by Steven Levy
Born in 1945, Lee grew up in the Strawberry Mansion section of Philadelphia, a neighborhood of row homes populated by first-and second-generation Jewish immigrants. His mother was the daughter of an engineer who had invented an important diesel fuel injector, and his father, a commercial artist, had worked in a locomotive plant. Later, in an unpublished autobiographical sketch, Lee would write that his father Jake “was a modernist who believed in the ‘perfectability’ of man and the machine as the model for human society. In play with his children he would often imitate a steam locomotive as other men would imitate animals.”
Lee’s home life was not happy. Family tension ran high; there was sibling warfare between Lee, his brother Joe (three years older), and a cousin Lee’s age who was adopted as the boys’ sister. His father Jake’s political adventures as a member of the Communist Party had ended in the mid-fifties when infighting led to Jake’s losing his post as district organizer, but politics were central to the family. Lee participated in marches on Washington, D.C. at the age of twelve and thirteen, and once picketed Woolworth’s in an early civil rights demonstration. But when things at home got too intense for him, he would retreat to a basement workshop loaded with electronic parts from abandoned televisions and radios. He would later call the workshop his Monastery, a refuge where he took a vow to technology.
It was a place where his brother’s inescapable physical and academic superiority did not extend. Lee Felsenstein had a skill with electronics which allowed him to best his brother for the first time. It was a power he was almost afraid to extend—he would build things but never dare to turn them on, fearing a failure that would uphold his brother’s contention that “those things are never going to work.” So he’d build something else instead.
He loved the idea of electronics. He filled the cover of his sixth-grade notebook with electrical diagrams. He would go to his neighborhood branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia and thumb through the pages of the Radio Amateur’s Handbook. He got the biggest thrill from a Heath Company instruction manual for building a shortwave receiver. The Heath Company specialized in do-it-yourself electronics projects, and this particular manual had very detailed diagrams of wires and connections. Comparing the actual parts for that five-tube project with the perfect diagram, with its octagons linked to other octagons, Lee saw the connection . . . this line of the schematic represented that pin on the tube socket. It gave him an almost sensual thrill, this linking of his fantasy electronics world to reality. He carried around the manual everywhere; a pilgrim toting a prayerbook. Soon he was completing projects and was vindicated when at age thirteen he won a prize for his model space satellite—its name a bow to Mother Russia, the Felsnik.
But even though he was realizing himself in a way he never had before, each of Lee’s new products was a venture in paranoia, as he feared that he might not be able to get the part to make it work. “I was always seeing these [Popular Mechanics] articles saying, ‘Gee, if you have this transistor you could make a regular radio you always wanted, and talk to your friends and make new friends’ . . . but I never could get that part and I didn’t really know how to go about getting it, or I couldn’t get the money to get it.” He imagined the mocking voice of his brother, labeling him a failure.
When Lee was a freshman at Central High, Philadelphia’s special academic high school for boys, brother Joe, a senior, drafted him to become chief engineer at the school’s budding Computer Club, showing Lee a diagram of some obsolete flip-flops and challenging his younger brother to build them. Lee was too terrified to say no, and tried unsuccessfully to complete the project. The effort made him wary of computers for a decade afterward.
But high school uplifted Lee—he was involved in political groups, did some work on the school’s cyclotron, and did some significant reading—particularly some novels by Robert Heinlein.
The slightly built, spectacled Jewish teenager somehow identified with the futuristic protagonists, particularly the virginal young soldier in Revolt in 2100. The novel’s setting is a twenty-first-century dictatorship, where a devoted, idealistic underground is plotting to fight the forces of the Prophet, an omnipotent Orwellian thug supported by unthinking masses who worship him. The protagonist stumbles upon evidence of the Prophet’s hypocrisy, and, forced to choose between good and evil, he takes the drastic step of joining the revolutionary Cabal, which provides him with the teachings to stir his imagination.
