You are comparing suicide to “ragequit”? Wow… Sorry, two very different things there and if you actually do know the real differences and made a poor analogy I think you really should clarify things.
Aaron’s death means his fight is over. What about weev?
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/21/ipad-hack-statement-of-responsibility/
I registered for the first time after years of reading to respond to this thread.
I just wanted to say: <3.
You’re the best and you’re doing good. StackOverflow helps me out regularly. Keep working and don’t be afraid of the dark nights. They come and then they go.
Hi Jeff, thanks for not quitting, out there is very dark, and sometimes that darkness comes closer to us. But in the end, is all we hav e, this little rock spinning in space is all we have. So lets make the most of it.
Don’t give up, don’t get even - get satisfaction.
Jeff,
I’m a bit frustrated by the whole tone of the comments toward you. You admit thinking about suicide and a bunch of knuckleheads think that anything else is important in relation to that. This post has bothered me all day.
I’m sorry you’ve seen that side of people, I give them the benefit of the doubt that they just skimmed your post.
While I think I’m preaching to the choir here from what you said in your post. Suicide is never the answer and especially not the answer when you have young ones that rely on their dad to be there. Get whatever help you need. Nothing else you said matters.
Ckincincy, I’d like to point you to two related posts. If Jeff has experienced that level of depression then he knows what Aaron went through. Jeff made the decision to live. Aaron did not. It was Aaron’s decision to make. I myself suffer from major bouts of depression and thus the last person to ever judge a decision such as this. As human beings we can NEVER know what it is like to live someone else’s life. The people who say “Suicide is never the answer” have no idea what severe depression feels like.
I wrote my tumblr post this morning have been receiving “thank you” messages all day. Sadly, they are being sent privately which is a very good indication of how embarrassed and ashamed some people feel about their depression. Jeff’s post does absolutely nothing but alienate them.
http://reedmangino.tumblr.com/post/41195787574/jeff-atwood-goes-off-the-rails
and
Are you kidding? Aaron was a criminal who committed felonies to get what HE THOUGHT should be free out to the masses. Look at it however you will; one man’s criminal is another man’s activist. Federal law has a lot to say about computer crimes and recklessly stealing data isn’t the way to get around it. Just because he was able to view the documents on JSTOR and other areas doesn’t mean others were allowed to do the same. He’s just a thief who got caught and he’s absolutely not a hero or a “martyr” as some have pointed out in the past; if he couldn’t handle the consequences he shouldn’t have done what he did.
Dude, did you see his security camera shots? Dude was going to get 6 months in a white male-prison, reduced partway to his sentence for those.
The US Government didn’t kill Aaron, lack of oxygen from a tightening noose that his depressed brain tied around his neck is what killed Aaron.
Imposing real consequences on these federal prosecutors in the Aaron Swartz case is vital for both justice and reform
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/ortiz-heymann-swartz-accountability-abuse
Charles Dortworth: "Just because he was able to view the documents on JSTOR and other areas doesn’t mean others were allowed to do the same. He’s just a thief who got caught"
People keep using the term thief in this case. Copying is not theft; even in the US where various lobby groups are pushing hard for the two terms to be conflated in a legal sense, courts have ruled this not to be so. In the UK it has been explicitly ruled that information is not property. Copying can be construed as illegal in various jurisdictions; it can be viewed as infringement of others’ rights to make money from a given piece of information; regardless nothing is directly stolen. That it is not theft does not necessarily make it right, but that’s a matter for the context, which is why we have legal systems in the first place.
Considering that JSTOR settled with Aaron, Aaron returned the items copied without distributing them when requested, and JSTOR even went so far to publish 4.5 million articles freely in a remarkably coincidental move after it dropped charges against Aaron (and before he died), I think you’re skating on thin ice, colloquialisms or not.
Of course, it’s easy to defame the dead, especially from the safety of anonymity.
From Navi: “Of course, it’s easy to defame the dead, especially from the safety of anonymity.”
^ This.
Stating that suicide is like ragequitting is absolutely uncalled for. Stating that Aaron should have continued to suffer because he was an “activist” is utter bullshit. He was a human being, he had a disease, and that diseased caused him to take permanent action against a temporary problem. It is incredibly said but fuck anyone who feels like they are in a position to judge him.
Jeff, I can understand some users’ objection to the metaphor, although I didn’t think you were trying to suggest they were equivalent. And I agree with some others that some of the ways you describe choices doesn’t seem to recognize how disease-like extreme depression is.
