More Awesome Than Money

by Jim Dwyer

  The program for the gathering had a biographical listing for Dan that went a little beyond his nerd credentials: “Since graduating NYU in June 2010, Daniel has been fighting the good fight, developing Diaspora full-time with his partners in downtown San Francisco. He’s responsible for Diaspora’s good looks and product cohesiveness. His pants are tight and his V-necks are deep.”

  Dan had told the genesis story, and how they had changed, over and over, the workings of Diaspora until they screamed with doubt, no longer knowing whether it was any good. It was then, he explained, that their design tutor and guru, Janice Fraser, made them draw a triangle. At the base, the widest part, she had them write what they had started out with—privacy and freedom. At the tip was where people achieved those two values.

  “In the middle is where it changes,” Dan said. “She told us, ‘Notice that your product has changed, like, about three thousand times in two months. What it’s going to do, how we say it is going to work. The thing is, as long as you have that base, every one of those iterations of the product, you can just step back and say: it still goes off those core values.’ And I think that’s the most important thing you can do.”

  He and the others were applauded. There was no sense going over the brutal six weeks that had just passed. Who even knew what it all meant? The Grippis were waiting to bring him back to Long Island. Dan could not find his sunglasses. Rafi’s robot passed along his tweet.

  @hipsterguido The king has spoken! to the gentleman who jacked my sunglasses: you look like shit in wayfarers. sorry bro.

  Dan might have been up early on Saturday morning for the event in New York City, but on the other coast, Max and T. H. Nguyen knew that they had to begin at a more sociable hour for their workday. They arrived around noon on November 12 at Noisebridge for a “Meetup on User Experience,” also known as UX.

  The agenda was to watch ordinary people use the Diaspora site and figure out what gave them problems and what they were excited about. Ilya had held one a couple of weeks earlier, and though it was marginally organized, it had given them useful feedback. This session would have a stronger, more purposeful flavor, as T.H. was now helping. She created a sign-up schedule on the Meetup website for one-hour slots, and invited members of the Diaspora group to bring along friends who were:

  1. Average social media users (no early adopters, savvy tech people)

  2. Female

  3. Ages 13 to 25

  She didn’t need to write the words “No geeky boys.”

  She would videotape sessions of “normal people” test-driving Diaspora. Her experience at Facebook had given her a good idea of how corporate focus group studies work. Still, in announcing the session, T.H. made it clear that this was an initiative of Ilya’s. She wrote: “Ilya envisions getting into a groove of doing user tests (every other Saturday), digesting learnings (during the week), then hacking to resolve surfaced issues (every other Sunday). Let’s keep the ball rolling this upcoming Saturday.”

  They got an excellent response. There was only one problem. There was no sign of Ilya when they arrived at noon that Saturday. By one P.M., he still had not turned up. Max dialed his number, but the call went right to voice mail. He tried again a few minutes later, with the same result. People were coming for the first session, and although Max was annoyed, he could not give Ilya’s absence much attention.

  “Do you think he’s okay?” T.H. asked.

  Ilya had looked wiped out the day before, and Max thought, God knows, there are Saturdays when I don’t want to talk to anyone, think about Diaspora, or do anything besides drop off the face of the earth.

  “He’s okay,” Max said. “He’s done this before.”

  Through the afternoon, Max sporadically tried Ilya’s phone, but he didn’t answer, and he and T.H. were busy with a full house through all three testing sessions. At the end of the day, T.H. posted an announcement.

  “Thanks to all the people who let us pick their brains! We ended up having more users to test than video capacity to record . . . so we’re canceling dinner to give people a breather.”

  —

  Katie Johnson had just gotten a new job that came with a place to live in Pacific Heights, a tony part of the city, but most of her friends were still in the hipster parish of the Mission. She turned twenty-five at the beginning of November, and Tony Lai was hitting thirty. With so many friends in common, he invited her to cocelebrate their birthdays at the Hive on that Saturday evening, the twelfth of November.

