More Awesome Than Money

by Jim Dwyer

  using my macbook pro as a second heater by running #diaspora’s test suite

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Bobby Fishkin never aimed low during meetings of his association—after all, it was named Visionaries and Revolutionaries—but his question at the November meeting stumped the audience. It was the first Sunday of November, the sixth, and they had gathered in a room at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. That evening’s topic was inspired by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a mathematician and philosopher of the seventeenth century. The name was not widely known, but his work and life had intrigued Bobby for fifteen years, so he gave a short preamble before throwing out his question.

  “The claim is that Leibniz was the last person in human history to know everything about all disciplines,” Bobby said. “That he learned everything that had been declared to be knowledge up until that point in human history.”

  Today, he said, individuals were silo’d into their fields and social networks didn’t cross disciplinary lines. “There are ten thousand subdisciplines,” he said. “Could the metallurgy of diplomacy be of value? Could the physics of sociology be meaningful? Could the epidemiology of history be an important area for study?”

  Some of these combinations, perhaps many, were of no importance. But, he said, “A subset of all those hypothetical disciplines are of profound relevance to human challenges. Yet with all the trillion hypothetical convergences of disciplines, we’re never going to get around to enough of them.”

  Here, he said, was a Leibniz challenge: how to encourage enough cross-pollination of disciplines to ensure that useful hybrids were created.

  “What would be the most efficient ways of creating the greatest diversity of solutions with the greatest possible relevance to solving human challenges?” he asked the group.

  A few times, Bobby scanned the room to see if Ilya had arrived; he had said he was coming, but never showed. Bobby was annoyed. But Tony Lai, the lawyer roommate in the Hive, had come.

  The conversations about the challenge were stimulating, but by the end of the evening, no one had come up with anything approaching a satisfactory answer. The center closed at eight P.M. on Sundays. Afterward, Tony invited Bobby back to the Hive.

  Ilya was in his bedroom, working at his computer, and at first did not come out to visit. He loaded an image of a giant butterfly, ascending to the heavens from a tropical garden, onto his Diaspora feed. After some cajoling, he joined them in the living room. Bobby told him about the Leibniz challenge.

  “Everyone was stumped,” Fishkin said.

  “Really?” Ilya asked. He gave it a moment then said that the answer was straightforward: make it a requirement for high school graduation that every student work on a cross-disciplinary project aimed at improving the world.

  “In twenty years, you would have a critical mass of collaborations,” Ilya said. “You’d have a statistically significant number of people who had crossed disciplinary lines.”

  In the span of a generation, he said, you’d have enough people to take on epic challenges.

  The night rolled on, the conversations sprawling across acres. Ilya had been blown away by an interview with Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, pioneer of virtual reality, composer, and author. Lanier described a “local-global flip” in which an illusion of power was gained through networks, with a “heroin-like” allure. People needed to understand that there was no such thing as “free,” Lanier argued. Uploading a personal video to YouTube, he said, was working to create fortunes for someone else.

  “If you’re adding to the network, do you expect anything back from it? And since we’ve been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn’t expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions aren’t worth money.”

  Lanier said Apple was funneling information through its hub, asserting control over how people consumed art that they owned. Google had decided that “‘since Moore’s law makes computation really cheap, let’s just give away the computation, but keep the data.’ And that’s a disaster.”

  Bobby said he looked forward to reading the entire Lanier interview, and Ilya sent him the link.

  They talked about their projects. Besides Diaspora, Ilya had gone back to his plans to create the Epic Parties app, and was thinking of ways to open spontaneous hacker spaces. The idea was that he would get half of the unaffiliated hackers to sign up for one, kicking in some modest membership fee, and use some of the revenue to open yet another, and so on. It had elements of genius and Ponzi at the same time.

  More pointed, Ilya had an idea to pinch off the illegal-drug trade at the bottom of the chain. He had read a study that said most workers in illegal-drug organizations had very little money and were not enjoying romantic liaisons.

  Billboards, he believed, could take out drug dealers by simply making it embarrassing to be one. He had sample messages in mind:

  “Drug Dealers on Average Make Less Than the Minimum Wage.

  “They Live with Their Mommas.

  “They Don’t Get Laid.” It was a low-cost and safe tactic, Ilya said, noting, “Some of the dragons are paper tigers.”

  Diaspora was consuming enormous amounts of time. They were hoping to get the beta release out, but that was looking less and less likely with Yosem gone. Ilya could have stayed up later talking, but Fishkin had a flight to catch in the morning, so after three hours, he took his leave.

  “We have too many revolutions, Bobby,” Ilya said. “This is good. We’ve got to hang out more.”

  —

  Dan had spent the evening watching an episode of Breaking Bad, the neogothic series about a nerdy science teacher who becomes the master meth kingpin of the southwestern United States.

