Mourning for a hacktivist: grieving the death of Aaron Swartz on a digital memorial

This study examines the discursive and semantic patterns underpinning the collective mourning activity on the digital memorial for Aaron Swartz (hacker/software developer/activist). More specifically, it questions if and how online mourning for hacktivists might result in a cultural reconfiguration of cyberspace through the grassroots and collective redefinition of the limits of users’ agency. To this end, all the comments present on Swartz’s digital memorial are collected, coded and, subsequently, analysed to detect their narrative and semantic structures. The results of this linguistic analysis are interpreted through a topological information model. Accordingly, the study discusses (1) the hero-making processes underlying online mourning for hacktivists and (2) the related redefinition of the Internet as the domain of a value-based community of users.