More Awesome Than Money (34 page)

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.”

M
ax 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 of 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.

The only direct mention of Ilya's mental health problems was by
Mitch Altman, who had cofounded Noisebridge. At fifty-four, he was an elder statesman of the tribe. He also had invented TV-B-Gone, a device that Ilya had before he ever came to San Francisco. Altman said he knew personally how bleak depression could be and urged people to look out for one another. He felt that he had failed Ilya.

Dan sat toward the back, neither speaking nor looking into the coffin; he doused his anger with silence. Yosem Companys, receiving emergency treatment for an asthma attack, had been unable to come.

Two days later, the Zhitomirskiy family held a service at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, a historic congregation founded by Joseph Priestley, who is credited with the discovery of oxygen and the invention of soda water.

The Zhitomirskiys were joined by, among others, the other three Diaspora founders and their parents, their mentor, Evan Korth, and NYU friends. Rafi gave the most concise speech: Even when Ilya was angry, Rafi said, he did not want to push people away. So Ilya smiled. Rafi intended to keep that in mind. Max repeated his talk from San Francisco; Dan encored his silence. Afterward, Dan drove home to Long Island with his parents, and Max headed to Washington, D.C., where his mother and father had recently moved.

A week later, Max and Dan returned to Pivotal. The Diaspora code forge had not shut down. While they were away, their friends at Pivotal had assigned two programmers to pick up where the guys had left off, working through a stack of bug reports that had piled up. The whole office had been shaken. People were glad to have a way to pitch in.

—

One of the Pivotal people could not bring himself to return to the office. Dennis Collinson, an intense twenty-three-year-old Matt Damon look-alike, had flown from San Francisco to Philadelphia for the services, and then stayed with friends in Brooklyn. His bosses were fine with him working at the Pivotal office in the Union Square neighborhood of Manhattan; it was as easy to do the pair programming across the country as it was across a table on Market Street.

Dennis, though, found it harder to focus on the work. He was drinking heavily. He liked Ilya, considered him a friend, but they were not bosom buddies; he went to the parties at the Hive, but did not find them
as captivating as others did. Even so, his death had knocked Dennis out of the pleasant haze of a life that, he said, consisted of “orgies and brunch.”

In life, Ilya had made it possible for him to work in the corporate environment. Once or twice a day, Dennis would swing by Ilya's desk to talk for a few minutes; he and Ilya would take a night to go drinking or play board games at Mike Sofaer's house. “This dude is telling me about freedom,” Dennis said. “Socially, I was very, very free, in a way that he really couldn't understand. But globally, politically, I had given up.” As glancing as their friendship seemed to have been, he did not think he could face Pivotal again without having a few minutes of Ilya during the day.

Around the time he turned sixteen, Dennis left his home and Catholic high school in New Jersey, and entered a world of underground gay parties mounted in old warehouses and factories in Brooklyn. He would be gone for days at a time, not bringing his computer with him, though he had made his first website when he was eight and stopped using the Windows operating system when he was thirteen in favor of the free software Linux. He knew that he could disappear into the computer for hours. Joining the Radical Faeries—“a loosely knit spiritual network of crazy faggots,” he explained—he found a society that mentored and supported him as he learned programming and lived exuberantly. In time, he settled in San Francisco.

At the end of his workdays, he went home to a cottage at the bottom of Bernal Heights, a San Francisco neighborhood that was becoming hot. The bike ride to work was flat, a prime virtue in a city of stupefyingly steep hills. His rent was twenty-three hundred dollars a month, but the view was fabulous and, set back a hundred feet from the road, his home was a retreat.

Join Diaspora and give it up?

In his grief, he had been doing a crummy job for Pivotal, as he knew well. He had about four months of savings. There was still a shot to make Diaspora happen. He had long thought that there had to be a better way to do social networking than Facebook. Diaspora was a way to actually make it happen. But before Ilya's death, he had been unable to find a way into the project; the Diaspora guys had formed a tight four-sided box.

“I could maybe write better code from scratch than where Diaspora
is now,” he mused over drinks that winter, “but I suck at making community happen, and they have a better community. And they have the attention of the world. And they're my friends. I love these people. I want to see this keep happening. I am never going to make this happen on my own. I have the power to help turn this light back on.”