  He tweeted:

  albuquerque, NM is a fictional place where not a single person has graduated from the flip-phone. #Breakingbad

  Addressing the main character, he noted:

  walter white, you’ve gone on for 5 seasons without checking twitter once. #Breakingbad

  Ilya might have been barely treading water, but Dan was exhilarated by the demands, and he let the world know in a series of tweets.

  we successfully migrated jd’s database to a 16gb o’ ram box. #diaspora #scaling #phew

  having the best support convo with alison o. from @rackspace right now. #Happypanda

  @newrelic you guys are fucking legit. thank you SO MUCH for server monitoring.

  we’re back up! major props to Sarah Mei Maxwell Salzberg Ilya Zhitomirskiy # #diaspora #scaling #scalingmeansmoreusersarecoming

  nyc in 3 days. NEW YORK, I NEED YOU.

  Dan was going to speak at NYU that weekend on the delicate circumstances of people starting up tech ventures with friends and classmates, just as Mark Zuckerberg had done with Facebook. The talk was called “Our Zucks.”

  The next day, Monday, November 7, the technology news section of the Wall Street Journal ran a blog item, “Whatever Happened to Diaspora the ‘Facebook Killer’?” It had some good news to report.

  “While the fact that new invitations are being sent out does not prove Diaspora will succeed or survive, at least they show the still-tiny Facebook competitor is more than mere ‘vaporware.’”

  —

  With Yosem’s departure any realistic hope of getting a beta out in November vanished. Dan was not troubled. The work had been hard, and good. They would get there. Organizationally, the project was in splinters, but there was fresh blood: T.H., the woman who had left Facebook and had introduced herself to Ilya at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference. On Wednesday, the ninth of November, she was a few days into her efforts to make progress. Someone new, from a real company, was giving them orders. A woman. The guys were glad to hear a fresh voice. Among her first tasks, T.H. imposed a regime that required them to clear up outstanding issues that
had been submitted by users.

  In the afternoon, she wanted each of the founders to say precisely what they were doing. One by one, each of the guys was pushed by her to explain where they were headed.

  “Max,” she said. “What do you really want to do?”

  T.H. might have thought it such an unexpected question that they would be shaken out of their ruts and forced to think how their lives and goals meshed with the work they were doing. In fact, all of them had answered this question multiple times over the last few months, in one forum or another, and they could have answered for one another.

  “I would love to be an entrepreneur,” Max said, “and I want to be a software engineer.”

  She turned to Dan.

  “What about you Dan, what is your aspiration?” she asked.

  “I want to run my own business,” he said. “I don’t want to have a boss.”

  Max and Dan knew what was coming next. Ilya would get his PhD in math and become an expert in machine learning.

  “I’m a programmer,” Ilya said. “I’ve accepted, that right now, I’m a programmer.”

  The rhythm of this ritualized dialogue was lost for a nanosecond, the strangeness of Ilya’s answer looping into Max’s attention for an extra beat. In an instant, the conversation had moved on.

  Dan was heading back to New York that day for the NYU panel. Before leaving, he had a word with Ilya.

  “Take a few days off,” Dan told him. “It’s only a project. There’s nothing to be ashamed about with depression. I see a shrink every week. I can give you his name.”

  Ilya thought that was a good idea. He would go next week.

  “I really appreciate it,” he said.

  —

  After Dan left for the airport, the only people left at Pivotal that Wednesday were Ilya, Max, and T.H. Around nine, everyone agreed it was time to go home. They put on their coats and were starting for the door.

  “There’s something I’ve got to take care of,” Ilya said. “I’ve got to make a phone call. Go on ahead.”

  Max had no intention of hanging around to wait. It had been a long slog.

  “We can wait for you,” said T.H.

  “No, that’s fine, go on, this may take a couple of minutes,” Ilya said.

  More weirdness, Max thought. The guy had his coat on; why did he turn back? He and T.H. got the elevator down to Market Street, and headed on their ways.

  —

  Later that night, Stephanie Lewkiewicz, who had met Ilya two years earlier when he awoke her in the math lounge at NYU, came out of a UCLA library after a siege of study and work. It was somewhere in the midnight borderland of Wednesday, the ninth, and Thursday, the tenth. She had been working on her PhD. Her phone, which had been switched off, showed a missed call. It was Ilya. They were still easy enough with each other that he would understand if she did not call him right then and there. She’d get back to him in a day or two.

  —

  At NYU, Rafi, who had been dismayed by the turmoil and glad that he was distant from it, did keep his connections with the group at approximately the social level he desired. He had created a robot Twitter account under the name of the Hipster Guido, and it was set up so that every time Dan posted a tweet, the Hipster Guido retweeted it, preceded by the words “The King has spoken!” Dan took it good-naturedly.

  Arriving in New York late Wednesday night, Dan had declared himself home by using Foursquare, a social-web application that tracked locations. It automatically noted that he and 114 others were at Kennedy Airport in New York. He tweeted a picture of the family cat, then added a grace note about his return to the city. Rafi’s Hipster Guido robot passed along both the cat picture and Dan’s note with the customary introduction:

  @hipsterguido:The king has spoken! @danielgrippi—lovingly made in new york.