But, your acknowledgement of your own struggles made me view those minor differences in a different light. It made me read it less as, “is this untrained analyst’s” metaphor and description accurate/helpful/etc?" Instead, I took it as, “I struggled, hard with depression, and this is how I’m feeling as I cope with this new event. And I’m being incredibly honest, however hard that may be, knowing that not just the internet, but my family - my kids - will all eventually read this.”
Anyway, whatever individual aspects of this I don’t agree with, overall I think it was very brave to share so much about your personal travails. So thanks.
I’m not surprised you’re getting some heat for this, but I think what you’ve written is pretty well balanced. Yes, suicide is often an act of rage; Yes, clinical depression is a catastrophically self-reinforcing illness.
But what a person does under the influence of depression is not disconnected from who they are before it strikes, so it’s good to plant a seed of resistance in people’s minds when they’re sane enough to hear it.
I think it’s important to clarify that only 12 states permanently take away a felon’s right to vote, and NY is not one of them.
Dear Jeff,
I like “Play other, better moves – and consider your long game” part 
I think that rageQuit is an essential action that expand your mental space. When someone got a considerable amount of frustation, with no experience of post-rageQuit situation, they tend to walk the easy, rageQuit route, especially when kids playing the game.
I think we all doing rageQuit at least once in the lifetime and we growth. Just hope that’s not the last action they do.
RIP Aaron.
Jeff,
Your post came at an important time for me. A good friend who I mentored and worked with for a long time ‘ragequit’ life this past Saturday. I wish there was a good way to implement a support network for people like my friend. He was a very gifted programmer and had made several important contributions to the free software movement. Perhaps if he had support available, on line , he may have been able to avoid his final choice. Of course all his friends and associates would have listened or advised but something stopped him reaching out for help. I am almost sure that had he had the resource available online he could have used it.
I share your view on ragequitting, but have a deep well of forgiveness for Aaron. Lifelong depression is unspeakably painful; I ask no one to live with that pain unabated. It seems Aaron was facing pain on almost all fronts; I can feel little else but compassion.
And despite his amazing accomplishments, he was quite young. As I have aged, and as a friend noted last night - through considerable laughter - that it seems life is a long series of conquering one hill only to find another in your path. The first few times this happens to you can be shattering, until you learn to enjoy the brief coast downhill and the challenge of getting to the to of the next.
Did the government pursuit of him exacerbate the pain in his life? I frankly can’t see how it would not. It was deliberately (I am struck by that word - de-liberate) structured to wear him down. Was it shameful on our part? Absolutely.
Is this odd? Nope. The current powers-that-be are fighting madly against the future-that-will-be, the future that Aaron could see wholly and clearly. This is a pattern we’ve seen throughout time as those who have the power struggle to maintain an ever loosening grip.
Bless you, Aaron. You did what you could. You will be remembered and cherished.
Well, in 2001 I was facinated by the RDF, when I was teen. It seems that RDF was hipnotic idea at that time when you were teen. I never heard about Aaron before, but accrding to Wikipedia Aaron was facinated by the RDF too (even in active role) as a very young person. So I feel now sad that he is gone 
I’ve experienced moderate and deep depression. It left a part of my mind still broken, but the moderate/deep depression is gone. I’m not offended by the suggestion that Aaron’s sucide was wrong, or was a mistake, or was quitting.
Depression is worse than almost anything. Would you kill yourself if you lost an arm and a leg? No? People kill themselves because being depressed is so painful. Even more depressed people would kill themselves, but they are too depressed. Because as well as pain, depression means a loss of judgement. Sometimes loss of judgement so severe that you have difficulty carrying out everyday tasks like stopping at red traffic lights, let alone planning and achieving suicide.
It’s not cruel or thoughtless to say that depressed people make bad judgements. It’s a description of the condition.
The loss of judgement is a thing that made my mind hurt. The hurt is a thing that caused loss of judgement. I don’t know which comes first - the loss of judgement or the pain – but the pain goes when the judgement comes back, and the judgement comes back when the pain goes.
Would Aaron have been hurt or offended by the sugestion that suicide was quitting? Would telling him that suicide was immoral have been helpful? Is it OK to kill people who can’t defend themselves? Was suicide the right answer for him in his situation?
He was depressed. His judgement failed. You can’t use his answers to those questions.