In the haze of those winter months, Dan and Max could not resist his help. They agreed to take him on, and Dennis walked away from a comfortable life.

“I don't really have any other choice,” he said. “If I don't, it's something I would regret for the rest of my life.”

He was not the only reinforcement they would get in the months after Ilya died.

—

One night, as the group wandered through the bars in the Mission, Rosanna Yau turned to Max. Rosanna was the artist and designer who had come to them during their first summer in San Francisco, offering her services, and the four guys had struggled to figure out what questions to ask during her job interview. Then they decided that they could not spend the money, but she had become enchanted with them. She had come up with their milkweed logo. She had cooked bugs for Ilya.

Now, in the dark winter weeks after his death, she had committed to the project, and was with Max, Dan, and Dennis several days a week.

Basic questions kept turning over in her mind, almost too blunt, too cosmic, to ask during the normal workday. But they were relaxed now, a few drinks into a convivial bar scene. No better time.

“So Max,” she said. “What is the future of Diaspora?”

He sighed.

“I can't answer that question at two in the morning,” he said.

D
an was pretty sure he knew the future of Diaspora, but he could not bring himself to utter the words. There was someone in his life, however, who had no such inhibitions.

For months, Dan had been seeing a psychotherapist on a weekly basis for anxiety. To the world, Dan was a handsome, smiling face, a man of few words beyond a sardonic crack here and there, his delphic tweets about arcane changes in programming languages, the music mixes he created, and a stream of pictures that he captured from the Internet. Like Max, Rafi, and Ilya, he was careful to avoid speaking ill of Diaspora in public. He was truly joyous about the banquet of possibilities that life presented, as he had told the NYU conference twelve hours before Ilya's body was discovered.

In his therapy sessions, though, another side poured out. The meetings with the venture capitalists had terrified him: their group careened from one pitch to the next, changing its story, never coming up with a coherent way that an investment would be paid back, or, indeed, mapping a path to survival. Or explaining why, in the end, anyone should even bother with Diaspora. It sucked. He didn't use Diaspora. He saw no reason to.

As the weeks went on, Dan heard the therapist form questions from the shapeless unhappiness that he detected in his patient.

“Why are you doing something that you don't want to do?” the
therapist asked. “Every week, it's like you're coming in here and you've been kicked and you've been stomped.”

This was true, Dan realized.

“Why don't you leave the group?” the therapist asked.

That thought had crossed his mind before, but the idea of walking away made him uncomfortable, not simply because it would have meant failure but because he felt that the value of the core idea—its social and economic worth—had not been mined.

“I know there's something here,” Dan said.

“It's over,” the therapist said. “Move on. Accept failure.”

After Ilya's death, he was flooded with the doubts that his partner's enthusiasms had, somehow, kept dammed up. The arrival of Rosanna and Dennis had brought a burst of new energy in the first weeks of 2012, with Dennis speeding up the response of the program, and Rosanna bringing a fresh eye to the design. And the long sieges of work had broken. The Daytime Emmys, the award show run by his mother, Carolyn, was being held in Las Vegas, and the other three Grippis, Casey, Laura, and Dan, joined her there.

Still, he was treading water. So was the project. They had enough money to last another four or five months, at the most. It wasn't just cash that they were burning up: Dan felt they were imaginatively bankrupt, that the gusts of enthusiasm from the new Diasporans would not get them anywhere. They didn't know where they were headed. A sense of duty kept him going to work. He worked with Rosanna on the design, but they made only sporadic progress. Maybe, she suggested, the schedule that brought her into the office only two days a week made it hard for them to get things going. Although she could not cut back on her other obligations, she did have time on the weekend.

Rosanna arrived at Dan's loft in the Mission a little bit after three on the afternoon of Sunday, February 12. The professional life of his photographer roommates was everywhere visible: big light umbrellas, backdrops, screens. Daylight washed the living room, which was beneath a glass roof. Dan pulled a table out and they sat down.

Their laptops stayed shut.

“I have no idea what we are doing,” Dan said. “What is the point of all this?”

They had been moving features to different spots on the Diaspora web pages—adding hashtags here, a new drop-down box there, subtracting and adding and trying to figure out what would entice and engage the users.

“We're just pushing pixels around,” Rosanna said.

