More Awesome Than Money

by Jim Dwyer

  At the hub of Ilya’s constellation of new friends was the instructor, Stark, a tall, dark-haired, and striking presence everywhere, it seemed, that she went; she had a sprawling network of friends and younger people who looked to her for advice.

  A few days after meeting the Stanford group, Ilya threw a party to celebrate his new status as a U.S. citizen. In notes inviting them, he said that he always had his parties on “Caturdays.” Elizabeth arrived with friends. Ilya viewed her with awe, but she quickly became another person who crashed at the Hive rather than go back to Palo Alto after an evening in San Francisco.

  Also present at the party were people who had become friends of Diaspora: Rosanna Yau, an interactive designer, who was their first employee. Sort of, since she was unpaid. All four of the Diaspora guys had interviewed her one evening at the Pivotal offices. None of them had the slightest idea what they were supposed to ask.

  “What is your favorite color?” Max had asked.

  “I don’t have one,” she said.

  “What kind of a kitchen appliance would you be?” Ilya wanted to know.

  Rosanna gave that a moment’s thought. “A cast-iron skillet,” she said.

  “What is your favorite designer tool?” Dan asked.

  A special pen, which was in her bag. She showed it to them. To move the conversation along, she talked about her studies at the California College of the Arts, where she had taken a graduate program in design. She was continuing research on entomophagy—the study of eating bugs for food, and how it might be made more acceptable. There was a long history of insects as part of the human diet, and it was a far more sustainable foodstuff than what was produced by modern industrial farming. The title of her thesis was “MiniLivestock: Exploring Rhetorical Methods to Promote Consuming Insects as Food.” Or, as she explained it in plainer English, how branding could be used to change the perception of eating bugs.

  Instantly, Ilya, who had lost some interest during the favorite-color part of the interview, was riveted. “I think this is a great idea,” he said.

  They were keen to bring Rosanna into the project, but the Kickstarter money had so astounded them, was so unrelated to what they wanted for themselves or any sum they had ever handled before, they could not figure out if it would be prudent to pay her from the proceeds. She started pitching in anyway, and created the Diaspora logo, a milkweed with spores flying off, as in the spreading of seeds, and remained close to the group. Ilya invited her and a roommate, Eloise Leigh, to brunch a few times. Eloise was struck by his hailstorm of ideas and his determination to keep them in sight, to make sure they were carried out. He had devised an elaborate checklist, charts for perspective, and, most basically, Post-it notes. And then there was the Jejune Institute.

  All around the city, ads were pasted to lampposts and streetlights about the Jejune Institute, which invited people to learn more about the work of its laboratory. It claimed to produce things like Poly Water, a “more condensed form of water that had regenerative properties upon all organic compounds”; Aquatic Thought, “a research center dedicated to the exploration of human/dolphin interaction”; and Memory Media, “where we’re able to render and record moving video images from your active memory.” It invited people to visit the institute’s offices in downtown San Francisco for a “FREE Induction.”

  In fact, it was an elaborate alternative reality game, built around a scavenger hunt that moved around the city, following clues to familiar and obscure places. It had three phases, and some people spread them over several weeks, but Ilya led a group that did it in a single weekend. The final leg required a long bike ride to the North Beach section, then up Telegraph Hill. This was no trouble for Ilya, who was an accomplished rider: when he was a student at the University of Maryland, he and a few friends bicycled home to Lower Merion Township, a 130-mile trip, sleeping overnight in a construction site. But Eloise had not been on her bike in ages and thought there was no way she could manage it.

  “You can do it,” Ilya insisted. “It’ll be fine.”

  Though the hill is not terribly high, the ride up is steep, and Ilya urged them on. They kept their eyes out for a flock of red-masked parakeets, the descendants of escaped pets who lived there. At the summit of the hill stood the Coit Tower, an Art Deco monument to the days when Telegraph Hill was a relay point for passing along news of ships arriving in the bay. They were looking for the final clue in the game, but Ilya declared a pause.

  “Hold up,” he said.

  All around them was San Francisco Bay: Alcatraz Island, innocent at a distance, and beyond it, the headlands of Marin, ripe and alive; by walking around the tower, they could see the downtown skyscrapers, and the Bay Bridge crossing to the east and coupling the city to the rest of the country. All was lit with sun.

  Eloise thought Ilya was the best companion for just this kind of random, crazy adventure.

  One rainy day, she and Rosanna came to the Hive, which had a big wedding-style tent permanently set up in the backyard, with a floor. A competitive ballroom dancer early in his college days, Ilya showed them basic steps, and then moved on to dances. They also did swing. On another weekend, he called Rosanna about a different matter altogether. For months, he had pestered her about making him a meal of insects, but they had not gotten around to it.

  “I really want to eat bugs,” he said.

  Rosanna, who had been looking forward to a relaxing afternoon, tried to put him off. “I don’t want to go out today,” she said.

  “Come on,” he said. “I want you to cook bugs for me.”

  “Fine,” she said, giving in. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  Rosanna had nothing planned but she brought along a few servings of mealworm larvae. The only ingredients in the larder were bread and cheese.