  They met at a Costco to load up on supplies, and then she headed back out to her house to get changed. Tony returned home. Festivity fatigue was settling on the Hive, which had been the scene of eight parties in a two-week span in October, including three back-to-back Halloween events. Ilya’s birthday had been mashed in there. After tonight’s gathering, the calendar would open up for a while and provide a revelry reprieve. Gardner and David were hanging out in their rooms as Tony unpacked. Ilya’s door, which opened into the main living and cooking area, was closed.

  —

  A few blocks away, Max, who had no real connections with anyone involved in that night’s Hive party, was making his own plans for the evening. A text arrived from T.H.

  “Ilya’s mom called me. He was supposed to call her four hours ago, and this is one of the last numbers he called.”

  Since Ilya’s phone was on his parents’ account, his mother had been able to look at the online billing record to see numbers of people he had spoken with recently.

  Max answered: “He’s ok.”

  T.H. replied: “R u sure he’s ok?”

  “Yeah,” Max wrote. “He’s stressed out. Sometimes he gets like this. No big deal.”

  “R u really sure? His mom just called me.”

  “I’ll track him down,” Max said, but he could not raise him, either.

  To his surprise, Max did not have the number for David Kettler, the Hive roommate whom he knew best. He sent him an e-mail.

  —

  Around that moment, as Tony was unpacking the supplies, his phone rang, displaying an unfamiliar number.

  “Hi, this is Ilya’s mother,” the caller said. “Have you seen Ilya? I haven’t been able to reach him.”

  “Sorry,” Tony said, slightly startled. He had never spoken with Ilya’s mother, Inna Zhitomirskiy, or anyone in the family. “I haven’t seen him for two or three days.”

  Tony said he would pass along a message for Ilya to call her when he saw him, and signed off. David was sitting on the couch, and Gardner was in his room. Neither had seen Ilya for a couple of days. Nor had Bobby Fishkin, who was arriving for the party. Behind him were more friends of the house.

  “The party is going to start,” Fishkin said. “Where is he?”

  “We haven’t seen him,” Tony said.

  “Have you checked his room?” Fishkin asked, simultaneously banging on the bedroom door and hollering Ilya’s name.

  “It’s locked,” Tony said.

  Gardner felt his stomach knotting. They never locked the doors. He looked at the knob, which could be jimmied with a thumbnail: a hack. He pushed open the door, stepped into the room, followed by Bobby, Tony, then David. In a glance, Gardner saw all that he needed to, and turned around.

  Fishkin looked at the bed.

  “Ilya!” he shouted. “Wake up.”

  From the bay window of the bedroom, San Francisco sparkled and winked against the plane of a November night. Below, in the courtyard, stood the tent-cabin that had kept them warm on the chilly San Francisco nights. Notions and schemes had been shot from that third-floor window as if from one of those air bazookas that fire confetti at sports events.

  The walls of Ilya’s bedroom were lined with lists compiled after late-night bull sessions, composed on paper torn from the rolls of butcher paper. Next to the queen-size bed was a spindle, the kind of spike that restaur
ants use for paper receipts. This one held Post-its:

  Go Skydiving

  Start a company

  Brush teeth

  Sneak into a company and re-arrange everything in the file cabinets

  Go to Burning Man

  Live in a castle

  Which Silicon Valley company is going to do the most to colonize Mars?

  End bribery in Congress

  Party with the Amish

  Gardner shook Ilya’s foot.

  The laptop had been open on the bed, and one final Post-it note was stuck to it.

  “Thank you to everyone who was kind to me. Please know this was my decision alone. Please post this.”

  Gardner eased the plastic bag from around Ilya’s head. On the phone with 911, the operator wanted to give Tony instructions on resuscitation. He told her there was no point.

  —

  At his parents’ home on Long Island, Dan had watched texts of people trying to find Ilya flying across his screen. Then his phone rang, lit up with Max’s number. In the instant before answering, he had a single thought: Fucking Ilya had offed himself.

