Aaron Swartz's "family and closest friends have tried to hone his story into a message, in order to direct the public sadness and anger aroused by his suicide to political purposes."

"They have done this because it is what he would have wanted, and because it is a way to extract some good from the event. They tell people that the experience of being prosecuted is annihilatingly brutal, and that prosecutors can pursue with terrible weapons defendants who have caused little harm. One of the corollaries of this message is that Swartz did not kill himself; he was murdered by the government. But this claim is for public consumption, and the people closest to him do not really believe it. They believe that he would not have killed himself without the prosecutors, but they feel that there is something missing from this account—some further fact, a key, that will make sense of what he did."

Larissa MacFarquhar — in The New Yorker — looks at the real complexities of the Aaron Swartz story. This is an extremely impressive piece. Read the whole thing. The passage above is the best abstract summary of what is in the piece, and I'll extract a few more things that are better examples of the kind of details that flesh out that abstraction:

He disliked all vegetables and refused to eat them except in extremely expensive restaurants, such as Thomas Keller restaurants. He had ulcerative colitis, a serious digestive disorder similar to Crohn’s disease; he also thought that he was a “supertaster,” experiencing sensations of taste more intensely than regular people. Partly for these reasons, he ate only foods that were white or yellow. He ate pasta, tofu, cheese, bread, rice, eggs, and cheese pizza. He was phobic about fruit and wouldn’t touch it. He rarely drank alcohol and was careful to stay hydrated. He went through four humidifiers in his apartment in Brooklyn. He said that he left San Francisco because the air-conditioning was bad....

He became a political activist.... But he never felt as strongly about any new idea as he had once felt about them. He would adopt a cause, only to become dissatisfied, deciding that it wasn’t important enough, or was too unlikely to succeed, and he would move on to something else....

He came to believe that the influence of money in American politics was so enormous a problem that possibly little else could be solved until that was. Then again, there were always other countries: in conversation with an Australian friend, he decided that it would be ridiculously easy to “take over Australia,” but that since the country had only twenty million people it wasn’t worth it.