ‘a true renaissance man’ (Woodhull). Aaron, according to users’ collective narrative, put his virtues at the service of the whole of humanity by fighting for the achievement of specific objectives: freedom of knowledge, freedom of speech, freedom of information or, as many Internet activists call it, freedom to connect (F2C).

However, no hero can exist without a worthy opponent. The definition of this opposite yet complementary actor is necessary to the working of a heroic narrative, for only through the imbalanced fight against an oppressive force can a subject reaffirm the importance of certain values while expressing his skills to the highest degree. Interestingly enough, the actual outcome of the fight is not relevant: what characterizes a heroic action is its absolute dimension. Users address Aaron’s opponent in different ways:

Shame on the DoJ who ironically were motivated by all that you [Aaron] were not: greed, fame, ambition and ruthlessness. (Dhinsa, 18 January 2013)

The venality and stupid orthodoxy of our justice system […] is shameful. (Swarts, 18 January 2013)

And, just like other great humans before him, he became a threat to those that control the system and want to control the internet. (Baysinger, 15 January 2013)

It is apparent from these few examples that even if the actual identity of the opponent varies, two main narrative dynamics are recurrent and recognizable: the opponent is defined in relation to Aaron’s attributes and usually accused of being responsible for his death. In terms of values, the process of polarization between Aaron and his opponents is particularly clear in the first comment: they ‘were motivated by all that you were not’. Indeed, regardless of the actual identity of this anti-subject, its definition does not change much. It is ‘over-zealous’, ‘bullying’, ‘hideous’, ‘inhumane’, ‘unjust’ and so on. These attributes and many more, expressed in various ways, are articulated through the development of a polar opposition between Aaron and the US legal system. Such opposition, however, relies on the subversion of an existing socially defined sematic category: crime VS justice. This semantic inversion highlights the strong polemic and even counter-cultural intention of the mourning activity: the legal system is presented as unjust while Aaron, the ‘criminal’, becomes the herald of a new idea of justice.

This kind of inversion is, nevertheless, far from unprecedented. Indeed, it is typical of social narratives describing the transition from a certain power and moral centre to another; they depict periods of instability during which rising leaders challenge the established authority, either successfully or not. Users’ cultural familiarity with this structure is what allows them to develop, in a short time and without any previous contact, a composite yet shared and highly consistent redefinition of Aaron’s life, struggle and death. Interestingly, in this narrative it is the US judicial system which plays the role of the villain. Corporations such as JSTOR and their copyright systems, actual target of Aaron’s operation, are barely mentioned in the comments (2.7%). This might be due to the fact that the users mourners perceived these corporations as non-worthy opponents for their hero. Accordingly, even when explicitly mentioned, these companies are narratized as minor agents, minions, of a much more powerful anti-hero.

In this collective process of heroification, there is, however, an element which cannot be ignored but is constantly out of place: Aaron committed suicide. The perceived problematic nature of this event is stressed by the fact that, paradoxically, his suicide is explicitly addressed only in 6 comments out of 328. In what appears to be a form of denial, users prefer to narratize the action of an external force on Aaron rather than attributing his death to his own will. When not openly accusing the opponents of murder, users state that he has been ‘driven to the edge’ (Lessig), ‘pushed to destroy the peace in his life’ (Gracian) and ‘pushed emotionally over the edge’ (Silva). In their effort to make sense of what is, after all, a personal tragedy, they almost completely ignore (and actively reject) the idea that he is responsible for his own death. In addition, often users express a sentiment of guilt:

This kid’s tragic case underscores our nation’s inability to protect one of our brightest from destructive bureaucratic interventions. (Cristi, 18 January 2013)

We all failed you and I am deeply sorry for that we should have stood shoulder to shoulder with you and helped bear the terrible burden that was placed upon you. (Dhinsa, 18 January 2013)

Everything he did, he did it for us. Sadly, we did not do enough for him. (Alamin, 15 January 2013)

Ultimately, the users’ mourning activity redefines the suicide of Aaron as a matter of public responsibility. On one hand, institutional powers drove him to the edge and, on the other, the community failed to protect him. Through this process not only the hero remains spotless but also the forming community finds a way to position itself within the narrative, even if in negative terms: we failed to help him, but we will carry his legacy.

