by Jim Dwyer
Their pitches had been naïve. “None of us went to business school. We are right out of school. Two of us didn’t graduate,” Dan said. “We would start pitching our ideals and then mention a whole swath of things.” The $10 million request to Kleiner Perkins “was kind of outrageous. It was kind of a joke.”
Through the string of failures, Yosem Companys had remained enthusiastic. In early May, he suggested that they park the project in a foundation, a not-for-profit that would of course need funding but would have to return only a useful application to the world. There were business possibilities that could be built on such a base: jQuery, an invisible beam of code holding up many websites, was housed in a foundation called the Software Freedom Conservancy. Eben Moglen and others in the free-software movement had created the conservancy to handle some of the legal complexities associated with nonprofit companies. For that matter, Linux, the operating system that served as a prime engine of the modern Internet, was nurtured by a not-for-profit consortium. And of course, Mozilla and Firefox, the virtuous and essential spawn of Netscape, were nonprofits.
In this vision, Diaspora would be a platform owned by no one, but to which anyone could bring new applications. It was like the skateboard, the simple device capable of tricks that its early designers had never dreamed of.
“Diaspora should make it easy to embrace owning your identity online,” Dan said, thinking aloud. “Completely open source to the max. We could actually get donations for that. But to get VCs to fund us now—it’s basically like asking them to cut a check for a donation.”
Not everyone, it turned out, was twenty-one years old and excited solely about changing the way the world communicated, regardless of the requirement that an investment have some promise of paying off. Still, if the basic Diaspora structure could not be turned into money, the applications built atop it could have logical streams. What would they be? Like the skateboard, it was hard to say. To think about something other than Diaspora when he went home at night, Dan had created an app he called “cubbies,” which, in effect, made it possible to quote a picture from one site on another. It worked perfectly well with Diaspora.
The platform approach “is still doing something good for people. We can embrace our morals and still take an aggressive approach with VCs,” Dan said.
His return to Facebook had convinced him that Diaspora was essential, and that nothing about the world leader was magical. It was a matter of scale. That, he knew better than most people, was an advantage that was hard to resist. He was appalled by the triviality of the Facebook news feed and the information people were handing away. Some of it was unavoidable. His social life was being held hostage.
“To get the added benefit of extended communication,” he said, “I have to whore out my personal data.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
As the summer of 2011 approached, interns from colleges in the East migrated to California to scratch soil in the digital vineyards. Adi Kamdar, a Yale student who had founded the university’s branch of Students for Free Culture, was going to work at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. He was not going to be paid, and sent word to people on the West Coast who had been involved in the free-culture movement that he did not have anywhere to live. Ilya, who glancingly knew Adi because they breathed the same air at Free Culture conferences and from online chats, immediately volunteered to ask his friends. And if things didn’t work out, he said, Adi could stay with him until he got settled. So Adi came from the airport to the Hive.
Almost immediately, Ilya left to go to Berlin for a week—he was on a panel at a conference—and simply told Adi that he was free to stay in his room. When Ilya got back, he set Adi up on a bean-bag couch. It wasn’t luxury, and Ilya made the hospitality seem effortless. Still, Adi felt awkward about freeloading on a guy he scarcely knew.
“Can I pay you some rent?” Adi asked. “Can I at least treat you to dinner?”
“You know what,” Ilya said. “You can help me throw a party.”
One of Adi’s closest friends from childhood and high school, a Dartmouth student named Parker Phinney, was also working in San Francisco that summer, and while he had his own digs, he had become part of the crowd at the Hive. Parker joined Adi in the party planning.
The two visitors learned the meme for the party was to be “TomCruiseFuckYeah.”
“Where did this name come from?” Parker asked Adi in an e-mail.
“Ilya came up with, I think,” Adi replied. “He was probably really high.”
A network of friends and acquaintances, loosely linked by mailing lists—the “Golden Gate Fridge” and “Web Ecology” lists—received an invite from Ilya.
“On the occasion of the arrival of two very excellent human beings, Parker Phinney and Adi Kamdar if you will, we will be coming together for an evening of Tom Cruise Fuck Yeahing! A party of epic proportions, epic connections and epic libations.”
It would be held “8 pm, Caturday, July 2nd, but don’t show up on time cuz that ain’t cool.”
As Adi and Parker became more friendly with Ilya and racked up hours of bull sessions at the Hive, they developed a running joke about their new friend: the countdown until Ilya mentioned slaying the dragon. A conversation about the cute waitress at the coffee shop would meander, inevitably, to the dragon. By Ilya’s lights, activists and hackers and revolutionaries, whatever their specific issues, needed to realize that they were all slaying the same powerful beast, stifler of freedom and collaboration. It had three heads, as Ilya saw it: companies that restricted the flexibility of software platforms, of which Facebook was only one example; agencies and legislators in government that made policy decisions favoring the telecom industry, the largest giver of campaign cash; and groups that kept vise-tight grips on creative work, like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.
