More Awesome Than Money (36 page)

Meanwhile, the community of Diaspora coders and supporters was eroding from neglect. They had provided sustenance for Diaspora, the debugging and rewriting of code, the constant regeneration that keeps a piece of software alive. And they were an endlessly thoughtful, if contentious, group. But the attention of Max and Dan, the leaders of the project and the gatekeepers who approved proposed revisions, was absorbed by the Makr venture.

By the middle of August 2012, even the most devoted followers of Diaspora were falling off. One of them, Jason Robinson, who had been a regular donor to the project, posted a message noting that the demise of Diaspora was a perennial topic. “Personally before I have been a believer
and have had faith in Diaspora Inc pulling off this whole thing. I have disregarded the doom talkers as people who just don't see the big picture. Today, I am one of those doom talkers.

“Currently my faith in this whole project is crumbling faster than ice in the polar region. There are so many things wrong that let's just list a few.”

He noted that while they announced that they were working on Makr, they had said almost nothing about Diaspora, and were doing very little to maintain its code and the fixes that were being suggested.

“Guys I wish you could just reach out and say ‘hey we're not interested any more, go home and do something else' if that is the case.

“Personally I am hoping some organization (Mozilla, etc) picks up and forks Diaspora* to build the next great social network that is modern and free. My trust in Diaspora Inc to be able to pull this off has dwindled—which I am very sorry to say since I think these guys have done an awesome job. The belief just doesn't seem to be there any more.

“As such, I am pulling my monthly donation to Diaspora Inc, as I no longer see that the products I am investing in will be something that is worth paying for. I am not paying to create Makr.io.”

Robinson's well-reasoned critique was correct in every respect. He had always spoken up for the Diaspora team. Now he was supporting the project by speaking the plain truth. That others were harsher, or had slightly different takes on events, did not change the reality.

The summer was coming to an end, with no Makr to present at the demo session, and with Diaspora disintegrating. Max rarely slumped emotionally, but the convergence brought him down. One evening, they were invited to dinner by Danielle Morrill, the head of a Y Combinator group that was working on a social app called Referly, which had the aim of getting cash rewards for individuals who drove purchases of products that they wrote about. It was promising enough that Morrill did not have to worry about getting ready for Demo Day:
she and her crew had spent most of the summer raising money, cooking big breakfasts, drinking a lot, and sleeping outside so they could watch meteor showers.

Over drinks in her yard, Morrill wanted to set Max straight. She wasn't buying the idea that Diaspora was a failure. What it had brought to the world would live on, she said, whether or not he and Rosanna and
Dan shifted their focus to other projects. It was normal to explore new interests. “Diaspora will not die,” Morrill told them.

Her words rallied them. And there were hard numbers to back up what she was saying. No central body counted how many people were members of the Diaspora network—decentralization was, after all, the point of it—but a pod leader in Seattle, David Morley, had kept a running tally, an informal census. It showed that 125 pods were running, and that they had a total of 381,649 users. Max was damned if he was going to let Diaspora die. It might not have satisfied what they had envisioned, and then reenvisioned, but it was valuable to people around the world.

The next night, he huddled online with a young man in Peoria, Illinois, Sean Tilley, who had been trying to manage the Diaspora code forge for months while the team on the West Coast worked on Makr. They spent the weekend deciding how they were going to move forward.

That brought them to the chat room session on “Monday, Monday,” August 27. It might have been ten
A.M
. in Sunnyvale, California, but hardly any of the other people online were in that time zone. Kevin Kleinman, the passionate young supporter, checked in from Holland, where it was seven
P.M
.

[12:47] Good morning/evening everyone.

[12:50] Good morning/evening everyone !! Buenos días/tardes para todos !! Spanish users are also present :)

[12:51] @diegoch german as well ;)

[12:51] Dang, 31 peeps in here. :)

That was only the start. Max put up one more video, tailored to his audience and the occasion: Elvis, singing “Suspicious Minds.” More were checking in every minute, their handles popping onto screens across the world. Mathis. Inyan. ranmaruhibikiya. Makailija. Zeropoint. Goob. Otomo. alpHa OmeGa. ghosthand.