  Ilya had been dead all that sparkling Saturday in San Francisco, as his mother and father and little sister went about their lives in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, and his partner Max ran the Diaspora users’ tests in Noisebridge, and his friends bought provisions for yet one more party at the Hive.

  He was dead as Dan spoke that morning on the other side of the country to the audience at New York University about the joy of building something.

  They were still doing Diaspora, Dan had said that morning, because people wanted it. As many changes as the project had gone through, to whatever effect, they always rested on the core values of privacy and freedom.

  When they started out, he said, “We never saw it as a start-up, necessarily. At the time, we were four geeks, wouldn’t it be cool to make this distributed platform?” And then, he said, with the flood of money, they realized: “People really want this. We have to make this thing for the Internet. People are giving to the project because they believe in what we are doing. It’s kind of wild. That’s why I say, it’s not the real world.”

  The moderator had asked about that very subject—on when the real world began for young people, the sails of their lives billowing with ideals and ambitions and things that had not been done or dared before.

  “I went from school, doing something that I love, to, like—doing something else that I love!” Dan had said. “Yeah, you trip up sometimes. It’s a real rush.”

  “You’re telling us the real world hasn’t begun yet?” she’d asked.

  The audience laughed. Dan smiled.

  “Ahhh,” he had said. “Yes.”

  He and his parents, Carolyn and Casey, stayed up all Saturday night. Sometime after midnight, Dan posted a tweet.

  FUCK NOTHING AND EVERYTHING.

  —

  He and Casey took the first flight out of JFK to San Francisco in the morning.

  Before the investigators from the medical examiner’s office left the apartment with the body on Saturday, they told the roommates that Ilya had purchased the tank of gas that he had used to suffocate himself on Wednesday. They apparently had been able to get his credit card records. Max recalled his strange start-and-stop behavior leaving the office that night, when Ilya, T.H., and he were all ready to go and Ilya pulled back, telling them not to wait for him.

  He had picked up the tank sometime on Thursday, along with a package of balloons, which apparently were thrown in as part of the rental. The balloons were untouched on his desk. On Friday at Max’s house, he agreed with his suggestion that they knock off early for the day.

  No one had seen him since he left Max’s Friday afternoon.

  On Saturday night, Elizabeth Stark, who had been eating in a restaurant a few blocks away, arrived at the Hive soon after the body was discovered. Elizabeth and Ilya had had a platonic friendship of rare power; she had been a guest at the Hive on a number of evenings when the talk had stretched too deep into the night to return to Palo Alto, where she was teaching. They had shared his bed companionably. In crowded rooms, each would know where the other one was.

  No surprise, then, that even though Ilya had been the cryptography czar for Diaspora, Elizabeth figured out the password to his laptop in a minute or so.

  Ilya, who had often joked about his tinfoil hat affectations, frequently used anonymizers when browsing the web that disguised his location and identity. That made it hard for anyone or any machine on the other end to know who or where he was. But his laptop had no such obfuscation. His browsing history was spelled out in unmistakable detail. For months, he had been looking at sites that discussed suicide techniques. A few minutes after nine on Friday night, he had downloaded a PDF document that gave the instructions; he had already downloaded the same file several times that evening.

  Just after eleven P.M., he telephoned a woman he had spent some time with, but she was in her car and didn’t answer.

  The timing of the call struck David Kettler, the roommate who had moved into the Hive that summer after being critical of Diaspora during a Stanford field trip to their office.

  That Friday had a peculiar spell over mathematicians, and many members of that tribe, including David, had been paying attention to its approach. Friday was November 11, 2011, or 11/11/11. For those beguiled by numbers, it had the distinction of lining up the month, day, and year in 11s, the lowest two-digit prime number. It would not happen again for a century, and would not fall on a Friday for another four hundred years.

  The last call had been just after eleven P.M. Friday night. To David, it was beyond question: Ilya had waited until the minute, hour, day, month, and year were all lined up on 11, then drawn his last breaths.

  Someone taped a sign to the door of the Hive saying that the party had been canceled.

