More Awesome Than Money

by Jim Dwyer

  A moment later, Rafi returned from the vicinity of the men’s room, and Ilya skipped up to him, his hands up in the air for a high five. Rafi fended him off with a forearm.

  Max thought through the orchestration. The announcement was being broadcast through several venues on the web, so everything would have to get pushed out within thirty seconds—opening the repository on GitHub, posting the announcement on the blog, sending out the tweet, and blowing the trumpets on Kickstarter.

  “Let’s all hold hands!” Ilya said, laughing, a bit embarrassed because he meant it.

  Actually, their hands were otherwise occupied. Ilya pushed one send, Dan another, Max a third. “It’s pulling,” Dan said.

  Ilya spotted the draft tweet, which said, “Developer release of Diaspora.” This felt banal.

  “We should make it more epic. ‘One small step,’” he said, grandly invoking the words spoken by the astronaut Neil Armstrong at the moment he became the first person to set foot on the moon.

  “It’s a tweet, man,” Dan said, a bit exhausted. He and Ilya jousted over the language for a moment.

  “Hurry up!” Max called. “Someone else is going to tweet our shit.”

  Dan typed, “Diaspora is real.” Then he stretched his arms overhead. “Finally,” he said.

  Rafi spoke. “I’m starting to get hungry,” he said, and the others realized that they had barely had a bite to eat all day.

  Still, they were gripped by the numbers of people clicking onto the code. In the first minute, 349. “We’re on Hacker News,” Max said triumphantly.

  Ilya’s phone was ringing and would not stop. Finally, he looked at the screen and saw that it was Jamie Wilkinson, their friend and ardent champion.

  “Yo, bud, we’re out there!” Ilya said.

  He paused for a moment.

  “Typos on the blog post?” Ilya said. “Are they worth fixing? I’m too high on adrenaline and all this other stuff.”

  The error, it turned out, was not a small one. They had spelled Diaspora as “Disapora.”

  Max fixed the spelling. Their first troll filed a comment on the Internet relay chat, and Rafi read out his message in a monotone: “‘I want to stick my dick in this code. But it’s coated in herpes spores.’”

  They roared and high-fived one another.

  —

  Four baskets of bread vanished at the steak house before the waitress took orders. It was their first food of the day. Someone mentioned Evan Korth. Ilya slapped his forehead. “I promised to send an e-mail before we pushed the button, but I totally forgot,” he said.

  Dan reminded them that after returning from Burning Man with them, Korth had left his belongings at the Sofaer home in Palo Alto.

  “He’s sleeping in his office naked,” Dan said.

  Ilya phoned Korth in New York.

  “So sorry,” he said. “But your name is all over the Internet.” “Korth” had been the password for the crash-test dummy they had used during development, and they had left it in the code.

  Mike Sofaer had joined the dinner celebration, wearing a T-shirt printed with the title “National Sarcasm Society.” Below that, it said: “Like we need your support.”

  The Sofaer brothers were in fine form. “Filet mignon,” Rafi told the waitress. “Very rare.”

  “I want the filet mignon, too,” Mike said, “but I want it rarer than his.”

  Mike’s phone could be turned into a portable router, so they all were able to get Wi-Fi at the table on their phones. This allowed them to read out responses from Facebook and the blogs. Already, they had four hundred “watchers,” people who had signed into the code with the ability to propose changes. If just 10 percent made contributions, they would be getting rapid improvement.

  “When we want something done, we can go away,” Dan said.

  “We can take naps,” Rafi said.

  Thrilled as they were at the prospect of having other people join them to write and rewrite the code, this meant new legal issues, which seemed technical but were at the ethical core of their undertaking. The license in a free- or open-software project is the governing document of the collaboration, spelling out what contributors of code could expect. Typically, they had to assign their copyrights to the project. Dozens of types of free licenses exist, but under the core principles, developed by Richard A. Stallman and Eben Moglen, no one could stop anyone else from copying, modifying, or selling the code. That lack of restriction never went away, no matter how many times the program was modified; through all its iterations, every time it was improved or updated, the intellectual property remained fully available for inspection or use. Other licensing arrangements permitted some retention of rights by the people who contributed the code.

  The choice of license included practical concerns of the community of specialist coders who would be working on the project. The Diaspora guys gave the license almost no attention until it was time to make the code public. At the last minute, Rafi scrambled to get one, and the license that went up with the code was not entirely “free” under the Moglen-Stallman regime. The code contributors retained some rights. So did Diaspora Inc., the for-profit corporation they had formed in June.

  At dinner, Ilya said they needed to revise the terms; he felt that they did not fully reflect the principles that the project was meant to embody.

  “You should give it some thought,” Mike Sofaer counseled.

  “I’ve given it a lot of thought,” Ilya said.

  The license was broken. Fixing it was a task for another day.

  —

  After dessert, the group stepped into the brisk San Francisco night and walked toward Market Street. I fell in with Rafi and we chatted about Moglen’s proposal that Rafi give testimony as an expert on the subject of Internet tracking. The Sofaer family knew the ways of Washington.

