More Awesome Than Money (15 page)

“‘It's the end of the beginning,'” Ilya said, quoting Winston Churchill.

—

A giant cartoon head—mostly a circle with a rascally grin and mischievous eyes—popped onto the Facebook news feed. It was the profile page for none other than the anti-apostle of Facebook, Ilya Zhitomirskiy.

“Just got an account! On a friending spree! Feel free to suggest some!”

Immediately, one of his friends posted the link to Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook page. Another, Fred Benenson, who had helped them navigate into Kickstarter, posted one of the first comments on Ilya's new Facebook page.

“Are you testing Diaspora? ;)”

Ilya replied that he wanted to understand the user interface issues that the others could speak fluently about but which he was unfamiliar with.

“Hence the Facebook account?” Benenson asked. “Or did you really cave?”

It was a matter of his own ignorance as a newbie, Ilya explained, known in geek land as a “noob.”

“Found that I was asking Max really noob questions about how people communicate,” Ilya said. “Also I'll probably use it for getting people to switch over when the time comes.”

This was heartily endorsed by Jamie Wilkinson, who quickly weighed in.

“USE YOUR ENEMY'S TOOLS AGAINST THEM,” he wrote.

They all seemed to be rolling with the stress, but that was an illusion. One evening, the four decided to see a film,
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,
a comedy whelped from a graphic novel series. In the theater, the previews ate up ten or fifteen minutes, and Ilya could not sit still. When the feature began, he got up and left.

T
ime to go home. Dan had barely lifted his eyes from his screen all evening. To watch him, one might have thought that he was in the grip of some gravitational force that kept his head pinned in place. But really, it was a combination of his own absorption and disinclination to small talk. Every few weeks, I visited them, but kept out of their concentration tunnels. At some point, Dan stood, stretched, saw that I was seated a few tables away, tapping at the screen of a new tablet computer. The near scowl turned into a big smile. “Your own iPad? Sweet,” he said. “Are you trying to write on it?” Indeed I was, foolishly.

In a moment, he had found and set up a wireless keyboard that liberated me from typing on the screen. Then he returned to his work.

Ilya and Rafi had spent hours at one of the standing desks, taking turns on the draft of a blog post that was supposed to explain what they were doing. Actually, they were doing precisely what they had promised: dropping a batch of software code into a public space on the Internet. But most of the readers of the post would be waiting to turn on their social network, and did not have the slightest notion that a mysterious ball of computer code was about to be made public, ready for kneading by other programmers. Explaining this was not simple. As ever, Ilya was keen to set the moment in a broader context, particularly the importance of free software; Rafi wanted to hone the message for the nongeeks. The two might have been negotiating the charter to a new nation.

They yielded every half hour or so to Max, who hovered. Clustered within a few yards, they had been a solitary late-day encampment in the Pivotal offices, a nearly city-block length of uninterrupted space.

Ilya wandered toward Dan, who was fiddling with sections of code that would polish the look of the site.

“How is it going?” Ilya asked.

“We're only going to get one chance to do this,” Dan said.

That morning, Eben Moglen told Rafi that he would be invited to testify at a congressional committee that was holding hearings on Internet privacy. With the press of work for the next code drop, the invitation had dropped off his radar. Rolling kinks from his neck, Rafi absently stroked his head, which was freshly shorn to the scalp.

Who had done his hair?

“Walgreens,” he said. “You can get a haircutting kit for thirty dollars.”

The styling, it turned out, was one of Ilya's do-it-yourself projects. A few weeks after the Burning Man festival, their pictures were being taken for a feature in
New York
magazine, and the stripes Ilya and Rafi had cut into their hair before going to the festival had long since lost any semblance of order. Even at age nineteen, Rafi had plenty of sense about testifying in front of Congress—his father, the federal judge and State Department counsel, knew all about the process and perils—but he did not have the years to carry off a cue-ball skull.

“It'll grow back,” Ilya said, confidently drawing on DIY adventures in amateur barbering that went back to high school.

Around ten, they all agreed that they had done everything they could for the day. “We'll come in in the morning, give it one last check, and push the button at eleven,” Dan said. “People are waiting for it.”

He jumped on the subway and rode out to the Mission, where he had recently found an apartment, leaving only Ilya still bunking in the flophouse. Dan had not gotten around to furnishing his new space. Bedless, his sleeping arrangements consisted of a few pillows and a blanket. It was moot that night. Around midnight, he was still fingering bits of code. He tweeted:

sleep? What's that?

