On his first day of work in San Francisco they took his laptop. Condé Nast had just bought Reddit, the founders had moved into the Wired offices, and the IT department collected the team’s machines to copy the drives “to ensure they had a copy of all our data”. What came back were iBook G4s with a Condé Nast desktop, a corporate screensaver and spy software pre-installed: “when they gave us the machines we didn’t even have administrator access on them”. The connection ran through the IT headquarters in Delaware, “presumably the better to spy on us on”. Aaron Swartz wrote all this on his blog two weeks later. By lunchtime on that first day he had locked himself in a bathroom stall and started crying.