  As we walked along Kearney Street, I asked him what he would tell Congress.

  “The truth,” Rafi said. “If there’s one thing our father taught us, it’s tell the truth to Congress and judges.”

  We switched our conversation into the cross-examination mode of congressional hearing rooms.

  “Isn’t it true, Mr. Sofaer, that you created this ‘Diaspora’ for the sole purpose of getting girls?”

  Rafi did not hesitate.

  “With all due respect, Mr. Congressman,” he said. “Is there any other reason?”

  —

  Within hours of the code’s release, other hackers identified security vulnerabilities. “The bottom line,” said one prominent critic, Patrick McKenzie, “is currently there is nothing you cannot do to someone’s Diaspora account, absolutely nothing.” McKenzie was interviewed for an online computer trade publication, and his comment was repeated in hundreds of publications.

  The troll commentariat rose in unison to declare the project dead on arrival. “Diaspora, security catastrophe,” dominated the narrative. The guys were not alarmed, but people who cared about them were. Carolyn Grippi, following the coverage online, called her son one morning in a panic. “Mom, calm down,” Dan told her. “It’s going to be fine. Most of it is already fixed.”

  Indeed, most of the security problems were quickly patched up; the very purpose of releasing the code publicly was to let hackers and coders bang away at it and find problems before ordinary people started using it. The failure to do this had led to the instantaneous demise of Haystack, the prematurely acclaimed digital lifeline offered to Iranian dissidents by Austin Heap. Writing in a blog later, McKenzie reported that he had found “a half dozen critical errors” in the code they had launched. Several variations of the errors let users log in as themselves, and then mess around with the data of other people, or even take over their accounts. Another vulnerability was the encryption that Diaspora encased around the communications between two users. The code permitted an attacker to overwrite the exis
ting encryption key and capture someone else’s private messages. McKenzie spelled out the flaws only after they had been repaired.

  Commentators on McKenzie’s blog debated their significance. Some insisted that they showed incurable naïveté on the part of the Diaspora team; others said such early mistakes were common when code was developed with the language and framework used by Diaspora, called Ruby on Rails. Most of those projects were backed with venture capital, which did not do wholesale public code dumps during the building. Naturally, Diaspora looked worse: the guys had simply pulled up the shades on what was normally a hidden process. “It’s just that we don’t get to see the code of most venture-backed start-ups at launch,” wrote one reader of McKenzie’s blog.

  Max, Ilya, Dan, and Rafi had already moved on to other refinements, though the “security problems” of Diaspora were frequently invoked, if rarely spelled out. The reality of the process, rather than the noise around it, was consuming them.

  “Lead, follow, or get out of the way,” Ilya said. “The armchair quarterbacks. Security stuff, we fixed most of it right away. I think we are way more thicker-skinned than we were at the start of it.”

  With relish, he quoted a tweet from a hacker who was following the project: “‘Now that Diaspora is out, everyone who complained that it is vaporware is going to complain about the way it works.’”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After four months in a city where they knew no one but one another, isolated by the drudgery of waking hours spent at Pivotal or hunched over laptops in their dingy quarters, Ilya, Dan, and Rafi craved a change. They came back to New York at the end of September on various pretexts—an open-source video conference sponsored by Mozilla where Ilya and Max were on a panel; a lecture that Dan was giving at a design conference in Providence, Rhode Island; and consultations with some lawyers for Rafi about licensing arrangements for coding contributions to the project. But really, three of them just needed the ordinary fruit of college life: a network of friends with whom they could hang out. In person. Not online. No less than the others, Max also was conscious about finding balance in his life, but he saw no need to go back to New York for it; in his mind, he had definitively closed the East Coast chapter and was fully committed to the life of a budding entrepreneur in the Bay Area. Nevertheless, he, too, had come back east for this break.

  The people they had been spending their days with at the Pivotal offices in San Francisco were almost all professionals hitting top stride in their careers; that is, they were older, settled into family and living arrangements.

  New York, on the other hand, teemed with friends and peers.

  “That’s why we’re slightly heartbroken about this epic city,” Ilya said over coffee near NYU.

  Being back in New York spun the flywheel of his mind ever faster. He had stopped by an anarchist collective, ABC No Rio, which housed a group called Food Not Bombs. “One thought, to add to my list of projects when I sort of run out of projects, is to make penny stoves,” he said, describing a contraption made from soda cans and using ethanol as fuel. “You could make lots of them and give them to homeless people. There’s so much food that goes to waste.”

  Ilya paused. “I was much more interested in this last summer,” he said. “I get really excited about projects and, like, one-tenth of them really happen. Because there’s never enough time for everything.”

  Musing about San Francisco, he reported that he had managed to find someone with whom to home-brew beer. Something to do that did not involve coding all day, work he could do with his hands, and that had an end. The deluge of criticism about the security holes, which had been fixed relatively simply and quickly, was an example of nonproductive carping.

  “There are so many things simply lost to passivity. Instead of just complaining about something, just do it. I think that’s very much the way things get done. Being passive and cynical is just boring—you have these awesome movements that are happening.”