—

So consumed were the Diaspora guys with the pending release, none of them noticed a tech story ricocheting around the Internet that night. They were not the first incarnation of the heroic geek, carried on the shoulders of digital acclaim. Working a few blocks away in San Francisco, a man named Austin Heap had been toiling for more than a year on another Internet project that had captivated people with the transformative, liberating possibilities of the online world. He was twenty-five.

During the June 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, Heap had watched as the regime filtered Internet communications, identified dissidents from their digital footprints, and heaved them into prison. A software developer in San Francisco, Heap had little interest in politics. The crushing of the uprising in Iran awoke him. What the activists needed was unfiltered access to the Internet, and encrypted communications, so that they would have a fighting chance to carry out their work without being instantly identified, thwarted, and beaten to a pulp.

Heap said he would build that precise tool. It would be called Haystack, and activists who used it would be like needles hiding in it. Teaming up with another developer, he created the Censorship Research Center. Donations poured in. The new U.S. administration of Barack Obama, committed to the use of soft diplomatic power, backed the development in small but vital ways. For instance, Haystack ran into none of the hassles that faced the first developers of public encryption, who had been legally barred from sharing their work until Eben Moglen and others fought federal prosecutors in court and elsewhere. Even so, it remained exceedingly difficult to export encryption technology, which was regulated by provisions of a Cold War–era law written to forbid Americans from sending nuclear weapons technology abroad. Haystack faced no such problems.
It received vital licenses from the U.S. Department of State, the Commerce Department, and the Treasury.

At the moment a totalitarian government was applying digital screws to its people, Haystack and Heap brought the promise of salvation. He was hailed in an HBO documentary. That summer of 2010, on the anniversary of the Iranian uprising,
Newsweek
published a glowing profile. The
Guardian
honored Heap as “Innovator of the Year” for protecting
free speech. Crisis is bound to hero by the covalent bond of narrative. Iran and Heap. Facebook and Diaspora.

In short, if Diaspora had an avatar, they would not have had to look beyond Austin Heap and his Haystack, subject of celebratory, uncritical press accounts and recipient of popular support that was expressed, concretely, with cash donations.

Like the Diaspora guys, Heap forecast that his project would be ready to go after a summer or a few months of intensive coding. He was wildly optimistic about how quickly he could build the software.
Meanwhile, the acclaim mounted; good intentions were confused with the actual goods. Behind the scenes, security and cryptography mavens urged Heap to share the work in progress. He said that was too risky. This seemed like common sense to people who knew nothing about cryptography, but was the very definition of folly to experts. The design principles for secure military cyphers were laid out in the nineteenth century by Auguste Kerckhoffs, a Dutch linguist and cryptographer who advocated that “the system should not depend on secrecy, and it should be able to fall into the enemy's hands without disadvantage.” It was probable, if not inevitable, that an enemy could figure out exactly how a system worked, but what would protect the message were the unique keys, shared secretly by the sender and the recipient. Without them, the message would remain indecipherable, no matter how much of the design the enemy knew. A single deciphering key set could be captured, but only its accompanying message would be compromised. Every additional secret was another weak spot, another likely point of failure. Security experts on a private mailing list that covered “circumvention and obfuscation” were making a ruckus about the secretive development of Haystack, and Heap was publicly challenged to let experts review the code by Evgeny Morozov, a Belarusian scholar at Stanford University who wrote frequently on the relationship between the Internet and political dissent.

Instead, by the end of the summer of 2010, Heap arranged to hand deliver CDs of Haystack to Iranian dissidents for “stress testing.” Inevitably, a copy made its way to security experts, and one of them, Jacob Appelbaum, demolished it within a few hours. Not only did it not protect the users, it did precisely the opposite: users of Haystack would leave a
trail of digital bread crumbs that led directly back to them. The chief developer working with Heap quit. A day later, Heap announced that he was ending the testing of Haystack until the problems could be addressed.

The story hit the
New York Times
website on September 14. It was a lesson, commentators said, in the hazards of media cheerleading uninformed by the slightest understanding of what was technically feasible.

