He fought for information to be free by pirating JSTOR papers, and he was persecuted and prosecuted for it, and he killed himself (or did he? [vsauce music]).
... And now we have SciHub. Which is the same exact fucking thing as what he was trying to accomplish.
Also he was instrumental to the invention of the RSS protocol:
As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS; the technical architecture for Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses; and the Python website framework web.py.
The same RSS protocol that spez completely killed off a few months ago. Aaron's grave has been shat on so many times that it's basically a latrine now. But the people who say "fuck spez" know none of this, and if they do, they're cowards for not saying it out loud.