For the first time in my life I was reading things which had not been approved by the Prophet’s censors, and the impact on my mind was devastating. Sometimes I would glance over my shoulder to see who was watching me, frightened in spite of myself. I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny.
(from Revolt in 2100)
Reading that novel, and later reading Stranger in a Strange Land, in which Heinlein’s extraterrestrial protagonist becomes a leader of a spiritual group which has a profound effect on society, Lee Felsenstein began to see his own life as something akin to a science-fiction novel. The books, he later said, gave him courage to dream big, to try out risky projects, and to rise above his own emotional conflicts. The great fight was not so much internal as broad—it was the choice between good and evil. Taking that romantic notion to heart, Lee saw himself as the ordinary person with potential who is seized by circumstances, chooses the difficult path of siding with the good, and embarks on a long odyssey to overthrow evil.
It was not long before Lee was able to apply this metaphor in reality. After graduation, he went to the University of California at Berkeley to matriculate in Electrical Engineering. He was unable to get a scholarship. His freshman year did not parallel that of a typical MIT hacker: he more or less toed the line, failing to qualify for a scholarship by a fraction of a grade point. But he got what seemed as good—a work-study job at NASA’s Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, at the edge of the Mohave Desert. To Lee, it was admission to Paradise—the language people spoke there was electronics, rocket electronics, and the schematics he had studied would now be transmogrified into the stuff of science fiction come alive. He reveled in it, the brotherhood of engineers, loved wearing a tie, walking out of an office and seeing neat rows of other offices, and water coolers. Heinlein was forgotten—Lee was conforming, an engineer out of a cookie cutter. Deliriously happy in the service of the Prophet. Then, after two months of that “seventh heaven,” as he later called it, he was summoned to a meeting with a security officer.
The officer seemed ill at ease. He was accompanied by a witness to the proceedings. The officer kept notes and had Lee sign each page as he finished it. He also had the form Lee had filled out upon entering Edwards, Security Form 398. The officer kept asking Lee if he knew anyone who was a member of the Communist Party. And Lee kept saying no. Finally he asked, in a gentle voice, “Don’t you understand that your parents were Communists?”
Lee had never been told. He had assumed that “Communist” was just a term—red-baiting—that people flung at activist liberals like his parents. His brother had known—his brother had been named after Stalin!—but Lee had not been told. He had been perfectly honest when he had filled out Form 398 with a clear “no” on the line that asked if you knew any known Communists.
“So there I was, ejected from Paradise,” Lee would later say, “and the security chief said, ‘You keep your nose clean for a couple years more, you won’t have any problem getting back in.’ Now I’d always been setting myself up to be abandoned, always expected to be abandoned. Suddenly I was. Literally thrown out in the wilderness. There’s the Mohave Desert out there, for God’s sake!”
On the night of October 14, 1964, Lee Felsenstein, failed engineer, took a train back to Berkeley. Lee had heard radio reports of student demonstrations there beginning two weeks before; he had dismissed them as a modern version of the legendary panty raids that had occurred in 1952. But upon his return he found the whole community alive with the Free Speech Movement. “Secrecy is the key
stone of all tyranny,” said Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 protagonist, voicing not only the cry of Berkeley revolution, but the Hacker Ethic. Lee Felsenstein made the leap—he joined the Cabal. But he would merge his fervor with his own particular talent. He would use technology to fuel the revolt.
Since he owned a tape recorder, he went to Press Central, the media center of the movement, and offered his talents as an audio technician. He did a little of everything: mimeographed, did shit work. He was inspired by the decentralized structure of the Free Speech Movement. On December 2, when over eight hundred students occupied Sproul Hall, Lee was there with his tape recorder. He was arrested, of course, but the administration backed down on the issues. The battle had been won. But the war was just beginning.