Max announced himself with a knockoff ghetto yell—on the Internet, no one knows that you're a dog, or a guy right out of college with a Land Rover parked in the driveway.

[12:58] holla!

[12:58] !

Code meetings had been held every other Thursday on the IRC channel, but they rarely were so well attended. The custom was that the meeting started four minutes late, to allow stragglers to keep up. As people logged in, it would take an instant and a half before their entries popped onto the screen, so there was a jagged asynchronous quality to the dialogue as one reply was being offered to a question that might have two or three others lodged after.

[13:04] whoop whoop

[13:04] Okay, it's that time!

The project had taken on a life beyond their original expectations, Max said.

[13:08] but right now, we think that we have to reflect this reality in the project itself

[13:08] so the purpose of this meeting today is that we are giving the code to the d* community who loves it so

[13:08] maxwell: Didn't you have far reaching plans to create FB alternative?

[13:08] so let this be an announcement that we are stepping forward and say, we are going to be creating some community governance

[13:09] so the thousands of people who love d* around the world can have a better say in what features are developed

[13:09] OK, how will this work?

[13:09] Let anarchy reign! \o/

[13:09] and what the priorities are

A governance structure had to be worked out, Max said. One participant then turned to the sticky question of the collective intellectual property built from hundreds of coders. From the day they threw open the code foundry as part of the free-software development process, individual developers had been licensing their contributions to the body overseeing the project—in this case, Diaspora Inc., a for-profit corporation. Max signaled that he and Dan, and any other shareholders who might have a say, were ready to give it up.

[13:29] diasp: we need to step through this

[13:29] we want to put it in the right place

[13:29] so if we have to set up a holding org thats community run

[13:29] we can do that

[13:30] i am open to stepping through the problem space and figure out the right course of acton

[13:30] May be a diaspora foundation or something.

[13:30] yes

A foundation! It had been discussed for more than two years, and now they were talking about it yet again. Nearly a year earlier, Yosem had bought the domain name, DiasporaFoundation.org, that was intended to be the website for the Diaspora foundation, which would accept donations of money and code. That set off the mutiny of October 2011. But there was no foundation, and the subject simply had fallen off the radar. Now it was being promised again.

Max and Sean made their good-byes and signed off. Rosanna had weighed in a few times during the chat. Afterward, in a chat on Facebook with me, she reflected that this step should have been taken much earlier:

“but i dont think there are really any regrets cause then we wouldnt be where we are today

“its all part of the learning process

“just life

“things happen

“if life were that easy, everyone would have everything figured out

“you just have to work with whatever life gives you”

Dan was not heard from during the online meeting. Just as he had at Ilya's funeral, he remained silent. In fact, he slept through the session. He moved back to New York before the end of that week, and did not return to the West Coast. His father picked up his belongings.

—

Two days after Max's announcement, Gardner Bickford sat at sunrise in the Nevada desert with Ilya's bike. It was mounted nose down in the sand, precisely, intentionally. The bike Ilya rode all around San Francisco had been converted by some friends into a sculpture for the 2012 Burning Man gathering. Gardner, Mike Sofaer, and other friends had brainstormed and drew inspiration from the video of Ilya trying to drink a Bloody Mary on his bike one sunny weekend morning in the Mission.

Using light bars powered by a solar panel, they evoked the flight of a dandelion seed—evoking the logo for Diaspora—onto the ground, where his helmet rested.

They erected a wooden lectern, and set up a tablet computer with streaming photographs. For a while, there was a plan to serve Bloody Marys from the lectern, but the logistics of having an electrified sculpture in the middle of the playa were all-consuming, and they did not get around to making drinks. They did commission three hundred pairs of sunglasses stamped with the words “Begin with love.”