  He reeled off a list of developments that he saw as positive: the rise of hacker spaces in major cities; the emergence of copyright licenses that liberalized the use of creative material; the legalization of jailbreaking an iPhone—meaning that an owner could load it with applications that were not approved by Apple, which might make the device vulnerable to malicious hacking but also created easier paths to innovation. And through Diaspora, he and his friends had shown the potency of crowdsource funding for projects on Kickstarter and other platforms like it. “That completely undermines the way funds are raised for creative projects,” Ilya said.

  On his pilgrimage of encounters in his junior year of high school, he had reckoned that about one in four people were alive to what was going on in the world. “This is something I think about a lot,” he said. “There are people who are completely unaware of hacking, making and creating things just for the awesomeness. Then there are people who are aware and regret that they don’t do enough projects. And then there are people who are actively working on projects.

  “An epic project for the future would be to somehow use social pressure to move both of these groups in the area. It’s like you’re not aware of awesome people doing awesome stuff. You should at least become aware of it. We need to move both of these groups in the right mental direction.

  “It doesn’t matter what it is. Whether it is basket weaving. Or beer making. The world is run by those who show up.”

  —

  Text alerts pinged like hail from Rafi’s phone. He was delighted. His NYU friends were meeting, and they were sending him word because they knew he was around. As it happened, he was on the third floor of the Courant Institute, in the computer room at NYU where he and the other three guys had taken the world by storm six months earlier.

  He made a call.

  “Lots of people are there? Great,” he said. “I’ll be over.”

  He listened for a moment. A scowl crossed his face, an unfamiliar cloud. It seemed that the bouncer at the bar was checking ID cards. Rafi had celebrated his twentieth birthday not long before, still a year too young to drink. Plus, he looked sixteen.

  “Then I guess not,” he said into the phone.

  Slight bummer, but not a calamity. He was just glad to be back in New York. Diaspora was a great opportunity for him, and he would stay with the project for another year at the most, or maybe just a few more months, until the end of the second semester. But he would have preferred, as Ilya and Dan did, that they were working on the East Coast. He had a level-headed view of the situation.

  On the one hand, no one in the group had a better handle than Rafi on the nuts-and-bolts support Diaspora was getting from software developers around the world, giving their own time. He was managing the suggestions and proposed revisions that were coming in every day, nearly every hour. There had been five major submissions. And every day, it seemed, someone was translating Diaspora’s pages into a new language.

  Yet he was cautious about whether this enthusiasm would amount to anything. The translations would soon be obsolete if they weren’t already, because the code was being revised so often. Plus the general public did not care about the intricacies of software development, and whether it was done with purely altruistic motives.

  “For consumer software, usability is way more important,” he said. “It is not an impressive piece of software. None of the four of us are genius engineers.”

  An e-mail popped onto his screen, and reading it, he made a face. This whole business of him testifying in front of Congress was getting out of hand. A staff member on the committee wanted seventy-five hard copies of his testimony ahead of time. “This can’t be serious,” he said. “Don’t they have printers?”

  Sure, the idea of testifying before Congress was exciting, but he had too high a regard for what he did not know to feel comfortable sitting as a witness before a committee. The last thing Diaspora needed was more hype. Plus they would undoubtedly dream u
p new hassles. He was bailing out.

  —

  The hallway at the Fashion Institute of Technology teemed with people, but a woman walking along spotted a familiar face.

  “Max! Congratulations on the article! You’re famous,” she said.

  “Thanks a lot,” Max said. New York magazine had run a lengthy, insightful profile on the four, but included it in a special section entitled “Who Runs New York?”

  “It’s ridiculous,” Max noted. “I don’t even live in New York anymore.”

  That weekend in October 2010, by far the coolest place in New York for a young, hip tech person was a basement at the Fashion Institute of Technology, a campus of the State University of New York. Mozilla was hosting a conference on new web standards for video. In defense of independent filmmakers and videographers, an army of young techies had gathered to make sure the web did not turn into a vending machine for Hollywood studios and television networks.

  The particulars held little interest for Max, who essentially was along for the break with Ilya, Rafi, and Dan. The others wanted to move back to New York to continue their work, but Max was adamantly opposed. “New York is so over,” he said. “I’m done with it.”

  More than a physical place, he had migrated to the land of entrepreneurs. To keep moving forward, he had become certain, they needed financing to hire more technical firepower. He and Dan had some experience in programming, but Rafi and Ilya had none. In particular, Max was distressed by the quality of Ilya’s code. Moreover, the team ate up hours quibbling. Someone from Pivotal with authority and experience could cut those debates short. “We need to hire a Pivot,” Max said.

  Another familiar passerby spotted Max: Tantek Çelik, a member of the federated web brigade that had met in Portland.

  “How’s it going?” Tantek asked.

  “I’m still standing,” Max replied.

  From the perspective of Tantek and the others in the federated movement, Diaspora arrived at a critical moment. Not only was Facebook chronically overreaching, but the microformats built by Tantek and the others were now in shape to be used widely for federation. That Diaspora, with all its attention, might be the one to put them together and make the breakthrough to a broad audience did not trouble Tantek.