More Awesome Than Money

by Jim Dwyer

  Rafi took the podium to discuss the internal plumbing of Diaspora, and how it was going to work to be federated. Social networks, for the most part, did not communicate with one another—there was limited ability to send messages from someone in one network to someone in another. “We will make it like e-mail,” Rafi said. “It doesn’t matter what e-mail server you’re on, you’re able to communicate.”

  The transparency of their process, he said, would demonstrate the value of openly developed software. It would help “normal people understand that they won’t get taken advantage of.”

  Questions came from the audience. What about encryption?

  Max quickly spoke on that. “Our goal is not to build systems that are anonymous,” he said. “The group of people who want anonymity is smaller.”

  A pathway could be created for those who wanted that, he said.

  Ilya, who had been sitting quietly until that point, entered the conversation to put down a marker for cryptography. At the moment, he said, it was hard to make it comprehensible and simple on the screen, in the user interface, the UI.

  “We don’t know how to work that into the UI right now,” he said. “It’s important to have encryption available.”

  Another question: “Are you still heads down, or do you want people to contribute?”

  “Right now, we’re heads down,” Max replied, but in September they would open up the software. “We want lots of contributors.”

  They needed advice on getting ready for that daunting moment. “Any best practices?” Max asked. “We don’t want to turn people away. We want to service them as much as possible. We are four dudes. We might get totally railroaded. We’re going to be definitely very strapped for time. I’m kind of worried about what happens when we turn it on.”

  A Firefox staffer spoke: “I think you should be soliciting the community for more than just coders; also for people who get really familiar with the project, and someone who can triage for you. I think that’s really what you’re looking for first and foremost. You don’t want to get overwhelmed.”

  “’Cause that’s going to happen,” Max said.

  “You need a gatekeeper to prioritize,” the Firefoxer said.

  That wave of people wanting to help, and the prospect of being swamped by it, was on Ilya’s mind.

  “That’s one thing that definitely happened to us after the Times article,” Ilya said. “We got five thousand e-mails, and we did not at all have the bandwidth to answer.”

  “If you sent us an e-mail, then I’m really sorry,” Max said.

  The solution, a member of the audience said, was to set up an online forum, and let the crowds answers their own questions.

  What, someone asked, would it be like for the users? Ilya handled that one.

  “Social networks are really good at acquaintances,” he said, but not friendships, because of the difficulty in calibrating. “Privacy is not about not sharing at all; it’s about being really clear who you’re sharing with. We’re thinking about different contexts of how people share information.”

  Diaspora would reflect an individual’s social circles, and have clarity about which circles were getting information at a given moment. People ought to be able to control who they shared with.

  “When you connect with someone new, you should not be, oh, here’s an update, and all the embarrassing things you share with your closest friends you should not share with your coworkers. On the counter side of that, we want to facilitate sharing and make it really easy because that’s what the Internet is about—sharing cool stuff with the people you care about.”

  Another question: Were they actually inventing new technology, or were they synthesizing existing code and putting a good interface on it?

  Most of it, Rafi said, already existed—with one caveat. Discovery, or the ability to track down friends on existing networks, was a problem that had yet to be solved.

  “User experience and user interface are inventions and that’s the main part of the project,” Rafi answered. “In terms of technology, it’s basically all out there.”

  “We might not be inventing, but we might be the first implementers of it,” Max said.

  A final question was called from the audience: “So are you going to win?”

  “Of course,” Ilya said, breaking into a laugh, then adding a question of his own. “What is winning?”

  The launch was mid-September.

  CHAPTER TEN

  On the Wednesday after Labor Day, the four reassembled in San Francisco following their first sustained break of the summer. Max had flown to Linz, Austria, to speak at Ars Electronica, an annual festival for art, technology, and society that had been held in an old tobacco processing plant. The 2010 theme was “Repairing the World.”

  Ilya and Rafi sported new hairdos, stripes shaved along the sides of their heads. With Dan and Mike Sofaer, they had gone to Burning Man, the sprawling festival of utopianists held at the end of every summer in the Nevada desert, thousands of people camping, communing, and partying. They even staged a version of the Critical Mass bike rides that take place at the end of every month in cities around the world; at Burning Man, the ride was females only, with tops optional. Ilya thought it was an excellent idea, although he noted that the Burning Man version was not called Critical Mass.

  “Sorry to miss you at Critical Tits,” Ilya had texted to a friend.

  On the long ride back from the Nevada desert to San Francisco, Mike spoke with them about the evolution of the project. In theory, he had been banished from business discussions early in the summer during the flare-up over acknowledging Mark Zuckerberg’s donation, but he was Rafi’s brother, and he had experience that all of them lacked. Plus they enjoyed going over to his house every few weeks for a night of board games. His involvement was delicate.

