Michael Hart may not be the most important member of the early open-information movement. He is certainly not the only person who worked to digitize and disseminate computerized texts. But his long persistence, with near-monomaniacal focus despite little positive reinforcement, makes him an emblematic figure, and perhaps an instructive one, too. Just as the invention of the Gutenberg press had helped catalyze the Protestant Reformation, Hart thought that computerized texts would have a similarly metamorphic effect on modern society, that they would “break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy.”33 E-books, he believed, would change the world—as soon as the world learned that they existed.
“You have to realize that for the first 17 years absolutely NO ONE paid any attention,” Hart wrote to an online mailing list in 2006. “Even the friends that helped me thot [sic] I was nuts, and that it would never work.”34 But even Hart’s enemies acknowledged his sincerity and dedication. Hart spent much of his adult life surviving on income he received from renting out rooms in his cluttered house to college students and forgoing traditional employment to spend his days and nights apostolizing e-books from his basement office. His walls were adorned with index cards onto which he had inked various aphorisms in block lettering with a thick black marker. Marcus Aurelius: A PERSON CAN NOT LEARN WHAT S/HE ALREADY KNOWS OR THINKS S/HE KNOWS. H. G. Wells: ULTIMATE COURAGE IS BRAVERY OF THE MIND. William Blake: I MUST INVENT MY OWN SYSTEM OR BE ENSLAVED BY OTHER MEN’S.35
For Michael Hart, the digitization of public-domain literature was a vocation in its original sense: a spiritual calling to a movement. But movements need names, and Hart delayed for a long while—for seventeen years following his transcription of the Declaration of Independence, to be exact—before choosing one. Lying on a mattress on the floor of his house in Urbana, Illinois, in 1988,36 Hart pondered various names for his endeavor—The Electronic Book Factory, The Never Ending Library, Library Galactica37—before finally adopting one that elegantly captured both his own revolutionary ambition and his endeavor’s transformative potential: Project Gutenberg.
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MEN like Michael Hart are naturally drawn to libraries. For those who are intrinsically suspicious of authority and received wisdom; for those whose curiosity transcends the boundaries of grade levels and lesson plans; for those who are fascinated more by process than by outcome, libraries can be a godsend. They are repositories of unfiltered information, and guarantors of America’s autodidactic ideal. As Herbert Putnam wrote in 1895, a clever person who cannot or will not attend college “is still by familiar experience equipped to pursue a higher education in the public library: all the best that mankind has had to say in history, science, or art, being placed there freely at his service.”38 When Michael Hart began his life’s work, that intellectual bounty was more plentiful and accessible than ever before.
If libraries nurtured dreamers like Michael Hart, then digital computers and networks activated them. “When I first learned I had access to the Internet back in 1971 it was as if one of those lights you see in the comics went off with a flash right over my head,” Hart recalled.39 Generations of disaffected nerds have felt the same way. The real world favors the handsome and coordinated, rewards conformism and compliance, and reinforces systemic inequities by design. The Internet offers an alternative. Thanks to its decentralized architecture, the network inverts the way that power and expertise tend to consolidate in the hands of big organizations that can use that power to perpetuate the divide between rich and poor. “With the advent of personal computers and with information becoming more and more the direct cause of production, we have a great chance at a new renaissance,” Hart observed in the 1980s.40 For many people, the Internet and computers appeared to be tools that would rebalance the world.
The American government didn’t realize it was underwriting something so radical. One of the results of the post-Sputnik surge in science spending was the creation of a Department of Defense office called the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. Initially responsible for working on spaceflight, ARPA soon shifted priorities and became the government’s long-term research-and-development laboratory, specializing in projects with minimal short-term applications that might nevertheless prove important down the line. One of these projects was the distributed computer network that would eventually become known as the ARPANET.
The ARPANET was designed to let ARPA-affiliated computers talk to one another and transmit data remotely. But J. C. R. “Lick” Licklider, an early executive at ARPA, also harbored bigger plans for the network. Whereas the Department of Defense hoped the ARPANET would make America stronger and safer, Licklider hoped it would make humans smarter and happier. “The idea on which Lick’s worldview pivoted,” according to Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon in Where Wizards Stay Up Late, “was that technological progress would save humanity.”41 Machines’ storage, retrieval, and processing capabilities would help their human operators to be more productive by minimizing error and mundane repetition. Humans would, in turn, improve and refine the machines. This cycle of mutual benefit and development would continue until humanity arrived at what Licklider described as a “man-computer symbiosis.”
Licklider had attended the Project Intrex conference and was enthusiastic about the prospect of digital libraries. “We need to substitute for the book a device that will make it easy to transmit information without transporting material,” he wrote in a 1965 book titled Libraries of the Future.42 The ARPANET took a step in that direction. The network would support a new, flat system of information sharing, an information commons with multiple points of entry. Licklider saw the “intergalactic network,” as he called it, as his gift to the world, one that would keep on giving. Though he left ARPA long before the ARPANET was completed, his spirit and ambition guided his successors’ work.