At the end of the gathering, they dissembled the lectern and burned it. Gardner stored the bicycle in the RV that he kept in Fernley, Nevada, along with the dandelion effigy. He could picture that morning with Ilya sipping the Bloody Mary on his bicycle, preserved as it was on YouTube. It stayed in his memory as a single, revealing pixel.

“That was an event,” Gardner said, “where he was attempting a feat, without any fear of failing.”

F
inally back in New York, Dan got an apartment in Brooklyn and went to work for Pivotal's branch in Union Square, a short distance from NYU. He connected with a woman whom he had met in his first days of college, and they settled into a happy partnership.

Max and Rosanna set up a business in San Francisco, BackerKit, to help start-ups keep in touch with people who donated money in crowdsource fund-raising efforts. It was an idea that rose from Max's own experience of trying to ship T-shirts and stickers and also to make sure their six thousand Kickstarter supporters were kept up to date on the project—not to mention wishing there were a way to hit them up for additional funds. It was a sound idea: enough groups and people felt BackerKit's fee of 1 percent of the amount raised was worthwhile that the business became profitable within six months.

None of the three surviving founders of Diaspora was involved in the project on a daily basis. Sean Tilley and the leading contributors to the code were given control of the repository, deciding what proposed changes should be accepted. A guy in Spain rewrote all the software for the mobile site, keeping it up to date with new phones. Mr. ZYX, a young German, managed updates to translations. Someone else connected Foursquare, the location tracker and identifier. By March 2013, four major revisions of the code had been pushed out since the previous September.

Diaspora, the project, had refused to die. But Diaspora Inc., the
for-profit corporation that the guys had set up in 2010, remained the holder of the copyright to all the thousands of lines of code. Who should own it? They needed a foundation, but creating one involved lawyers, accountants, IRS certification. Max ended up speaking with Eben Moglen, who had built the Free Software Support Network, which Moglen likened to a condominium for nonprofit organizations. Within it, free software projects could operate as subsidiaries, and the FSSN would take care of bookkeeping and taxes.

Moglen was interested, but wary.

“I don't want to be a project gravedigger,” Moglen told Max. So what condition was Diaspora in?

In fact, hearty, under the control of the community. As Max would say: “They've pushed out four or five major updates. Honestly, they're running it a little more even-keeled than we were doing.”

There was little sign of Max's involvement in the project, but behind the scenes, his discussions with Moglen's organization stretched on more than six months, with papers sent back and forth, various people not being available, and due diligence being conducted on both ends. Moglen's group had to be sure that Diaspora was viable; Max needed to understand how the structure would work.

In August 2013, Max made an announcement on the project's discussion board: Diaspora could join the FSSN if the community agreed. All the assets of Diaspora Inc., including the code and a few thousand dollars still in the bank, would go there. The volunteer community would run the project. Max suggested that they simultaneously launch a new crowdsourced fund-raising effort, not because they had pressing needs for money but because he expected that these signs of vigor would get some favorable attention.

Max's sudden return to the online community with the proposition drew mixed responses—not on the merits but on the process. A major code contributor over the previous year, a European, Johann Haas, whose handle was Jonne
β
, bristled that Max and Sean Tilley had been working on this transfer for months without consultation.

“Would it have been so hard to at least inform the community about the strategy you set before all the decisions had been made?” he asked on the forum.

Others, however, weighed in to defend Max and Sean, explaining that it was a proposal, not a final decision.

As a practical matter, if a group had been involved in assembling the granular details of the arrangement made by Max with Moglen's group, what had taken six months might well have turned into a death march. Instead of admiring the problem, Max had actually found a solution.

Still, there was no enthusiasm to do more fund-raising, as Max had suggested. Looking for support, he could not turn to Dan, who had withdrawn completely. He could, however, call on Rafi, who had graduated in May from NYU and spent the summer in New York as a teaching assistant. He was waiting to join the navy.