  Now Mike asked: Do you want Max to be the CEO of Diaspora? They did not. He informed them that Max fully intended to be the CEO—in fact, he had told Mike that was his ambition on his first day in San Francisco—and that unless they acted, Max would be the top dog. Which of them wanted to take on the CEO job? Actually, none of the others. Back in June, when they had incorporated, Max had been listed, somewhat casually, as the president and CEO, though the others did not regard this as an actual decision to have him run the company. Besides, they were not thinking about the business: they were absorbed by building. Max was, too, but he was thinking already about how they would sustain and grow Diaspora.

  If the summer had been full of sudden twists bringing them to places they had never expected to be, the fall had its own peculiar dynamic. It was the first time any of them had not been in school in September. As graduates, Dan and Max would, in any event, have been leaving behind the rituals of restarting classes, the familiarities and predictability of the academic calendar that had ruled nearly their entire lives.

  They were in San Francisco, in the Pivotal offices on Market Street.

  “My body feels like, okay, you’re going to have a big change,” Max said. “I think it’s this residual muscle memory of going back.”

  “This would be the third day,” Dan said.

  The arrival of the school term churned Rafi’s ambivalence about the whole enterprise. Not only was he the youngest of the four, but he was the one with the greatest emotional distance from the project. His personal compass was not pointed to computer science; his interests ranged across the law and politics, math and neuroscience. Learning how to hack was, of course, elemental to twenty-first-century literacy. But he had older brothers in the tech world. It was not his passion. He had been undecided about continuing with Diaspora beyond the summer; he had weighed returning to NYU for the fall semester, finally deciding in mid-August that he would join Ilya in taking a leave. “It’s a little weird,” he said. “There were classes I was looking forward to taking.”

  “What this means is tha
t we are not just a summer project,” Max said.

  They had barely settled back at their computers when a man paused at their tables.

  “Do you know where the Diaspora group is?” he asked.

  Unscheduled visitors were part of their routine. Mostly, they were a class of gawker. Corporate clients of Pivotal would come to the sprawling space for meetings about their online business—people at companies like Best Buy, Groupon, Gowalla—and after their own affairs were dealt with, they would be escorted through the floor by their Pivotal manager. The office had props typical of the hip tech workspace: the pantry with unlimited treats and drinks, an archipelago of island meeting spaces, racks near the doors where scores of bicycles hung. It also had the Diaspora kids. Sometimes, visitors paused at their patch of table space. As this one did.

  “That’s us. How are you doing?” Ilya said. They always gave a friendly welcome, as they were temperamentally polite. Even if graciousness hadn’t come naturally, brains did; they had come to understand, startling as it was, that they were celebrity geeks, and that these little walk-bys mattered to Pivotal, their generous host.

  This particular visitor was a business graduate student.

  “I was hoping to get an invitation to the developer release,” the man said.

  “Sure,” Ilya said. “Are you a developer?”

  “I’m just an average user,” the man said.

  He fell into a short conversation with Rafi, telling him that he did have some programming experience. Hearing this, Max braced himself to be asked for a job.

  “So who are you seeing at Pivotal?” Max asked.

  “I’m here to see you,” the man said. “I’ve read a lot about the project and am very interested in what you come up with.”

  Whoa.

  They deciphered the man’s visit: he had come to see them. Unannounced. With no appointment. They knew the virtual eyes of the world were on them, but an actual person, a total stranger standing over their workspace, was a bit much. Suddenly the others could see why Rafi had been creeped out when someone tweeted that he had just left the subway.

  “Leave your details,” Max said. “We’ll put you on the mailing list. The invites will be going out in the next week or so, if all goes according to plan.”

  This appeared to satisfy him. They watched him walk toward the elevator on the other side of the room. Then Ilya, grinning, crept up next to Rafi, and stroked his arm, as if he were fingering the hem of the garment of an emperor or rock star.

  “Oh, Rafi, can I touch you?” Ilya teased. Rafi recoiled.

  Their next plunge into the open waters of public life, a few weeks off, was very much on their minds.

  In August, they had promised on their blog to release the developers code on September 15. This meant that their technical road map and the basic code foundation would be available on a public repository called GitHub. From that moment on, the global community of free-software developers could build on what the Diaspora team had started; anyone could suggest changes and submit them to the team, or anyone could just create a “fork” from their code and take it somewhere else.

  The code release was big nerd news, but to the amazement of the guys, it quickly hopped the wall into a world expecting a fully formed social network, not what amounted to a wiring diagram. In draft form.

  With dizzying speed, word spread in the nontech media that Diaspora itself, not just lines and lines of code, was going to launch on September 15. It was easy to understand how that happened. The blog posting had been their first public statement since the Kickstarter explosion in the spring. Their silence had been tactical, to avoid stoking speculation and stories about something that did not exist. As thrilling as the response to the Kickstarter appeal had been, they were acutely aware of the high expectations it had created, and they wanted to do nothing to accelerate them. Their intention for the summer had been to get work done, not give a running play-by-play of the line-by-line development.