  “Do you really want grilled cheese and mealworm sandwiches?” she asked.

  “Go for it,” Ilya said.

  Rosanna thought it was the worst idea she’d ever had—the exoskeletons of the mealworms made them too slippery to stick to the sandwich—but Ilya raved.

  “This is so good,” he said.

  “I don’t like it,” Rosanna said.

  He insisted. Rosanna strongly suspected that he was being polite, but he finished every bite. And not long afterward, she was at a street food festival, and Ilya turned up to have another bug meal.

  Among the people landing in his growing circle was Katie Johnson, who had gone to his aid in the Bloody Mary transport accident. She and Ilya had met when Elizabeth Stark brought her to a party at the Hive, the theme of which was billed as “We Are the Internet and We Come in Peace.” Ilya was three years younger than Katie, but that was not a serious gap in San Francisco. Single people in their twenties, searching for a mission, were a social strata unto themselves. She had heard about him as a true-blue idealist from Tony Lai, the lawyer from the Stanford class who had moved into the Hive.

  “What are you passionate about?” Ilya asked her not long after they met. With some people, that sort of inquiry might have come across as a line; to Katie, Ilya was the picture of earnest interest. He truly wanted to know. So she told him: she loved the outdoors, and hiking; she was interested in “collaborative consumption,” a broad term covering a movement to reduce the waste of resources.

  One afternoon, when a few of the crowd were having drinks, Katie mentioned the Wi-Fi password used by a friend: “FuckTomCruise.”

  “I told him the next time you change it, you should insert ‘Yeah.’ So it would be ‘FuckYeahTomCruise,’” Katie said.

  Ilya howled.

  “Yes!” he said. “We should make a party around that. It’ll be the meme: ‘FuckYeahTomCruise.’”

  For the party, he flipped the proper name and the epithet, and it would become “TomCruiseFuckYeah.”

  —

  At night, he delivered more profound thoughts.

  O
ne evening, I had e-mailed the Diaspora Four, inviting their ideas for questions to ask Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web. An interview with him was on my calendar. What to ask him? Ilya replied quickly, though he noted that he was not quite sure of Berners-Lee’s role in shaping the modern world. Still, he came up with a few questions about the inventor’s views on the current state of the web. His final one was not about technology, but on the pendulum of emotions that Ilya himself seemed to ride.

  “Were there any truly dark times when it seemed that everything was totally doomed?” Ilya wrote. “On the other hand, were there times when everything was happening and large chunks of time were just an adrenaline rush?”

  —

  The stage was so big, so bathed in black, that the pinpoint of spotlight on the lectern where Max stood had the effect of miniaturizing him. That scale was magnified by the enormous screen behind him where his image was amplified. It was mid-April at a conference in Berlin, a long way from Silicon Valley, yet another occasion when the group—this time with Max as the representative—served as the ambassador from the world of possible, popular, and noble ideals. His subject was crowdfunding.

  As it happened, crowdfunding was not on the new map of exploration being used by Diaspora in its hunt for sustenance; their trail now went through the venture capital offices of Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park. That would not have distinguished them from any of the other start-ups hoping to win the lottery. What mattered about Diaspora to the crowd at re:publica, an annual conference in Germany of two thousand bloggers and social media people, was how they had been launched by the Internet herd. They had been determined not to shift their vision or plans because of the surprising response.

  “To change from that core because we had a lot of money did not make that much sense to us,” Max said. “We’ve been very cognizant to spend the money where it makes sense—to decrease pain and increase productivity, not completely, fundamentally change why we did it.”

  The four, he noted, simply had wanted to create an alternative platform that developers could hack on, tinker with, modify, and build into something sturdy.

  “We were doing it because we were having fun,” Max said. “If it becomes a start-up or whatnot, it’s still going to be why we started it. Crowdfunding in general is plugging into people’s passions, and to me, successful projects are people who are honestly trying to do whatever they are trying to do. They want to do it, and they will do it whether they get the funding or not.”

  Other people and groups were trying to create alternative social networks, he pointed out, showing a slide naming nine such projects. The day before, at the same conference, he had heard Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman of Mozilla, the not-for-profit foundation that brought Firefox to life, talk about ways to support the open web.

  Above all, she had said, Mozilla was trying to make sure that the Internet was not strictly operated by a few institutions. Centralized control might be an attractive way out of disorder, she had said, but in the long haul, it was “a recipe for potential abuse.”

  Mozilla and its followers were free to hold that view, Baker said, because of their status as a not-for-profit. “That we don’t have the financial return as a motive, by being a nonprofit, gives us an extra ability to build in what’s good for the individual and what’s good for society. Firefox is a good mechanism to demonstrate that what we’re talking about may be abstract ideals, but that can be made real and concrete.”

  When he got back to California, Max sent notes to people inside Mozilla. Baker’s talk had reminded him that, he said, “More than ever, Mozilla and Diaspora are trying to solve some of the same problems.”

  He asked if there were opportunities at Mozilla to sponsor a project like Diaspora.

