BenSw
Ben Swartz | |
|---|---|
| Born | Benjamin Hillel Swartz Highland Park, Illinois, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Brandeis University (BA) |
| Known for | NotLikeThis emote on Twitch |
| Website | Official website |
 | This article may rely excessively on sources too closely associated with the subject, potentially preventing the article from being verifiable and neutral. (September 2024) |
Benjamin Hillel Swartz, better known as BenSw, is an American software engineer and tech activist known for the emote NotLikeThis which became an Internet meme in the mid-2010s.
Early life
[edit]Swartz was born in Highland Park, Illinois to Jewish parents, Robert "Bob" Swartz and Susan Swartz. He is the youngest of three brothers. His oldest brother is the late Aaron Swartz who worked on RSS, Creative Commons, and Reddit. Aaron was already an established person in the tech community, which inspired Ben to join that field. Swartz later graduated from Brandeis University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics.[1]
He worked in Google in early-2010s, where he initially worked on combatting payment fraud in Google Play Store, and after his brother's death he led a team archiving the USENET posts in Google Groups to the Internet Archive as a tribute to him.[2] He left Google in 2013.[3]
NotLikeThis
[edit]By 2015, Swartz was working for Twitch as a senior engineer. On July 23, 2015, Twitter user @FishStix posted an image of Swartz[4] at Evolution Championship Series with his head buried in his hands after watching Super Smash Bros. Melee player HugS lose. FishStix suggested it would make a good emote. The name NotLikeThis is a quote from the 1999 movie The Matrix. The image was quickly adopted by Twitch users as an emote by later half of 2015, and on 2016, Twitch posted an interview with Swartz for #TwitchHistory in which he explained the emote's origins.[5]
After Twitch
[edit]After briefly becoming famous for NotLikeThis, Ben devoted his later years on Twitch as a tech activist in the company, advocating the company to take a stance in net neutrality in 2017 through gaining consensus with the executives and lawyers there.[6] He left Twitch in early 2019 to work in Washington D.C. to work in tech and politics, and educating senators on issues related to digital platforms, data privacy, and intellectual property.[1] In 2023 he started working as a Senior Technology Advisor in Federal Trade Commission, working on issues like regulating AI.[7][8]
References
[edit]- ^ a b "Ben Swartz — TechCongress". TechCongress. Retrieved August 29, 2024.
- ^ Swartz, Ben. "Aaron, 5 years later". BenSw.com. Retrieved August 29, 2024.
- ^ Swartz, Ben. "I quit". BenSw.com. Retrieved August 29, 2024.
I didn't just leave Google. I quit.
- ^ Goldhaber, Ben (July 24, 2015). "Ben Goldhaber (@FishStix): "this is gonna make a good emoticon @bensw"". X. Retrieved August 29, 2024.
- ^ "Twitch on X: "Where did NotLikeThis come from?". X. November 21, 2016. Retrieved August 29, 2024.
- ^ "Meet the 2022 Fellows: Ben Swartz". TechCongress. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
When I was at Twitch, I spearheaded Twitch's response to the Net Neutrality Day of Action. I was able to build consensus with C-suite executives, lawyers, and policy groups on an issue that Amazon hadn't taken a public stance on.
- ^ "Video of Ben Swartz in a FTC conference". X. November 16, 2023. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
- ^ "Generative AI Raises Competition Concerns". Bureau of Competition & Office of Technology. June 29, 2023. Retrieved September 3, 2024.
Thank you to the contributors of this post: Elena Ponte, John Newman, Dan Principato, David B. Schwartz, Jake Walter-Warner, David Koh, Alex Gaynor, Nick Jones, Stephanie Nguyen, Ben Swartz, Varoon Mathur, Josephine Liu, Daniel Zhao, Dan Salsburg, Sam Levine.