For each element of design in Facebook or Google, the giant social networks could get advice from platoons of marketing researchers and cognitive scientists who could offer guidance on what they were doing. Whether an individual feature was good or bad, beautiful or weak, the gravitational force of hundreds of millions of users made the giants inescapable, like dark stars. No Diaspora feature, no matter how clever the gut instinct from which it arose, could match those forces. When Dan and Rosanna had started collaborating in January, he initially called their work a redesign. Then he changed the term to “rescheme.” That Sunday, he was more dismissive.

“This is putting lipstick on a pig,” he said. “A waste of time.”

In this case, the lipstick was the user interface, the UI, the bag of visual and interactive tricks offered on the site.

Rosanna agreed. “You can move all this stuff. Anyone can make awesome UI. All this shit can change. We are trying to reinvent the wheel,” she said. “If you put a feature out, tomorrow Google is going to make the same thing.”

They had only to look at how Google came out with circles months after Diaspora had introduced the aspects settings, each of them a digital corral, a way to hold aunts and uncles in one place, girlfriends and boyfriends in another. Maybe Google engineers had been quietly dreaming up their version of it even before Diaspora went public, or maybe they had not. Either way, it was a perfect example of how quickly digital innovation could lose its novelty. Technology could be replicated, just like the MakerBot had been whelped from the idea of early 3-D printers.

Dan needed a cigarette.

“Let's go for a walk,” he said.

The streets of the Mission on weekends are not quite the class 5 white-water rapids of Times Square, but they do have respectable rivers of walkers. The coffee shop down the block from Dan's loft was chronically crowded; even if they could find a place to sit, having a conversation
in its din was like trying to talk above three armed riots. They walked. Dan lit up an American Spirit cigarette. Rosanna turned back to their first principles.

“Your vision is what holds you together,” she said. “The thing that no one can touch you on is that you are decentralized. Google and Facebook are already deep into their own structure. How are they going to make money off that? You guys are the one. You have the voice. You are visible. You almost have the responsibility to move this movement forward.”

Federation, distributed networking, decentralization—like data ownership—were things that few normal people gave much thought to, Dan believed, although he knew it was a geek cri de coeur. “Decentralization is a nerd boner,” he said. The deeper question, though, was what it could give people. For Dan, the answer was plain: the ability to express themselves, to connect without corporate boundaries. AOL had been ubiquitous in Western culture through the 1990s, until people realized that Netscape and Firefox had made the web a place they could navigate unsupervised. Once it seemed safe to roam outside the garden walls of AOL, that company's subscribers evaporated into cyberspace.

“We keep saying that Facebook is going to be the next AOL,” Dan said. “We never said what the solution is going to be. Oh. We're going to put a search bar at the top, search for hashtags. That sounds a lot like everything else.”

Rosanna recalled that at her first meeting with the group, the laughably awkward late-night interview in the Pivotal offices, the guys had talked about creating a project for girls, not the beards. Something for everyone. That ambition, so striking in its earnestness eighteen months earlier, had not come close to being realized. Anyone, it was true, could join an existing pod, but setting one up was a job for a full-grown beard. Diaspora could be downloaded by anyone for free, and installed on a server, but it demanded fluency in arcane details that most people had no time or inclination to acquire. Making it easy to install was for some unspecified time in the future. That meant even the installation would be a barrier.

Dan had just finished reading a biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. “What Jobs did was make complicated things simple,” Dan said.

The sun was dropping as they walked back to his place. Upstairs, they continued to talk. Simplicity was a prime virtue. They had to make it—whatever it might be—easy to install.

But a deeper, more profound change was needed. The whole idea of Diaspora as a place was wrong. The very notion that users needed a networking “site” for their thoughts, comments, updates, pictures, was misguided, a distraction fostered primarily by Facebook's setup. Yet Diaspora had bought into that notion. It had created tightly scripted boxes, just like those of Facebook and Google and Twitter. Why, if they wanted to, couldn't the users spread a picture, a piece of art, a single word, across the full screen as their profile page? Why should the social networks inhibit people's expressive abilities?

Of course anyone could set up a personal web page to their exact design, and millions of people had, to virtual silence. “They're dead zones,” Dan said, networks of one, static presences that lacked the voltage of interactivity.

Then there were blogs. WordPress had spun the wheel of progress forward a complete turn. “It's great for nerds. It's great for the average person,” Dan said. “But you can't interact with them.”