For the next few years, Lee balanced the seemingly incompatible existences of a political activist and a socially reclusive engineer. Not many in the movement were so technically inclined, technology and especially computers being perceived as evil forces. Lee worked furiously to organize the people in his co-op dorm, Oxford Hall—the most political on campus. He edited the activist dorm newspaper. But he was also learning more about electronics, playing with electronics, immersing himself in the logical environment of circuits and diodes. As much as he could, he merged the two pursuits—he designed, for instance, a tool which was a combination bullhorn and club to fend off cops. But unlike many in the movement who were also deeply into Berkeley’s wild, freewheeling social activity, Lee shied away from close human contact, especially with women. An unwashed figure in work clothes, Lee self-consciously lived up to the nerdy engineer stereotype. He did not bathe regularly, and washed his unfashionably short hair perhaps once a month. He did not take drugs. He did not engage in any sex, let alone all the free sex that came with free speech. “I was afraid of women and had no way of dealing with them,” he later explained. “I had some proscription in my personality against having fun. I was not allowed to have fun. The fun was in my work . . . It was as if my way of asserting my potency was to be able to build things that worked, and other people liked.”
Lee dropped out of Berkeley in 1967, and began alternating between electronics jobs and work in the movement. In 1968, he joined the underground Berkeley Barb as the newspaper’s “military editor.” Joining the company of such other writers as Sergeant Pepper and Jefferson Fuck Poland, Lee wrote a series of articles evaluating demonstrations—not on the basis of issues, but on organization, structure, conformation to an elegant system. In one of his first articles, in March 1968, Lee talked of an upcoming demonstration for Stop-the-Draft Week, noting the probable result of insufficient planning and bickering among organizers: “The activity will be half-baked, chaotic, and just like all the other demonstrations. The movement politicians seem not to realize that in the real-world action is carried on not by virtue of ideological hairsplitting, but with time and physical resources . . . it is my responsibility as a technician not to simply criticize but to make suggestions . . .”
And he did make suggestions. He insisted that demonstrations should be executed as cleanly as logic circuits defined by the precise schematics he still revered. He praised demonstrators when they smashed “the right windows” (banks, not small businesses). He advocated attack only to draw the enemy out. He called the bombing of a draft board “refreshing.” His column called “Military Editor’s Household Hints” advised: “Remember to turn your stored dynamite every two weeks in hot weather. This will prevent the nitroglycerin from sticking.”
Heinlein’s protagonist in Revolt in 2100 said: “Revolution is not accompanied by a handful of conspirators whispering around a guttering candle in a deserted ruin. It requires countless supplies, modern machinery, and modern weapons . . . and there must be loyalty . . . and superlative staff organization.” In 1968, Lee Felsenstein wrote: “Revolution is a lot more than a random street brawl. It takes organization, money, dogged determination, and willingness to accept and build on past disasters.”
Felsenstein had his effect. During the trial of the Oakland Seven, the defense attorney Malcolm Burnstein said, “We shouldn’t have these defendants here . . . it should have been Lee Felsenstein.”
• • • • • • • •
In the summer of 1968, Lee Felsenstein placed an ad in the Barb. The ad itself was less than explicit: Renaissance Man, Engineer, and Revolutionist, seeking conversation. Not long after, a woman named Jude Milhon found the ad. Compared to the other sleazy come-ons in the back pages of the Barb (“GIRLS ONLY! I crave your feet”), it looked as though it came from a decent man, she thought. It was what Jude needed in that tumultuous year—a veteran of the civil rights movement and a long-time activist, she had been dazed by 1968’s political and social events. The very world seemed to be coming apart.
Jude was not only an activist, but a computer programmer. She had been close to a man named Efrem Lipkin who was also in the movement, and he was a computer wizard who sent her puzzles for entertainment—she would not sleep until she solved them. She learned programming and found it delightful, though she never did see why hackers found it obsessively consuming. Efrem was coming from the East to join her on the Coast in several months, but she was lonely enough meanwhile to contact the man who wrote the ad in the Barb.