The early ARPANET consisted almost entirely of academic affiliates using institutional computers. The US government provided the network infrastructure and initially decided to restrict commercial use of the service. (The last of these restrictions wasn’t lifted until 1995.) Thus these early users, prohibited from exploiting the network for profit, used it instead to foster the free exchange of information.
This munificent ideology was encoded into what the author Steven Levy described in his insightful book Hackers as the “hacker ethic.” Hackers—a term for early computer programmers—wrote computer code and believed that other hackers should share their code and computing resources with their peers. This policy was, in part, a pragmatic one: at the time, computing resources were scarce, and possessiveness impeded productivity. But the attitude was also a conscious philosophical choice, a statement that the world ought to be open, efficient, and collaborative. Nowhere was this hacker ethic taken more seriously than at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As Levy tells it in Hackers, the AI Lab was something of a socialist utopia for computer programmers. The lab was charged with developing thinking machines, and it deployed a lot of computers toward that end. These computers were programmed and otherwise tended to by a crew of young hackers, some of whom were paid employees, others just enthusiasts who congregated at the lab to be close to the objects of their desire. The hackers wrote code and maintained the lab’s computers with radical transparency. Any hacker could access another’s files to study or improve them. The computer terminals had no passwords; few locks were on the doors. For many of the hackers, the lab functioned as a surrogate dormitory. In 1986, a former AI Lab hacker named Richard Stallman recalled how he and other programmers would “stay up as long as you can hacking, because you just don’t want to stop. And then when you’re completely exhausted, you climb over to the nearest soft horizontal surface.”43 The next day, they would do it all over again.44
An intense, mischievous man who sported a dark beard, studied folk dancing, and sometimes wore a button reading IMPEACH GOD,45 Stallman was dubbed “The Last of the True Hackers” by Levy. He began h
is MIT career in 1974 as a graduate physics student, but spent his evenings working on computers at the AI Lab. After a while, Stallman examined his priorities and realized that they no longer included the study of physics; he dropped out of school in 1975 and embraced his digital destiny. Stallman became a full-time AI Lab programmer. Eventually, he emerged as the conscience of the hacking community, an unreconstructed champion of open information.
The same independent, inclusive ethos that empowered Stallman and the AI Lab hackers also created opportunities for people like Michael Hart—difficult, ambitious individuals who fared poorly in hierarchical systems but thrived in nonconformist environments. Like Stallman, Hart used computers to build the sort of world that he wanted to see, one in which knowledge was freely given rather than sold, one predicated on altruism rather than profit. “Idealism—the way you think + feel things ought to be—is soooooo wonderful!!!!!!” Hart once scribbled in his diary.46 The early digital utopians saw computers as instruments of social realignment, the vanguard of a revolution that would remake the world along more egalitarian lines.
It didn’t last. In the early 1980s, at the dawn of the personal-computing era, some of the AI Lab’s hackers defected to a company called Symbolics, where they constructed commercial versions of the machines they once built at MIT. Others went to a competing firm. The AI Lab hacking corps dwindled, and its motivating principles came to seem increasingly obsolete. For Stallman, these defections only reinforced his commitment to free software.
Stallman believed that proprietary software was inimical to the hacker ethic, and that it impeded the free flow of knowledge. Treating software users strictly as customers rather than potential collaborators implied that the public could contribute nothing of value but money. “The rule made by the owners of proprietary software was, ‘If you share with your neighbor, you are a pirate. If you want any changes, beg us to make them,’ ” Stallman wrote.47 He couldn’t abide this philosophy, so he quit MIT to develop a free computer-operating system. “With a free operating system, we could again have a community of cooperating hackers—and invite anyone to join,” Stallman wrote. “And anyone would be able to use a computer without starting out by conspiring to deprive his or her friends.”48
He called the program GNU, a “recursive acronym” that stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.” (Unix is a popular computer-operating system. A gnu is also a large, hairy wildebeest, an animal to which Stallman bears a faint resemblance, if you squint and use your imagination.) After working on the GNU Project for approximately two years, Stallman doubled down on his principles and founded a complementary organization called the Free Software Foundation.
The Free Software Foundation (“Don’t think of free as in free beer; think free as in free speech,” Stallman explained) was and is dedicated to the idea that unrestricted access to information and computer code is a simple matter of justice. The foundation argues that software ought to be liberated from licenses, passwords, and other restrictions that foster adversarial relationships among computer programmers and users. “My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation,” Stallman wrote.49 “I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better.”
Though Hart and Stallman worked in different fields, they shared similar tools, goals, and methods. They also shared similar blind spots. Free software and free literature by themselves will not necessarily improve society, and proprietary books and computer programs will not necessarily destroy it. The rise of a commercial trade around cultural artifacts can also end up expanding the audience for those artifacts, exposing them to people who might never have known they existed.
