Aaron Swartz in The Internet’s Own Boy (Quinn Norton/Film Buff and Participant Media)

What happens when an idealistic computer genius tries to hack the most obstinate system of all, American corporate capitalism? By turns touching and infuriating, the documentary The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz recounts the short but meaningful life of programming prodigy Aaron Swartz.

Swartz had an intuitive knack for computer programming, and he was able to create any Web technology that he could imagine. He pioneered RSS feed technology and cofounded Reddit, among other things, and dropped out of Stanford after his freshman year. He sold Reddit to Condé Nast, publisher of Wired magazine, and moved to San Francisco to work for the popular technology magazine.

But as the film shows, traditional success, even in a relentlessly fast-paced and innovative field like computer science, was not nearly enough for Swartz. As a friend puts it in the film, Swartz believed that being a genius-level programmer is like having super powers, and it would be a shame if Superman just used his powers to make himself rich. He quit his job at Wired and became a full-time internet activist, or hacktivist.

In the wake of 9/11, the government took new, undreamt-of threats extremely seriously, and cyberterrorism was at the top of the list. A special Patriot Act funded cabal called the Electronic Crimes Task Force had been given vast powers, and was just waiting for someone to make an example out of. The fact that Swartz was operating long after George W. Bush left office shows how little changed from one administration to the next.

Swartz firmly believed that information is power, and power should be granted to as many people as possible. Focusing especially on the scientific data in peer-reviewed academic journals, Swartz was dismayed that digital libraries like JSTOR and Elsevier charged people steep prices for full access to their academic journals. So in late 2010, he wrote a program and used a basic, cheap laptop with an external hard drive to steal more than four million articles, using MIT’s access and lightning-fast servers.

The film depicts this process and how he was eventually caught on security footage. Swartz’s “crime,” sharing academic information with the public, was the total package of what he represented, and that rankled the system so much. He looked like a prototypical hacker, he was very ideologically driven, and he was smarter than anyone running servers. He really could do whatever he wanted, and he was inspired to do quite a lot. So the state threw the book at him, charged with wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He faced 35 years in jail, $1 million in fines, if convicted. The pressure of this horrible fate understandably depressed him severely, and in early 2013, at age 26, he committed suicide.

A chunk of the film depicts the surprisingly successful campaign to fight the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), in which Swartz played a key role. He designed networks that streamlined the process of contacting representatives with complaints, and tens of thousands of voters made their dissatisfaction with the obtuse, draconian legislation known.

SOPA was designed to cripple any site that at any time hosted content that infringed on copyright laws. This meant that owners of sites would have to constantly police their sites for any content that could have been conceivably lifted illegally from an original source, an absurd expectation given the volume of content uploaded every day. SOPA was a wrecking ball.

Swartz was in on the ground floor of anti-SOPA activism, and he helped the resistance grow so that many of the top sites in the world shut down in a day of protest, including Wikipedia. Once this Internet blackout took place, Congress changed its tune very fast, and SOPA was dead. Without Swartz, SOPA may have passed, and the Web would be a much less interesting place than it is today.

The film shows how deeply he touched those around him, how his family and colleagues admired him for his technical abilities and his philosophical commitments, and how so much was left undone. Swartz’s unique blend of programming talent and political conscience made him a force to be reckoned with, and there was truly no limit to the change he could have helped bring about. Saddening, informative, and inspiring, The Internet’s Own Boy is one of the most powerful documentaries in years.