  With Dan on the other side of the country, Max decided he and Ilya could take their feet off the accelerator. Instead of going to Pivotal, they met at Max’s apartment in the Mission on Thursday, the tenth. They did not get a lot done, and broke early. Ilya did not tell Max where he was going, but he had to make a stop at a party supply store to pick up an order.

  On Friday morning, the eleventh, Max saw that Ilya did not seem to have slept. His color was off; it must have been days since his head had been beneath a shower. And instead of his regular machine gun of speech and ideas, he was speaking and moving in slow motion. He was wearing a T-shirt that said “Dawgma,” the name of his high school robotics club.

  It was the second day that Max and Ilya spent at Max’s rather than Pivotal. A break from their routine, yes, but also a concession to reality. Even if Dan had stayed, they would not have finished, despite all the progress. They had raised enough money, about sixty thousand dollars from donations and parents, to keep going until January. The beta would come out then. There was no getting around the holes left by the departure of Yosem.

  That was bothering Ilya; so was another problem, one that had long gnawed at him. He wanted people who used Diaspora to be able to delete material.

  Suppose a girl posted a photograph of her with a guy, and they broke up, and she wanted to delete it.

  Seemed simple enough. Hit the delete button. The picture disappears—at least from the server that it was deleted from. In a distributed system, each server was an empire of its own, not subject to the rules of a centralized hierarchy. That is, a single piece of data would live on multiple servers.

  “It’s really hard,” Max said. “You have to go into all the servers and ask them all to do this operation.”

  Facebook said that for the most part, it did not continue holding things in its servers that people had deleted from their pages. But because Facebook kept data on multiple servers, all of which it controlled, any item might have to be deleted in its servers around the world, making the process less instantaneous than met the eye. It was like a letter or a picture stuffed in a drawer—until it was cleaned out, someday, someone might open it again.

  Not surprisingly, Diaspora faced similar problems—the data was distributed far and wide—without the command and control that Facebook held. So they set a goal to have a deleted piece of data actually dissolved from the network within twenty-four hours. This delay troubled Ilya. It had been precisely what bothered him most when his classmates back at NYU had created a prank Facebook account in his name—that the fake stuff would linger on a server.

  They had gone over this issue before. Ilya had taken on the technically complex job of writing the code to address it. It seemed that he could not summon the energy to focus.

  Yes, it was Friday, but he was in a deeper slump than would come from simply hitting the end of the workweek.

  “Let’s take a look at the worst parts of the code,” Max said, “and make it, like, the best.”

  Programming, he thought, was like writing. He tried to convey that to Ilya.

  “In writing, you’re making sure that there is some canonical piece of knowledge in one place; really good writing doesn’t need to repeat itself. Clarity and brevity are the values—the most expressive thing in the least amount of space possible.”

  They moved deliberately through the coding. Max thought he might be teaching him something, but he realized Ilya was out of gas. He could not engage. Max was getting weary. At midmorning, they were joined by T. H. Nguyen.

  They broke for lunch and went to a taqueria around the corner from Max’s place. Ilya picked at a shrimp quesadilla. When they got back to the apartment, he was still dragging.

  “Dude, you’re really tired, you didn’t sleep,” Max said. “We’ll break at three-thirty.”

  After all, Dan was not around to crack the whip.

  “I don’t know,” Ilya said. “We have so much to do.”

  They beavered away for a while longer. At one point when Max left the room, Ilya confided in T.H
. that he was very worried about their pushing the beta back another two months. People were counting on them. Max was back in the room.

  “I have a crazy question for you,” Ilya said. “Do you think we will ever really release the beta?”

  Fatigue, Max thought.

  “Dude, of course we’re going to do it,” Max said. “Why would you even worry about that?”

  Ilya shrugged. They turned back to the work, and he seemed engaged. Then he leaned back.

  They had scheduled a Meetup for the next day, a Saturday, at Noisebridge, the hacker space in the Mission, to get feedback from users. In theory, Ilya had called the meeting, but it had been T.H.’s idea and she would run it. She was fresh. He was swamped and spent, and it was still only Friday.

  He’d had enough.

  “You know what, man, I am going to take you up on that offer to break early,” Ilya said.

  “Hey, dude, see you tomorrow,” Max said, relieved.

  “Peace,” Ilya said. He took his bag and left.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  More than halfway through the panel discussion, the moderator asked a question that Dan could have spent the rest of the session answering.

  “Do you guys have any stories of intrigue or betrayal that you want to share?” she asked.

  The auditorium at NYU was full, though it was just nine A.M., a most unsociable hour for college students, on a Saturday morning, no less.

  Onstage, sipping an orange juice, Dan did not show a flicker of interest in that particular query.

  Instead, it was fielded by David Goldberg, who, with his brother, Ari, had started an online company called StyleCaster with the goal of bringing “style to the people.” It was one thing to break up a partnership started with friends, Goldberg said, and entirely different with a family member. There are former friends, but not former family. “Shit is going to hit the fan. There will be moments at every stage and evolution of the business where it’s do or die. Or at least in real time, it feels that way,” Goldberg said. “Retrospectively, it probably wasn’t that big a deal.”