The young Mozart, according to legend, ended one of his earliest concerts by bursting into tears. The audience had erupted in rapturous applause at the spectacle of a tiny little boy playing sonatas with the proficiency of an adult master. So why was Mozart crying? “They were only applauding for me,” the boy told his father. “They weren’t listening to the music.”
I was reminded of this story while reading the collected writings of the campaigner and computer prodigy Aaron Swartz, published in January in paperback as The Boy Who Could Change the World (Verso). Urban legends follow child prodigies as reliably as the FBI follows young men who mess around with computers, and, to some of the finest minds in technology, Swartz will always be the brilliant teenager who started to design software and websites when he was still at school. The collection, along with a new biography of him, The Idealist by Justin Peters, cannot help romanticising Swartz’s early achievements and his early death.
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