Rhetorical Précis of "Aaron Swartz, Coder and Activist, Dead at 26"

In his article “Aaron Swartz, Coder and Activist, Dead at 26” (2013), Kevin Poulsen asserts that technological problems will now go unsolved, or be solved a little less brilliantly because of the death of Aaron Swartz. Poulsen supports his claim by going into detail about the many accomplishments of Aaron Swartz such as working with Larry Lessig to launch the Creative Commons, he architected the Internet Archive’s free public catalog of books, OpenLibrary.org, and in 2010 he founded Demand Progress. Poulsen soon challenges the legal system, suggesting that Aaron Swartz was driven to suicide due to the long pre-trial motions, lasting over 18 months. His purpose in writing this article is to show how Aaron Swartz believed that information/knowledge collected through research should be available to everyone, not just solely on people that have money. Kevin Poulsen seems to have a supportive tone towards the actions of Aaron Swartz, such as hacking JSTOR. He seems to keep his audience in mind, by pointing out that JSTOR was not a free journal database but a database used in a wealthy college such as MIT.