I didn't know Aaron Swartz; I didn't even know who he was until yesterday. Today, I know who he was.

Bill Gates famously said that the advocates of open source and open access are "the new communists." So be it; with the destruction of Aaron Swartz, a true champion of open access, the gauntlet is thrown down.

There is now a choice; never has it been more clear that we stand at a turning point in history, between the ongoing disaster of holding, and guarding, private wealth, and on the other hand openness, sharing, a public world in which the condition of individual advancement is the advancement of humanity - and the condition of the survival of humanity is the advancement of every human and harmony with the natural world.

Never has it been more clear that this is not a struggle between "work" and "welfare," or between "job creators" and "lazy people," but between two fundamentally different definitions of wealth and life.

Aaron Swartz was not pursued by MIT, the university from which he supposedly "stole," nor by JSTOR, the organization whose files he supposedly "stole," all to make them universally available.

He was pursued by our federal government, "because they needed to make an example" for all to see; a public flogging because Private Property is the Holy Grail.

Never before has it been more clear that the fight for that new future is not against this or that individual or corporation, but against an entire system and the State apparatus that enforces the power and privilege of the 1%.

Aaron Swartz was a New Communist. I am a New Communist. We claim this now.