  —

  On the other side of the country, in Cambridge, S. J. Klein had gotten the word from Elizabeth Stark. Rather than sleep, he replayed the night a few weeks earlier when he and Ilya had stayed up until dawn talking, right after they’d met at the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference. And Klein also could not get a video that he had just seen out of his head.

  It was made by people in a rowboat on the River Shannon in the southwest corner of Ireland. They had gone out to document starlings in a flock: a vision of tens of thousands of small birds, swooping in unison, the dark clouds of their mass splitting, then suddenly rejoining. A funnel of life spread across miles of sky, spilling out of formation and back in an instant. Scientists could guess what was happening, but no one really could explain why the birds did all this. It was called a murmuration.

  At 3:16 in the morning, Klein posted the video of the murmuration onto his blog, beneath the headline that could have come from a tombstone: ILYA ZHITOMIRSKIY 1989–2011.

  “Together,” S.J. wrote, “we can move in ways that none could move alone.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Max poured the day’s first shot of coffee into an Elvis Presley mug from the “Hound Dog” era, then went out to the garage where they had furnished a space with folding tables and a couch they’d bought off Craigslist. They held their group meetings there, gathered around an exercise bicycle, and did their work at tables that looked out to Gloucester Street, a quiet cul-de-sac in Sunnyvale, one of the suburban towns that make up Silicon Valley. The town was rightly named. Every day had been bright, warm, comfortable. For three months, the reconstituted Diaspora team of him, Dan, the designer Rosanna Yau, and a programmer named Dennis Collinson had been renting a house there.

  It had been just about ten months since Ilya died, and Max had called a Diaspora community meeting for that morning, Monday, August 27, to be held in an Internet chat room.

  “We will be making an important and exciting announcement about the future o
f the project,” he had written.

  When Max logged in, one person was already in the Diaspora meeting room with a question.

  “Is there going to be music while we’re waiting?”

  Max quickly cued up a song that had been popular almost twenty years before he was born, but was right for the day: “Monday, Monday” by the Mamas and the Papas. Once it finished, he pulled up another pop hit from the 1960s, by the Monkees: “I’m a Believer.”

  Few people at the meeting would have sung along. To all but a small group of its most devoted followers, Diaspora seemed to have withered in the months since Yosem had left the group and Ilya died. The four of them were forty miles south of San Francisco, nowhere near where they had started.

  —

  For five nights after Ilya died, Max opened his place in the Mission for a “shiva-fest,” a variation on the custom of Jewish mourners receiving visitors over many nights. They cooked and ate and drank. They held on to each other. Casey Grippi shopped. One evening, about twenty people sat and sprawled in the living room, staring into their phones or tablets or laptops, most of them saying nothing. But small smiles broke out. With no planning, no announcement, they had started texting and tweeting to one another. Casey showed up with twenty-two cans of tomato sauce in honor of Dan’s twenty-second birthday. A hashtag was established for their tweets: #saucecon, as in, sauce conference. The physical presence of people in the room could not compete with the screens where their bon mots were popping up. Max and Dan hacked up a program that let them modify and send GIFs. So a cat could appear to rumba; a big dog could jump in the air at the sight of a tiny mouse. Their little hack made it possible to add silly captions that they could send zipping into cyberspace and onto the screens of the people sitting at the other end of the couches.

  Finally, on the Friday after Ilya’s death, it was time to move the ritual forward. Dressed in a suit, his body lay in a casket at the front of a San Francisco funeral home. Elizabeth Stark set up a live stream so that his parents, who were in Pennsylvania awaiting the return of the remains, could watch the services. Max opened the program, speaking of his friendship with Ilya and inviting anyone to speak, just as he had opened his home in the previous week. A dozen or so people spoke of Ilya and his enthusiasms, his support for the improbable, his deep empathy, his visions for a better world. Aza Raskin compared him with a Swedish reformer who modernized her country’s impenetrably difficult traditional alphabet simply by insisting that all books for schools be printed with a modern, simpler one. In a generation, she changed the practice of centuries. Ilya’s legacy would be like that, Aza predicted.