Aaron Swartz’s death has unleashed a massive amounts of sentiment. Some from his friends (some of whom are also my friends), some from people who didn’t know him but knew his work, and others condemning his persecution, widely attributed as one cause to his suicide. All of which, is very heartfelt, and the emotion of which is a bit overwhelming to me, and has made me think a lot about suicide in general, a reoccurring theme in my life, and no doubt many others.

There is one thing nagging at me currently (I’m sure others will come up as I continue to reflect on this, as they tend to do), about the criticism of his persecution. Apart from the quite reasonable and warranted outrage at the charges that were levi ed against him for such an insignificant transgression (if there was a transgression at all), the critique of intellectual property I’ve heard surround this tragedy seems to be missing something.

While the rentier class who pushes the harsh penalties for intellectual property violation are certainly to blame, and as any purely capitalist force are completely deserving of critique, this forgets the fact that Aaron himself was, in a way, part of this class, having made quite a bit of money when Reddit sold out to Conde-Nast.

First of all, this is in no way to suggest that Aaron, his life, or his work was in any way hypocritical. On the contrary, from all accounts he was a remarkable person who strove to promote equity and justice in the world without exception, committing all of his financial resources to his work of liberating information, and people themselves by giving them access to this information. So much so, that as Lawrence Lessig suggests, he had few resources left for defending himself. I can think of few examples of lives lived in recent times, in which it sounds as if someone so selflessly devoted themselves to what is right, as opposed to what is popular or lucrative. And in general, I see absolutely nothing wrong with taking money from capitalist interests in order to fund the fight against them. This is an unfortunate fact of the extent of the capitalist economy in contemporary times–it is impossible to fight against them without holding property, using resources, and laboring under the auspices of the system.

What this points out, I think, is the contradictions of the system that Aaron was coming up against.

For all the activist technologists out there in the world fighting the good fight, there is very little recognition that the system itself that they are utilizing is broken. This path, of cashing in on a clever invention so that then, one has the resources to spend on the frivolous luxury of doing good, is viewed as the best and most noble path. Business, itself, is the primary tool that many technologists point to, as the weapon with which to undo the negative effects of capitalism. Start a business, make a fortune, start a non-profit, give a TED talk, everyone applauds. But if you do something as forward as plugging in a computer and start downloading public information, you have a prison cell to look forward to.

If we are actually trying to confront the rentier class, then we have to see the way that technology itself is the rent system. I don’t say that we should condemn technology. I say that we need to realize that the entire spectrum of “good” and “evil”, our entire conception of justice and how to achieve it, is wholly owned by this rentier class, and leased back to us, in pieces, in platforms, and in apps.

From everything I’ve read of Aaron’s writings about his life and work, it sounds like it was creativity and curiosity that drove him to accomplish everything he did, and I can only imagine, this is what led him to allegedly set a computer up to download those public files. Curiosity took him to thwart the rules of how to do “good” in the world, and to pursue a sort of good that has been criminalized. If I am correct in this assessment, the lesson I take from this is that our creativity must find ways to take back this sense of justice.

I don’t know what this means. I don’t know how to take back this sense of justice. But as we celebrate the amazing technological things that Aaron did, I can’t help but feel that he was set up, not just by the US attorneys who persecuted him, but by all of the technological wonders that make our world. I feel like the bad guys in this situation are not just the government, the music industry, and the institutions supposedly existing to spread knowledge that sought to restrict it, but also start-up culture, TED talks, what we know as “innovation”, business, and every piece of property, from restricted PDFs to office space, to every dollar and every cent.

I’m an unrepentant anti-capitalist, but if you are a person who thinks what happened to Aaron was wrong, I don’t know how it could be any other way. It was the technological property that Aaron worked with, that he was trying to liberate, that turned was against him; and I can’t help but think that every one of us benefiting by that property is in some way culpable.