The hero, the world and the Internet

Digital graves for digital heroes

At the end of any qualitative analysis, it is appropriate to step back and observe the case study as a whole. The narrative dynamics detected and systematized in the previous section are, in fact, structural components of a single grassroots mourning activity which, beyond its inner variances, exists as a unity. With a few exceptions, written communication is absolutely dominant and addresses either a generic audience, usually evoked through the use of the pronoun ‘we’, or Aaron and his family. On this digital memorial, users do not try to express their creativity and invent new forms of mourning but rather adopt a classic and familiar funeral rhetoric: they behave as if they were gathering around Aaron’s grave. Indeed, as previously stated, this website was created consistently with Aaron’s philosophy and conceived as a tribute to his legacy in both technical and moral terms. This digital artefact not only commemorates Aaron but is, in its nature, an element which inhabits cyberspace in a ‘proper’ way, a way which expresses in itself the set of values previously analysed in relation to the figure of Aaron.

By comparing this commemorative website and the social interactions taking place in it with more traditional memorial dynamics and artefacts, we notice some interesting structural similarities and differences. In most Western cultures, gravestones play a central role in the commemoration of the deceased; they are physical markers situated in well-defined places which report the name and the dates of birth and death. All these elements (the stone, the place and the name) are bound together by a tight symbolic relationship with the body of the deceased whose physical existence they symbolise and replace. The resulting symbolic artefact catalyses a series of different meanings. First of all, it expresses the fact that a certain member of the community was connected to a specific place. In the Western tradition, gravestones are symbolic knots which link a community to a certain space through the entombment of a deceased member. Accordingly, graveyards, conceived as a system of graves, become the articulation of the past of an entire community in a specific territory (Assmann, 2011; Halbwachs, 1992). On a second level, gravestones allow the re-actualization of social memory: the living members of the community gather around the grave to mourn and commemorate their loss. This memorial activity generates a self-descriptive social discourse which, ultimately, re-establishes the community and reaffirms its values (cf. Walter, 2015; Walter et al., 2012).

Interestingly enough, in a digital memorial most of these elements are not present: no gravestone, no place, no physical remains and, in social terms, not even a pre-existing community. Nevertheless, despite the absence of these elements, Aaron’s digital memorial is able to host collective memorial performances. This is possible because users express and constantly recreate through their comments the necessary system of structural positions. As shown in the previous paragraph, through their enunciation activity users deploy entire sets of narrative roles (e.g. we, the MIT and Aaron), establish the relationships among them (e.g. cultural belonging, conflicts and objectives) and eventually place themselves in this system. Interestingly enough, the physical presence of Aaron or other members of the community seems not to be perceived as necessary by users.

From this perspective, RASW works as both a digital gravestone and a support for expression: users gather on it and around it, they learn about each other’s existence, they publicly express shared values and grief and, in this process, narratize themselves as a group. Users perform their eulogies in front of an absent community, but whose existence is strongly evoked. Indeed, pronouns such as ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’ are used to address either the Enunciator or the Enunciatee (or both) in 79.5 % of the comments. The strong recurrence of these dialogic structures brings the community into existence not only as an expressed value-based collective but also, first and foremost, as a fundamental participant in the communication (Benveniste, 1971).

He is the hero of open world

While the gravestone, the deceased and the community are structurally evoked through the website layout and the dialogic dynamics it displays, the location of this memorial remains ambiguous. Indeed, our case study presents an interesting peculiarity: the Internet is not only a technical means which allows the creation of global sites of mourning but also the actual environment in which Aaron’s main endeavours took place. The Internet has been impacted by his action in many different ways. It has been improved, defended against ‘invaders’, made more accessible or, in other words, more habitable. Aaron’s efforts were explicitly aimed at empowering users through the design of new modes of living on the Internet. Aaron’s values are reflected in his creations and, as previously noted, the same memorial website has been constructed to fit his vision. This peculiar digital artefact is designed to occupy and at the same time to produce a digital space of a different nature: a piece of cyberspace regulated by different rules.