  One area seemed promising: Mozilla was about to start WebFWD, a three-month “accelerator” for people using open-source tools to make the web more open. Its goal was to merge the principles of the open-source movement with the best practices of the start-up world and its emphasis on useful, competitive products. The program consisted of nine weeks of classes, plus coaching from Mozilla’s technologists and the possibility for seed funding at the end of it.

  Though there was enthusiasm among some people at Mozilla for bringing the Diaspora group into the inaugural class, Pascal Finette, who ran the WebFWD program for the foundation, said he did not think Diaspora’s potential privacy offers alone would excite many users. His persistent question, Finette said, was, “Do you create enough user value that people will care about you?” Privacy concerns that people might entertain in their heads were not usually strong enough to take action, he believed.

  Moreover, “they were looking for office space and primarily financial support,” Finette recalled.

  While there was a WebFWD seed fund, it was available only after a group had completed the twelve-week program. The discussions petered out, without Diaspora ever formally applying.

  For his part, Max felt that people at Mozilla were not eager to take on a project with an existing high profile. He was frustrated that he had not been able to put his pitch directly to Mitchell Baker. “We suck at phone calls,” he said.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Money? Sitting in a café in the Mission District on a Saturday morning in May, Ilya was a shrugging study in nonchalance. “It’s okay,” he said. “Worst case, we ask our parents for housing money for a month.”

  Dressed in a surplus army fatigue jacket, a Saturday morning bed head keeping his unwashed hair pointed at spiky angles, Ilya brushed off inquiries about his health—his face seemed a touch pallid—and tucked into bacon and orange juice. Besides connecting with the people at Stanford, he had found a hacker collective in the Mission and met with an engineer at Berkeley who was cooking up a scheme to see if ratings on Twitter could be rigged with a software robot. Through Yosem, he had become involved in practical ways with Liberation Technology. Diaspora was one item on a plate full of the delicacies he relished; he had bought a bicycle, and it had changed his feelings about San Francisco. He was meeting girls. His pining for New York was easing. There was more to life than Diaspora.

  Nevertheless, by May 2011, the Kickstarter money, once a pile unimaginably high to four college students, was dwindling. Not due to extravagance in their lifestyles: it was the natural erosion of a year of diligent, nonremunerative work. To begin with, the $200,000 in pledges was illusory, in that they paid $22,000 in fees to Kickstarter and $28,000 to send out the promised T-shirts and doodads to their supporters. “We should drop Diaspora and go into the T-shirt business,” Rafi had said. Payroll, plus taxes, came to $114,000. Server rental costs, $8,600. A few other small expenses, and they had a little more than $25,000 left, enough for a few more months.

  The experience at Kleiner Perkins had startled Ilya, who had not initially realized that the $10 million ask had been fast-acting poison, but he had enough ambivalence about the prospect of venture capital money keeping the project afloat to see a bright side to the rejection.

  “Really,” he said. “When I found out, I was, Yo, this is our Internet. Let’s rebuild it. No corporate interests or VCs standing over my shoulder. I am pumped about that.”

  But how long could they keep going on housing allowances from their parents?

  “Yosem, who is truly an awesome dude, came up with this idea: we can put part of it in a foundation, like Mozilla.” How that might happen was not something he had given much study.

  —

  More than a year earlier, Dan fingered the delete button on his Facebook account, then kept clicking “Yes I’m sure” when the cascade of screens came along to cajole and coax him into staying. It was a moment of emancipation. Max had remained a constant Facebook user even as they worked on Diaspora at Pivotal, which the others teased him about. Dan had once been an insanely heavy user, to the point where he felt he was cutting himself off from actual people as opposed to virt
ual connection. Now, however, it was the other way around. After he left college and moved to San Francisco, where he had no natural social circles, the lack of a Facebook account had heightened his isolation. E-mail was not the primary connection among people his age; moreover, in a new city, the chance to follow up a social meeting with a digital shout was curtailed by his absence from Facebook, the closest thing to a cyberspace phone book. He found himself with no bridge to many people.

  Worse, he was constantly hounding Ilya and Rafi to log on so he could chase down some design element, or look up someone. By April, after more than a year of absence, he caved in and signed up for another account. In a conversation with me, he seemed slightly embarrassed. “I had a month of deep thinking about my morals,” Dan said. “It’s a necessity.”

  It was only one of Dan’s crises that spring. As the unsuccessful pitches piled up—it seemed to him they were up to eight by the beginning of May—he and the others struggled to think through a direction for Diaspora that made sense. At night, he would call his father, Casey, in New York to lay out the dilemmas and frustrating loop they seemed to have entered.

  The momentum of their first seven months had been tremendous: from a standing start in February 2010, they had released the basic code in September and an alpha version of the site in November. But then they had stalled. The first burst of activity had been fueled by their own idealism and the global civic enthusiasm that greeted it. Now they were turning to people who used different measures to gauge its worthiness.

  “It’s completely free. Anybody can download it. It’s great for humans on the Internet,” Dan mused. “There’s no opportunity for profit off the thing we are making right now. I’ve been trying to think of ways to make money off it but most of it doesn’t jibe well with our morals.” By morals, he meant their mission: they wanted to provide people with social networking tools that did not exploit their personal data, which was the basic business of Facebook, Google, and other nominally free tools.