But commercial culture has never been particularly compatible with Hart and Stallman’s brand of single-minded integrity. Free software, free e-books, free culture all promote user independence over reflexive compliance with authority and encourage users to become more than just passive recipients of other people’s cultural products. “The perspective is that of changing the world from the bottom rather than changing things from the top down,” Hart reflected. “If I had waited for those at the top to approve of what I was planning to do, even waited HALF as long as they wanted, then you would [have] never heard of me or of Project Gutenberg.”50
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THOUGH Hart liked to say that Project Gutenberg has existed continuously since 1971, in truth, it lived mostly in the traps of his mind for those first seventeen years. Hart’s papers from that period make no mention of Project Gutenberg or any similar project—and the man seemingly recorded every stray thought he ever had. He continued to digitize famous texts—the Bill of Rights in 1972, the US Constitution in 1973, other patriotic documents in subsequent years.51 He spent the 1980s digitizing the entire King James Bible. (It is a very long book.) But for most of this period, Project Gutenberg, to the extent it existed at all, was a hobby, intermittently pursued, fated for obscurity.
“My unhappiness is that of an unfulfilled potential,” Hart wrote of himself in 1983.52 He pursued employment in various technical fields: stereo sales, systems analysis, computer consulting. He became a prolific writer of complaint letters to businesses, institutions, and individuals who failed to meet his often impossibly high standards. (“I do not know what you want from Coleman,” a representative of the Coleman outdoor products company wrote in plaintive response to one of Hart’s letters.)53 He briefly considered dropping out of society to found a self-sufficient farm, “complete with power generators, flour mill, + maybe a loom if anyone can run it.”54 He got married. The union didn’t last. All the while, he was wondering how and when he would make his mark.
In 1984, Apple released the Macintosh computer, one of the first home computers for the nontechnical user, and a market for Hart’s product slowly began to emerge. The gargantuan mainframes of the 1960s had given way to smaller computers suitable to the home office, produced and marketed by entrepreneurs who realized the potential for consumer revenue. Microsoft’s Bill Gates—whose MS-DOS and Windows operating systems eventually dominated the PC market—and Apple’s Steve Jobs, for instance, were unmoved by the hackers’ utopian rhetoric. They wanted to make money, not save the world. But by bringing computers to the casual user, their products also amplified the message of those technologists who were operating from nonmaterial motives.
Hart joined several clubs and organizations for personal-computing enthusiasts and met other people who shared his interests, if not his grand ambitions. In 1988, he had a premonition “that something very powerful and fulfilling was just over the horizon.”55 Encouraged by the ascendance of the personal computer, and buoyed by the personal connections he had made in the various clubs to which he belonged, he took the first steps toward turning his e-book hobby into Project Gutenberg. Hart gradually started floating his idea to the wider world. “Dear Word Perfect User Group Members,” one of his pitches began. “How would **YOU** like to be part of the biggest book project since Gutenberg invented the printing press?”56 Project Gutenberg, at the time, featured approximately ten texts. Few others shared Hart’s optimism that it would ever contain many more.
“I am not convinced that your idea has any future to it. I find it difficult to see why anyone would want to sit in front of a computer screen and read a book,” an official at Illinois Benedictine College, where Hart served as an unpaid adjunct professor, informed him in 1988, suggesting that he instead focus on “some way of animating the texts and turn them into some sort of video.”57 That same year, a friend in California told Hart that a professor at San Jose State had scoffed at the idea of a digital library. “Seems that librarians as well as publishers fear for their jobs if electronic publishing becomes popular,” the friend observed. “Boo Hoo!”58
Hart admired Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, which was loosely devoted to the idea that geniuses tend to be subsumed by the mediocrities that surround them and are usually unapp
reciated in their own time. But unlike Rand’s protagonist, Hart was unwilling to forsake those who had spurned his labors. He clung to his mission of bringing e-books to the world, whether or not its inhabitants either wanted or deserved them. “I know I will never be happy without trying to see if I can change the world for the better in a major manner,” he wrote in 1990.59 That January, Hart traveled to the American Library Association’s midwinter meeting to proselytize for e-books and Project Gutenberg. There, he vowed, “There will be 10,000 Machine-Readable-Texts available by Dec. 31, 2000, even if I had to make them all myself.”60
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IN 1990, a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee wrote an article for a house newsletter at CERN, a particle-physics laboratory in Switzerland. Berners-Lee programmed software at CERN, and, like many idealistic coders before him, he had become enamored of the Gospel of Richard Stallman. “A source of much debate over recent years has been whether to write software in-house or buy it from commercial suppliers. Now, a third alternative is becoming significant in what some see as a revolution in software supply,” he wrote, referring to the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project. Berners-Lee wondered whether Stallman’s ideas might not be applied to the work he was doing for CERN. “Just as we publish physics for free, should we not in certain cases ‘publish’ our software?” he asked.61 One year after publishing his Stallman-inspired note in the CERN house journal, Berners-Lee followed through on that note’s central idea when he released to the world, for free, a project that he called the World Wide Web.
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