According to Lotman and Uspenskij (1973), cultural systems produce two basic kinds of texts: the ones which define the structure of the universe and the ones which define the limits of human agency within that structure. These texts express the basic topology of the cultural space inhabited by the community or, in other words, its self-perception. Nevertheless, one of the main characteristics of the hero is to cross the boundaries. In order to become a vehicle of social change, the hero’s action has to exceed the cultural limits imposed upon human agency, thus, challenging the established authority, and subsequently, being re-absorbed by the community through memorial productions and performances. From this perspective, the rhetoric adopted by users in addressing the global dimension of the Internet reveals some interesting common traits:

I had some understanding of the fact that he was a hero of the Internet world. (S, 13 January 2013)

Earth was not a place for a true hero like you. (Darwish, 15 January 2013)

We have something in common which unites us – THE INTERNET. We belong here. This is our world where boundaries are torn apart. (Vignesh, 21 January 2013)

We, the world misses you. (Pantalone, 15 January 2013)

He is ‘the hero of open world’! (Wayne, 14 January 2013)

RIP, Aaron. This world does not deserve you. (Barbedo, 18 January 2013).

Wonderful bright star in a world full of darkness. (Stemberger, 16 January 2013)

As shown above, the term ‘world’ is frequently used in the comments (mine emphasis). Its narrative function, however, varies: it is an environment which can be improved, a collective entity made of people, an actor able to suffer, fail and even destroy. All these definitions re-articulate the conflict previously described in territorial, yet not spatial, terms. On the one side, a world regulated by strong powers and, on the other, the open world dreamt of by Aaron. The global dimension of the Internet is here redefined in terms of human agency: the entire Internet is the domain of this new-born community, and they claim their right to act on it and in it without any external interference (‘We belong here. This is our world’).

In this narrative, such perceptions are shaped by the hero’s actions: he broke the institutional boundaries which fragmented the Internet into small private domains and ‘made all the efforts to make this world one’ (Unknown 4). He deliberately disregarded the established authorities claiming the whole Internet as the rightful domain of users. He re-drew the boundaries of users’ agency in the digital world, thus, advocating emancipation from external authorities like JSTOR; he worked to change the topology of the Internet. Different organizations of cyberspace not only reflect different cultural perspectives but also actually host peculiar forms of life and social belonging. Aaron’s death is narratized in these terms. He was ‘too bright for this world’, a world ‘full of darkness’ which ‘does not deserve’ him, which ‘isn’t free like we need’ and is ‘not a place for a true hero’. According to this narrative, he attempted to change the digital environment because otherwise he could not survive in it. He was the ultimate expression of a certain set of values and of a new form of life, and eventually he was destroyed.

Conclusion

In this article, I examined users’ mourning activity on the Aaron Swartz’s digital memorial. The narrative and semantic analysis of the comments highlighted the self-descriptive efforts of a transnational scattered community to affirm its values through the collective recreation of a heroic narrative. The death of Aaron is reframed by users as the tragic outcome of a radical confrontation between two actors who embody incompatible sets of values: institutions versus hero. From this perspective, Aaron’s death becomes an act of heroism which catalyses a scattered transnational community transforming, ultimately, the collective mourning activity into a self-descriptive community-building process.

As noted, the architecture of Aaron’s memorial website embodies the values of the community it is meant to host. This digital artefact has three different functions: it is a monument, a surface of inscription and a topological object. As a monument, it commemorates the deceased; as a surface of inscription, it allows users to write and read comments; as a topological object, it expresses a precise cultural perception of the universe and the limits of human agency, while being located within the topological organization it defines. Indeed, topological objects are not elements which occupy a pre-existing space but rather something that make space; they trace the spatial–temporal coordinates in which they are entangled and though which they make sense. Unlike most online memorials, RASW celebrates the life of a ‘hero’ whose activity took place mostly on the Internet; he struggled to change cyberspace and empower its inhabitants. The software he designed re-drew the routes of online information, thus, delineating new centres and peripheries. He broke boundaries, opened new trajectories and made them available to everyone: it could be said that he actually changed the digital landscape.

For this reason, Aaron’s memorial should be regarded as a digital grave. Indeed, this website is not only an online mourning site aimed at preserving the memory of the deceased but also a digital artefact located within a cultural space the community recognizes as its own: a space defined by the digital architectures which support free exchange of knowledge and users’ interaction. In these terms, Aaron is the ‘hero of open world’. For this reason, the digital memorial and the mourning activity I analysed should not be regarded as a substitute or a complement of offline rituals. Indeed, they are an independent set of practices coherent with the values and the social structures of this transnational value-based community; they take place in a culturally defined and accordingly manufactured (cyber)space, whose characteristics fit and, at the same time, express a specific worldview. Aaron, to say it with Cory Doctorow ‘was part and parcel of the Internet society, like he belonged in the place where your thoughts are what matter, and not who you are or how old you are’.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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