More Awesome Than Money (18 page)

“Oh, yeah,” Stephanie said. “I've seen you in class.”

“I'm Ilya,” he said.

Good thing he had rousted her. Analysis, a course in advanced calculus, was about to start. They walked to class together. The conversation was a bit forced, but by the time they got there, they were shooting beams
at each other. In the room, where it looked as though the other thirty students were staring at their desktops, they split up and took their usual seats—Ilya in the front, Stephanie to the side and back a row or two.

Throughout the class, he turned to her and smiled.

After that, they were together all the time. In math club. At special talks or any other gathering. All-nighters in the math lounge. He wanted to meet everyone, find out what people were up to. On weekends, he might call and ask, “Do you want to get lunch?” It was best not to arrive too hungry. She'd get to his apartment and he would be up to his elbows in a box of electronics.

“Can you just hold this for a minute?” he'd ask, and they would forget food while she gripped pliers and he wielded a soldering iron, tinkering until he'd had his fill. The tools of mischief, rather than the making of it, were compelling to him, and there was always something to make. For instance, once he'd heard about TV-B-Gone, a remote control that could switch off any television—in, say, a waiting room, a bar, a student lounge—he had to have one. It could be bought either ready to go or as an open-source kit that had to be assembled. Of course he bought the kit and put it together. Though he never really used it that much.

In groups, he'd spiel about limits to freedom on the Internet, and any other social causes that had caught his interest. He liked to hang out at Bluestockings bookstore on the Lower East Side, a café, center for activists, and seller of books that looked at the world through a radical lens, or nearby at ABC No Rio, the collective run by artists and activists.

Stephanie usually did not accompany him on these journeys; they had no exclusive claim on each other. Having grown up as the immigrant outsider in high school who had to wipe the sweat from his palms so he could shake hands with one new person every day, he seemed to relish the life of a nerd Lothario. He loved that girls found him and his zany ebullience to be winning, and that they seemed to remain fond of him even after a dalliance of short duration. “A single-serving friend,” Ilya called them, invoking the movie
Fight Club,
where the Narrator uses those words to praise fleeting but valuable conversations with people he meets on airline trips.

His relationship with Stephanie was deeper, richer, plainly romantic,
but it was also beyond any category she could name, with neither formal nor informal boundaries drawn. In the summer after they first smiled at each other, it turned out that they both had commitments that kept them at school in June and July, so, by default, they continued to spend lots of time together rather than drifting away. But they never met each other's families.

As Ilya migrated from the math department lounge to hanging out in the computer club room, and working on the MakerBot, Stephanie got to know his new friends there. He was always peeling off to make some repair on the 3-D printer, and even gave her a lumpy thing that was an early product, though she never quite figured out what it was meant to be. Whatever he had going on, she wanted to know about it. She loved hearing him rail about a social issue. So many people were just thinking about getting good grades and passing classes and partying. He had his eye on the wider world, and was passionate about it.

When the Kickstarter campaign went on to its roaring success, she felt that the world was responding affirmatively to a person who loved it, and who would make good use of the support.

That episode also provided a kind of punctuation mark to their own, not-quite-recognizable relationship. She was graduating, a bit late because of her double major, and pointing herself toward graduate school. He was two years younger, and was heading off to San Francisco to spend the summer, and perhaps longer, working on Diaspora. To make parting simpler, they decided that they would not speak until the fall. This was his initiative. They'd had a few calls in September; he was buzzing over the release of Diaspora. They managed to squabble a bit, but it was nothing serious.

Now, though, nearly three months later, on Thanksgiving weekend, he barely answered questions about how he was. For a moment, Stephanie thought that it might be the tiff they'd had a few months earlier. But that had been nothing—she'd almost forgotten it. His quitting Diaspora was a surprise, but he had so many options.

“So what are you going to do?” she asked.

He was going back to NYU with a big proviso.

“If they'll take me back,” he said.

“Why wouldn't they?” she asked.

In his funk, Ilya had assembled a psychic railroad train that ran on unyielding tracks of despair, each boxcar filled with some new worry or anxiety. Had he followed proper procedures in setting up his leave of absence? Maybe not. Then he had just extended the leave, but there wasn't a formal approval process. So maybe they wouldn't regard him as a student anymore, just as some guy who had abandoned the program, a dropout. Maybe they would make him reapply. He might not get in. And so on.

Stephanie thought the particulars were, one by one, ridiculous, but she also recognized that the logic of depression was impregnable. She had been close to people with serious psychological problems. Yet in the two years they had known each other, she had seen Ilya only with the lights on, fully ablaze. Perhaps she could talk him out of the shadows. She had never gone to his family home in Lower Merion Township, just outside Philadelphia.

“How about I come down to Philadelphia to see you?” she suggested.

No, no. He would be fine. He just had to work out some details of readmission to school. They signed off. Stephanie was profoundly unsettled.

—

Ilya's gloom was disconnected from the reality of what the four of them had pulled off since the night of Eben Moglen's speech back in February. Diaspora worked.

During the first hours and days when it could be used and looked at, there was no rush of apologies from the prophets of cynicism who either had accused them of running a colossal scam or had no hope of their building something people would use.

Sign-ups moved at a brisk pace during Diaspora's first semipublic weekend, even though the Diaspora Four had taken pains to titrate the growth, mindful of Friendster's collapse a generation earlier under the weight of its own popularity. Invitations went out first to Kickstarter contributors, each of whom would be able to issue five invitations. Once that group had reached its mass, the team would begin issuing invites to more than 200,000 people on a waiting list that was growing by the minute.