“It’s a triple-headed dragon,” Ilya argued. Young activists and revolutionaries working on any of these fronts needed to understand that they were working in tandem, for higher purposes.
Just as he had preached to classmates hanging out in the lounges at NYU, he would hold forth after getting home from work as the group was sipping beer in the backyard, or passing around a joint, trying to get a Hula-Hoop to begin its shimmering neon orbit around their waists as they mapped out ways to slay Ilya’s dragon. Or was it dragons?
His passion about this—well, about everything—glowed from him. He was weird, at times a bit hard to follow. Also, irresistible. An instant friend to men and to women. The easy personal intimacy brought young women into his bed often enough, though he tried to avoid entanglements.
For many people, Ilya was a blur of enthusiasms, but Parker, in their bull sessions, was able to see the chain of concepts that he was linking together.
The work on Diaspora was one piece of this broader movement to create more free collaboration and communication. Parker noted that Ilya was carefully measured when he spoke in a public forum about the need for reform and the mission of Diaspora. He was conscientious about not injuring the prospects for their project with more radical propositions. (Similarly, Tony Lai, one of the roommates, noticed that although Ilya was a heavy pot smoker, he was scrupulous about doing it only in settings where the image of Diaspora would not be hurt.)
So in public, Parker saw Ilya speaking about giving people choices. At parties, in small settings, he spoke the language of revolutionary battles. He wasn’t shy about using the language of an activist who hoped to fundamentally reshape structures, Parker thought. Ilya would insist that people needed to realize that movements were running in parallel: Diaspora was one of the proxies in the war for free and open software that also included the free-culture groups at universities that pushed for greater ability to draw on, not steal from, creative works, and the hacking culture that could put together a machine like the MakerBot, the 3-D printer that the NYU kids had
built for under one thousand dollars, as opposed to buying one for twenty or fifty times as much.
Over the summer, Parker saw Ilya’s obsession with the dragons in another context. “Epic” was one of Ilya’s favorite battle cries, the term he used, for instance, not only to declare that a bit of hacking was clever and useful but also to describe the success of a crowded party that had been filled with both adventure and connections. A young man toiling away by day on lines of code might not feel that his hours were all that epic. One who conjured a three-headed dragon for an adversary would feel his work was high adventure indeed. As Parker noted, “It’s much more exciting to think of yourself as a knight slaying dragons than just a kid who’s trying to create competition in the social networking space.”
Later in the summer, a mysterious stomach ailment made Parker quite sick. It gave him so much trouble that doctors finally decided to give him an anesthetic and explore with a scope. He needed someone to bring him home after the procedure. The first person he asked was Ilya, a kid he had really not known until a few weeks earlier.
“Absolutely,” Ilya said. Ilya had made close friendship simple, almost axiomatic. He immediately put a note on his calendar. Later, Parker saw the reminder for the day of his examination. Ilya had written, “Saving Parker.”
Another moment, another bellyache, elevated to epic.
—
In the last week of June, the Diaspora Four were looking forward to the Fourth of July weekend, with its extra day off. Ilya and Dan would be at the “TomCruiseFuckYeah” event. There were two major developments on Tuesday, June 28. That morning, Max had sealed a date to meet with another company, which was nominally just a getting-to-know you meeting. In fact, they had run through their venture capital prospects. This was an attempt at matchmaking by Randy Komisar. It had the realistic prospect of making them all decently well-off young men for their year of work. Without it, they were officially broke.
Over the long months of his engagement with Diaspora, Komisar had encouraged them to consider teaming up with Reputation.com, a company that Kleiner Perkins had backed with investment. Despite the debacle of the pitch in March, Komisar retained a soft spot for them, and continued to believe that they ought to think about joining forces with a well-funded business.
Reputation was led by Michael Fertik, a long-haired Harvard Law School graduate who had started it at age twenty-eight in 2006.
At the beginning, he had fashioned Reputation as a way to help businesses manage their images online, navigating privacy controls on social media like Facebook, and purging hurtful, hateful, calumnious statements about its subscribers from online postings.
In many cases, shoveling the Aegean stables would be quicker than cleaning up online messes. Even so, Reputation had found its way into a commercial niche that no one was yet occupying, and it had plenty of money to spend.
Fertik was about to close a deal for another $42 million in funding, and one of the items on his shopping list was a privacy-conscious social network. He was fond of saying that “data is the new oil,” and that the first trillion dollars made on the web from data all went to advertisers. For the second trillion, Fertik intended to give consumers a way to either protect their data or make a profit from their share in the commodity by offering them a “data locker.” As part of that plan, he had amassed commercial databases with information on millions of people.
At least in theory, a social network built on privacy was a pretty logical fit for Reputation. And for Diaspora, such a merger would give the development process a home in a business, and the guys could continue to work on it without the endless worries over raising money to keep it going and growing. Their brains and passion were evident to everyone who met them; so, too, was their lack of business experience. Fertik could teach them business.