  Although the software sausage was still being made, many people assumed they would be sitting down to breakfast on September 15. Max wanted to update the post to make the situation clear; Ilya argued that they should say nothing more. Perhaps from his days in the high school drama club, lighting different parts of the stage, he had a keen sense of public spectacle. Sometimes what you didn’t show was even more important than what was fully lighted. Another amplifying blog post, he argued, would dull the impact of their communications. The debate engaged them all.

  “There could be a complete wave of haters,” Rafi said.

  That wouldn’t be anything new, Dan said: “The beards are hating on us already—how come we didn’t make it open source from the beginning?”

  That is, some of the free-software purists were complaining that the Diaspora Four had not published their early scratchings. The notion that all drafting would go on in public seemed disconnected from the natural history of most human endeavors. They had been creating the framework of the project, and putting the fundamental elements of their vision into place. This is what would be made public next week.

  Maybe, Ilya mused, they should have a special reservoir or holding tank for the bile that was sure to come their way. “We could make a ranters’ list. Or a haters’ list,” he suggested.

  The public’s high, perhaps unrealistic expectations, were bundled into the whole Diaspora story, the great surge of support, the sharp hunger for a Facebook alternative. That same package included the shrinking of their private space, and an ill-formed conception by strangers that they were entitled to some ownership of their lives.

  Some of it was intriguing. A friend had texted Dan to tell him that her summer Italian language class was reading a newspaper from Milan, and had spent an entire class discussing an article about Diaspora. Max’s sister told him that a class at the Parsons School of Design had been assigned the task of designing what a distributed, privacy-aware social network should look like. In case anyone thought it was all dazzling, Rafi read aloud part of an online discussion about Diaspora.

  “This guy sees us as a major threat, that we’re a ‘New World Order Mafia.’”

  Rafi recited the rant: “‘They’re destroying our country and the rest of the world through their corrupt practices. Well, these are the same people who own Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Google and more. These people who make these sites gather information on people and monitor what we think. If and when we find out their attack on our lives, this Diaspora group is backed and financed by the same people. All of these guys are qualified to be Israelis, and they are going to do the same thing as Facebook.’”

  Ilya cackled.

  The post continued in the same vein, invoking 9/11 and people selling secret helicopters.

  “I just want to give him a hug and tell him it’s going to be okay,” Dan said.

  How long could they last? Dan was notoriously careful about how they spent the money—“He didn’t want us to pay for Yosem’s dinner,” Max had complained—but they all shared a sense that they had to responsibly steward their funds. Moreover, their families were supplementing their Kickstarter reserves in various ways, like covering cell phone bills and trips home.

  Over coffee, Max said that he was keen to hire engineering help—“heavy iron,” he called it—but a few of the senior people at Pivotal had counseled otherwise. Instead, they suggested that Diaspora get a product manager, someone who would shepherd their existing work for release to the general public. Wouldn’t it be hard for the group to have someone new calling the shots? Maybe they would not need an outsider, Max said.

  “Pick one of us exclusively,” Max said. “Our democracy of building a project is hard enough. You can’t build a product with four cooks in the kitchen.”

  —

  A friend from New York, Jamie Wilkinson, visited at lunchtime. He had recently written a piece of code that people could easi
ly install on their browsers called the Google Alarm—a little monitor that sounded an alert anytime Google inserted tracking software onto the computer. “The idea is to make the invisible web visible,” he explained. “You might have sixty little tracking bugs on a website. It’s this totally quiet experience that nobody ever pays attention to.”

  The alarm made the bugs impossible to ignore. It also got him attention: suddenly, he found himself being called on as an expert on online privacy by television networks. He had also taught “Internet Famous” at a design school in which students were graded on their ability to generate online attention, no matter how spurious.

  The Diaspora guys were eager to hear about Wilkinson’s own sudden wave of fame, and its faintly ridiculous contagiousness.

  “I did a CNN International interview about it and they asked me to come back and do a debate,” Jamie said.

  “Suddenly you’re the go-to expert,” Ilya said.

  “It reminds me of Jonah Peretti,” Max said.

  “It’s just like that,” Jamie said.

  Peretti, who had helped create the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, had spotted an offer by Nike for customers to buy sneakers with their names or other message printed on them, saying the program was “about freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are.” So Peretti submitted the custom ID “sweatshop” for a pair of running shoes, a poke at the company for the conditions under which its shoes were made. Peretti’s request was turned down. His e-mail exchange with the Nike customer service department became a viral classic, and he found himself written about in, among other outlets, Time and the Wall Street Journal. He also appeared on the Today show to debate a Nike representative.

  “He got all these invitations to go to worker-labor union talks,” Max said. “He became like the expert on sweatshop labor. He thought it was funny.”