Facebook had also inched into the world at birth in 2004. At first, only students with a Harvard.edu e-mail address could sign up. Then it
moved campus by campus across the country. Six weeks after the launch, it had twenty thousand members. Not only did the slow rollout give Facebook a discrete, technically manageable load, but each school provided a ready-made, built-in social network where the users knew one another or wanted to.

Diaspora, by contrast, did not have such organic networks. Its users were bound by their support of the idea of it, their ardor for privacy, their love of free software, or their abhorrence of Facebook. The early reviews of Diaspora praised the simplicity of its interface, or at least were neutral about it, but were bewildered by the absence of actual friends or any way to find them.

“
What if you build a social network and no one is there?” Christina Warren wrote on
Mashable
. “Here's the big problem with Diaspora—no one is there. . . . Right now, it's like adult swim at the YMCA. You know there aren't any adults at the pool so there are just a bunch of kids standing around the empty water.”

She added: “What makes Diaspora worse is that there is no easy way to find people.”

On
ZDNet,
another important tech site, an article was titled “Is Diaspora Too Late?” The author, Dana Blankenhorn, was skeptical that the project could move ahead with just its current foursome.

“The challenge for Diaspora—for any challenger—is convincing masses of people to try a second social network,” Blankenhorn wrote. “If people can be convinced to join, then Diaspora has to scale its development process. Facebook is organized. It has gone through that process. You're not going to maintain a competitor with just the four partners, no matter how well they code.”

In the comments section, one contributor said it was missing the point to gauge Diaspora's success on whether it became a business. “No one cares about Diaspora—the website. It's all about the software. It doesn't matter the least bit if they manage to make a buck off it—the software will always be continuously developed by its users—be it single users, or large companies trying to monetize it. Just look at the amount of code contribution they already claim.”

And on
Ars Technica,
Ryan Paul noted the rawness of the first release, but said it held out a great deal of promise—though not necessarily as a
Facebook killer. “It may seem far-fetched, but Diaspora (or something like it) could someday help to inspire change in the social network arena in much the same way that Firefox has helped to reinvigorate the browser market and accelerate conformance with open Web standards,” he wrote.

“Diaspora doesn't have to topple the entrenched giants in order to inspire positive changes in the industry; it just has to get a critical mass of people to start thinking more seriously about privacy issues and the right kind of interoperability.”

—

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, Max returned to the Pivotal offices with a long list of things to do. The release of the alpha version meant that they had kept the second of the two large promises: to put out a working set of code for other developers to hack on, and to run their own node for supporters.

The Italian edition of the fashion magazine
Vogue
was calling to set up a photo shoot; Daniel Grippi was of unmistakable Italian descent. A company that tracked the number of people working on open-source projects found that Diaspora was consistently among the top two or three in the world. Every day, on average, nine hundred links on the web pointed to Diaspora. The next largest open-source project on the web had three hundred, and most had around thirty to forty-five. “It's quite astonishing,” said Philip Marshall, an executive with Ohloh, which ran a search engine that tracked open-source projects. They were declared rookies of the year by Ohloh, and one of the top ten start-ups by
ReadWriteWeb
.

And they even inspired a small cultural war when a person who went by the name of Avery Morrow, an early supporter of the project who had also been documenting their progress in a blog, publicly renounced it. He took exception to their failure to just have a simple drop-down box for users to choose “male” or “female” in their profiles. Instead, they had left the box blank so that people could identify themselves. Wrote Morrow: “This is a sign that the programming team—not some unrelated pinheads, but the five or six people who are supposed to be writing the code—have put strong, usable code last on their priorities.”

Sarah Mei, the developer with Pivotal, had created the gender box and explained why on a web post.

“I made this change to Diaspora so that I won't alienate anyone I love before they finish signing up.

“I made this change because gender is a beautiful and multifaceted thing that can't be contained by a list. I know a lot of people aren't there with me yet. So I also made this change to give them one momentary chance to consider other possibilities.

“I made it to start a conversation.

“I made it because I can.

“And, of course, I made it so you can be a smartass.”

Writing on the blog
Econsultancy,
Patricio Robles said it was a sign of how unserious Diaspora was, compared with Facebook.

“
Facebook develops new features, of course, based on an analysis of real-world usage, and when it ships new code, it iterates as necessary based on the feedback it receives from real users. Diaspora, on the other hand, isn't even out of private alpha and one developer has already
single-handedly
decided how one of the most important fields will function with implications for data consistency, search and usability being brushed aside. ‘To start a conversation,' and because she can.

“That's not likely to be the foundation of a successful consumer internet product.”

Perhaps the most striking reaction to their arrival was an article in
Scientific American
published just the day before their alpha release, in an issue marking the twentieth anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web. Its principal creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, bemoaned the increasing strictures that were shrinking the autonomy and the privacy of individuals. He saw the silos of giant social networks draining the web of its vitality. He hailed Diaspora as one of the projects making a path to a healthier web. Berners-Lee had transformed the world. He had never attempted to patent his conception. So this pack of pizza-eating, sneaker-wearing, scruffy college kids was being praised for their vision by an authentic giant.

None of them even knew about the Berners-Lee salute; they were absorbed with other, more immediate developments.

After Dan got off his flight, he called Max from the San Francisco airport to let him know that he was on his way downtown.

“What's going on?” he asked.

“I'm here working with Rafi,” Max replied.

“What about Ilya?” Dan asked.

“I have some news,” Max said.

Ilya had already called that morning.

He wanted to go back to school, and he would be checking with NYU to see how he could resume classes in the new year. So he wasn't returning to San Francisco. Max replayed the conversation that he and Ilya had had the week before, when he thought he had extracted a promise from Ilya to stay with the project until at least the beginning of December. He was stunned by the call.