Jude, a thin, plucky blond woman with steady blue eyes, immediately pegged Lee as a “quintessential technocreep,” but solely of his own making. Almost unwittingly, by her company, and particularly by her consistent straightforwardness, honed in countless self-evaluation sessions in various collectives, Jude began the long process of drawing out Lee Felsenstein’s personality. Their friendship was deeper than a dating relationship, and continued well after her friend Efrem arrived from the East Coast. Lee made friends with Efrem, who was not only an activist but a computer hacker as well. Efrem did not share Lee’s belief that technology could help the world; nevertheless, Lee’s decade-long wariness about computers was coming to an end. Because, in 1971, Lee had a new roommate—an XDS-940 computer.
It belonged to a group called Resource One, part of the Project One umbrella of Bay Area groups fostering community activism and humanistic programs. “One” had been started by an architect-engineer who wanted to give unemployed professionals something useful to do with their skills, help the community, and begin to dissipate the “aura of elitism, and even mysticism, that surrounds the world of technology.” Among the projects in One’s five-story, mustard-yellow warehouse in an industrial section of San Francisco, was the Resource One collective, formed of people “who believe that technological tools can be tools of social change when controlled by the people.” Resource One people had cajoled the Transamerica Corporation into lending an unused XDS-940 time-sharing computer to the group, so One could start gathering alternative mailing lists and setting up its program of computer education, economic research projects, and “demystification for the general public.”
The computer was a Hulking Giant, an $800,000 machine that was already obsolete. It filled a room, and required twenty-three tons of air conditioning. It needed a full-time systems person to get it going. Resource One needed a hacker, and Lee Felsenstein seemed a logical choice.
The systems software was set up by a Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) hacker who had written the original time-sharing system for the 940 at Berkeley. He was a long-haired, bearded Peter Deutsch, the same Peter Deutsch who at age twelve had peered over the console of the TX-0 twelve years before. A Berkeley graduate, he had managed to blend the whole-earth California lifestyle with intense hacking at PARC.
But it was Lee who was the machine’s caretaker. In his continual mythologizing of his life as a science-fiction novel, he saw this period as a reimmersion into the asocial role of a person whose best friend was a machine, a technological esthete sacrificing himself in the service of the Cabal. The monastery this time was in the basement of the Resource One warehouse; for thirty dollars a month he rented a room. It was below sewer level, had no running water, was filthy.
For Lee it was perfect—“I was going to be an invisible servant. Part of this machine.”
But Resource One failed Lee, who was far ahead of the group in realizing that the social uses of technology would depend on exercising something akin to the Hacker Ethic. The others in the group did not grow up yearning for hands-on technology . . . their connection to it was not visceral but intellectual. As a result, they would argue about how the machine should be used instead of throwing back the sheets and using it. It drove Lee crazy.
Lee later explained: “We were prigs, we were intolerable esthetes. Anybody who wanted to use the machine had to come argue their case before our meeting. They had to plead to use it.” Lee wanted to change the group’s outlook to a more hacker-like, hands-on openness but did not have the pluck to make the social effort—his self-esteem had hit a low point. He rarely even had the courage to venture out of the building to face the world—when he did, he’d glumly note that the tenderloin district bums looked cleaner, more prosperous than he did. Other people in the collective tried to open him up; once during a meeting they borrowed a television camera from a video collective upstairs, and every time there was laughter in the group they would zoom in on Lee, invariably poker-faced. Looking at the tape afterward, he could see what he was becoming—heartless. “I felt like I couldn’t afford to have a heart,” he later said. “I could see this happening, but I was pushing them away.”
After that experience, he tried to become more active in influencing the group. He confronted one goldbricker who spent most of the day slowly sipping coffee. “What have you been doing?” Felsenstein demanded. The guy began talking about vague ideas, and Lee said, “I’m not asking you what you want to do, I’m asking what have you done?” But he soon realized that calling people down for their bullshit was futile: like an inefficient machine, the group’s architecture itself was flawed. It was a bureaucracy. And the hacker in Lee could not abide that. Fortunately around that time, the spring of 1973, Efrem Lipkin came to Resource One, to rescue Lee Felsenstein and get Community Memory off the ground.