—

The following morning, the Diaspora Four were at their tables before most of the Pivots had poured their first cups of fair trade organic coffee. The night before, they had managed to convince themselves that they had very little to do to keep the promise of the September 15 release. Three chores, really. First, they needed to have a tweet poised to launch at the moment the code repository was opened, directing the community of backers to the
JoinDiaspora
blog for an update that would elaborate beyond the 140-character cage of Twitter. The second was the blog post, letting their nontech supporters know that they had reached this milestone, distant though it might have been from the ready-to-roll tool that the donors had thought would take the guys just the summer to write. Finally, they needed to put the code through its paces again, to make sure everything was running properly, or near enough. It did not have to be perfect; indeed, the very reason for posting its entrails was to have crowds rise in their wisdom to fix and improve what the Diaspora Four had started, the long tail of the Internet working its magic.

Still, they didn't want to be public laughingstocks, which they immediately discovered was a distinct likelihood if other developers were to run their code in its current state. A bug had crept in. Somehow, Diaspora was not allowing users to add friends: nominally, a social network, but one that offered only solitude.

“It's a show-stopping bug,” Max said.

They crunched backward through the code, trying to find what had gone wrong. Before they knew it, noon arrived. Pivotal Labs was holding its customary Wednesday talk, but no one from the Diaspora crew even glanced toward it. By the time they wandered near the buffet, they found a few spoonfuls of couscous and a half-plate worth of grilled vegetables. So potato chips for lunch. Meanwhile, the bug was not yielding. In cyberia, the natives were getting restless. They posted complaints on
Facebook, which had been hosting a Diaspora group page from the beginning of the project.

“Vienna is waiting for you . . .” Helmut Kreutner wrote at 12:35
P.M
.

In Argentina, Federico Carrizo noted that it was heading for 2:00
P.M
.

“Still waiting,” he wrote.

A man following the Diaspora discussion in upstate New York invoked a website whose only function was to repeat the same welcome announcement and introductory remarks that ran in a maddening loop.

“WELCOME to ZOMBO COM,” wrote Andrew Charles Cayer.

For people waiting in Europe, September 15 was close to having come and gone. At one in the afternoon in San Francisco, it was ten
P.M.
in Paris. From France, Jean-Baptiste Tobé Berlioz demanded: “where is the source code? give me the source code!” In Cagliaria, Italy, Antonio Lorenzo Picciau wrote, “come onnnnnnnnnnn.”

There was debate, bawdy at times, over what was taking so long. “Either someone overslept and forgot to do all what they said, or it's vaporware and they're spending that 200k!” suggested Jason.

“i think they are drunk and stoned somewhere in las vegas, married with whores,” Mike Vourk wrote.

“The whole thing was on Ilya's laptop's hard drive, and they spilled beer on it last night,” Kyle Bennett suggested. “They've been up all this time frantically typing it back in from printouts.”

“Guys, could we get just some idea of whether to keep watching or just come back at a certain time? It would free up my day, and more to the point, my ‘refresh button,'” pleaded Chris Larson.

Dan, who had deleted his Facebook account months earlier, was able to ignore the online demands for the code. He did nothing else until he had tracked down the bug and got the program to run again. The blog post was another matter. Ilya was not satisfied that a dozen drafts and false starts had rendered it into plain language. Max gnawed at his fingernails.

Rafi dipped into the Facebook page, and saw kindred spirits, suspicious of hype. If he were sitting with them, he would have had precisely the same perspective. In fact, he almost had it and wasn't sitting with them.

“This is awesome—these people are going nuts,” he said, reeling off a
few comments, concluding with one that he deemed worthy of the Facebook seal of approval.

“‘I'm sick and tired of waiting. R u joking with us?'” Rafi read, then announced: “I'm going to ‘like' this one.”

There was more, and only so much cynicism that they could laugh off. “I'm not surprised that it's not out yet . . . i doubt it will even come out today. They don't have anything done and they're probably hoping we fix it/build it for them,” Joseph Pereira said.

Jean-Baptiste Tobé Berlioz tried to calm him. “C'mon,” he wrote. “It's not like the world will end today.” The cybergathering was one of developers—amateurs in the original Latinate sense: people who workedor played or created or built out of love for the task. They spoke about the coding language that had been used—Ruby—and discussed learning how to use it. They kept track of the people signed up for the Diaspora repositories on GitHub, a powerful tool for collaboration among software developers.

“It's midnight in France,” wrote Jean-Baptiste. “I'm going to sleep now (drunk already). I hope to get the source code tomorrow.”

Then he emended: “Ok, ok, last glass of wine.”