Inevitably there were elaborations of WordPress—Tumblr was a microblog tool created by David Karp, a twenty-one-year-old who had left high school in New York after his freshman year—but it, too, had limitations, being made with proprietary software.

“The personal website is dead space,” Dan declared. “But make it connected. Match WordPress with the coolness of being connected to Facebook and Twitter.”

He pulled out a notebook and began to draw, ink on paper. Everyone would have a personal web page, with all its freedom, and it would propagate through the existing networks. Diaspora was lonely: no one went there except those who thought about Diaspora.

Suppose, Dan mused, that you could tell your friends on Facebook and Twitter that you had just updated your own web page. “That's how we beat the network effect—piggyback the shit off Facebook and Twitter,” he said.

Now Dan spoke at length, wildly unusual for him, simultaneously drawing his ideas in a notebook. The power of democratic publishing,
made possible by WordPress, would be amplified by social networks. No one was doing that. He and Rosanna began to think aloud about how it could work. Some people would host their own pages, but there would be a demand for a hosting business. Companies would like to have the ease of a flexible web space that they could modify with the ease of anyone updating a blog—and still have the vibrancy of social networks. “If my mom is putting on the Daytime Emmys, she can sell tickets right on the page,” Dan said.

There were clear points of revenue. It gave people total control over their data. If they wanted to sell it to advertisers, fine. If they didn't, that was fine, too.

Finally, Rosanna thought, a plan.

“We just have to convince Max and Dennis,” Dan said.

“You can pitch them tomorrow morning,” Rosanna said.

“You have to have my back,” Dan said.

“I will,” Rosanna promised.

It was a matter of do or die, as far as Dan was concerned.

—

Dan called for a morning meeting, cracking his timekeeper whip. He'd kept working Sunday night after Rosanna left, trying to find the weak joints in his plan. There was nothing that could not be fixed. Now he had to find out if the others would go along with his ideas.

“Guys,” Dan began, “I'm going to be looking for a job in three months.”

“Okay,” Max said. “Sure.”

“What we are doing right now fucking sucks,” Dan said. “The product is shit.”

He recited what he saw as the implicit, unspoken demand of the project as it existed: “Join Diaspora, we are cool guys, so it's totally fine.” No one tried to argue the case. Of the four people in the room, Rosanna realized, she used Diaspora more than Dan, Max, and Dennis put together.

Not that Dan needed to be more blunt, or could have been, but he saw a way forward. He was confident in it. They could try it or not. If they didn't, he was done.

So he laid out his plan. Rethink what it meant to be in a social network: not people adding a pinch of update here, a cute photo there, a link here—whatever class of items was permitted by the corporation that ran
it—but a sharing of personal websites, which had the most scope for personal expression, and which currently lacked the vibrant charge of social connections.

For a moment, he discussed the possibility of creating a pay service to host the websites. “Say Lady Gaga has her shit there. We say, ‘Given your load, we can off-load a hundred thousand uniques a month.'”

Dennis did some arithmetic, comparing the pop star with their most ardent young user in Amsterdam.

“Kevin Kleinman can be charged nine dollars and Lady Gaga a hundred thousand dollars,” Dennis said.

A delightful thought.

Dan returned to Kevin Kleinman.

“He doesn't want that much,” Dan said. “He can't have a custom theme on Facebook. He can't own his own data on Facebook. If he wants to do that, he has to have his own personal website. And he doesn't know how to do that. If he does, he has very limited knowledge. Once he does that, then he doesn't get the comments and interactions. That's what Facebook gives him. We allow this comment and interaction lane. That's it. Supersimple.”

There simply was no reason to feed and care for the existing setup. “People go to JoinDiaspora.com and they say, ‘Great, another social network. My friends are not here. Who cares?'” Dan said. “We are going to make it dead simple for you to make and manage a website. You own the data. And it can become social.”

Dennis and Dan talked about how they would explain it to users, and investors. Dan said: “WordPress made your personal website a blog. That was cool. You could just track WordPress. We're going to do the same thing. This has utility—people already have websites, minus the social factor. You tie in the social factor, and it's a million times better. It's not like, why am I signing up for a new service. It's like, I have a website and it's socially enabled. Right now to make a website social, you need your Facebook fucking like button on it. And it all goes back to Facebook.