Despite the straightforward advantages, none of the Diaspora group was enthusiastic about meeting with Reputation. They wanted to keep their own project. In this, they were no different from Mark Zuckerberg. Over and over, Zuckerberg had turned down increasingly larger offers to sell Facebook in its first few years that would have made him billions. He had no interest in surrendering control of his project, which was far more polished, far more expensive to operate, than Diaspora.
Still, it made sense to Max that they at least have a conversation with Fertik.
As it happened, by midafternoon of the twenty-eighth, such a meeting took on a new urgency. That day, Google announced that it was launching a new social network, Google+, which would give users the privacy controls that Facebook did not. Some of the corners of the technology press went beyond a simple product announcement. As the Betabeat blog put it: “Google Just Stole Diaspora’s Thunder.”
On the surface, Google offered precisely the kinds of privacy controls that the Diaspora Four had created in their alpha version. On Diaspora, the controls were called aspects—the groupings that allowed a user to segregate the tavern softball team, say, from the bosses at work. With aspects, members of a hiking club could go in one bucket, and friends from the robot project in another, and the two groups would get messages meant only for them.
In Google+, the aspects idea was called “circles,” dolled up with engineering by the best software scientists money could buy. Google also offered users a way to completely download every piece of personal data they had posted on a site.
One tech blog declared that the privacy system was “taken straight from Diaspora’s design documents.” John Henshaw of the Raven blog analyzed the new network in a piece entitled “Google+ Runs Circles Around Diaspora.”
“Google+ Circles works almost exactly the same way as Diaspora Aspects,” Henshaw wrote. “Google took the best part of Diaspora and made it even better.” He wrote that the circles feature was “blatantly ripped off,” then coyly modified those words by striking through them, leaving the original words visible and replacing them with “blatantly inspired by” Diaspora.
Ilya was close to devastated, the others nearly so. Yosem initially counseled calm, saying it wasn’t that serious a blow. On one level, that was true: Google’s core business was auctioning off data, every second of the day, to advertisers. That was why it had $50 billion in annual revenue. Diaspora genetically could not do that; that was why it had no venture capital funding, but thousands of people donating to it. Still, the distinction—that “free” applications were actually swapped for unlimited use of personal data—seemed to have limited traction with the general public. Mom couldn’t see your Friday night pictures but Budweiser could.
The term “privacy settings,” as used by big centralized networks like Facebook and Google+, was “mere deception, a simple act of deliberate confusion,” Eben Moglen had told Congress over the winter, before the Google+ network had been unveiled.
“These ‘privacy settings’ merely determine what one user can see of another user’s private data. The grave, indeed fatal, design error in social networking services like Facebook isn’t that Johnny can see Billy’s data.
“It’s that the service operator has uncontrolled access to everybody’s data, regardless of the so-called ‘privacy settings.’”
The Google circles scheme gave users the power to limit what everyone saw, except, of course, for Google, a business built on vacuuming up data. It was a conjurer’s trick, in a way: getting the audience to watch the hand with the hat and handkerchief, while the other hand is slipping a white dove out of a hiding place. But it was a good one. And after thinking about it overnight, Yosem changed his mind.
It was a dire situation, he acknowledged.
“I’ve spent the past 24 hours thinking about the events that have transpired over the past couple months, and I’ve realized Diaspora has just entered a tricky situation that can best be described as a ‘perfect storm,’” he wrote to Max. “I know this is the opposite of what I said to you over the phone when I first heard the news about Google+ yesterday
.”
The problem, he said, was the difference between Diaspora’s public posture and its plans. At the moment, it was a social network that gave the users control over their data: “Facebook 2.0 with control as the key defining feature.” That was how users, the media, and investors saw it. One day, Diaspora would be “an ecosystem of apps that builds upon user control to enable new, cool social interactions online. But this doesn’t exist yet, and furthermore, no one really knows about this except us.”
The arrival of Google+ had thrown a shroud over the financing prospects for Diaspora. “Some prospective investors like Tim Draper are saying Diaspora’s time has passed. I’ve spoken to a couple of other prospective investors since yesterday, who specifically cited Google+ to reach the same conclusion.”
A year earlier, Draper had been keen to meet with the Diaspora crew, but they had sensibly deferred. Now he had just looked at their slide deck, summarizing their pitch. He wasn’t interested, he told them in a short, blunt e-mail earlier that week.
Facebook “is a lot stronger than they were when you guys were starting this company,” Draper wrote.
Many tech writers and ordinary people who’d been waiting a year for an invitation to join Diaspora had come to something like the same conclusion, he said.
Yosem had a list of proposed responses, but the most fundamental was that they had to stop dillydallying. The waiting list of people who wanted invitations had grown to 500,000.
“One basic thing we can do is launch the product that users signed up for (i.e., ‘Facebook 2.0’) before Google+ came along and then announce that we have obtained 500,000+ users in a week since launch,” Yosem wrote. “This will help boost us back into the news and at a more equal footing with Google+ and will prevent that we continue to be seen as a ‘has been.’”