He supported Max publicly on the idea of turning the project over to the foundation, but shared the general reticence on the fund-raising. He, too, accused Max of presenting it as a fait accompli.

“A little bit guilty as charged,” Max said.

More to the point, Rafi did not understand why funds had to be raised. No one was being paid. The expenses were very low. Max said that they didn't need to figure out where the money was going to go, but that they ought to strike when news broke of their resiliency, building up resources for things that would surely come along. Perhaps they could pay code bounties or organize gatherings. Or, for instance, they could sponsor fellows who would spend a few months working on nothing but the project.

Rafi was not persuaded. When Max went back online, Rafi was among those vocally opposed to raising money.

“We need to decide who will get the money,” Rafi wrote in a public post.

“I love you buddy,” Max replied, “but we had basically the same conversation three years ago, and if we acted then how you are suggesting then and now, we would have shut the Kickstarter down at 30k
. Surely we would not have been here three years later talking about it in front of a hundred people who love and care about our project.”

The community overwhelmingly ratified the idea of accepting the assets of Diaspora Inc., and of setting up the project within the FSSN. The fund-raising proposal was turned down.

—

In late 2013 and into 2014, Edward Snowden, the former contractor for the United States National Security Agency, continued to make revelations about the American government's omnivorous appetite for surveillance across the world. In response,
Tim Berners-Lee called for a global “Magna Carta” establishing the independence of the web and the rights of users on it.
And with reports emerging that the NSA had impersonated Facebook users to plant spyware on their machines,
Mark Zuckerberg spoke out in a blog post on his Facebook page. “I've called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future,” Zuckerberg wrote.

Yet it hardly seemed possible to divorce the practices of governmental and commercial surveillance. In the fall of 2013, Eben Moglen gave four talks on “Snowden and the Future.”

The government's ability to conduct wholesale global surveillance was made possible by “the great data-mining industry that has grown up in the United States, to surveil the world for profit, in the last fifteen years,” Moglen said, comparing it with the industrial overreaching that was modifying the planet's climate. Analogously, the surveillance panopticon “is merely an ecological disaster threatening the survival of democracy.”

The loss of privacy, Moglen said, was not the interception of a single kind of commerce or instance of communication between two people: “Privacy is an ecological rather than a transactional substance.”

He cited two changes that had fundamentally altered the integrity of individual identity and privacy: e-mail and social networking: “They offer you free e-mail service, in response to which you let them read all the mail, and that's that. It's just a transaction between two parties. They offer you free web hosting for your social communications, in return for watching everybody look at everything.”

On the notion that people had agreed to the monitoring by their use of the “free” services, he turned to the example of environmental law, which set standards for clean water and air. “You can't consent to expose your children to unclear or unsafe drinking water in the United States, no matter how much anybody pays you,” he said.

All the huffing and puffing about the decrepit sense of modesty in
young people—“humanity's overpublishing, that the real problem is the kids are sharing too darn much”—was misdirection, he said. If people were saying too much, then that could be a subject of complaint, but no more than that. “But really what has gone wrong is the destruction of the anonymity of reading, for which nobody has contracted at all,” he said. “The anonymity of reading is the central, fundamental guarantor of freedom of the mind.”

For the guidance of antiquity, Moglen—lawyer, hacker, and historian—turned to Edward Gibbon's volumes on the rise and fall of the Roman empire. From Scotland to Syria, the Romans had extended their empire by building roads that were still being used fifteen hundred years later. Down those roads, the emperor marched his armies.

“But up those roads he gathered his intelligence,” Moglen said. “Augustus invented the posts: first for signals intelligence to move couriers and messages at the fastest possible speeds; and then for human intelligence.”

With that infrastructure, Moglen said, “the emperor of the Romans made himself the best informed human being in the history of the world. That power eradicated human freedom.”

There were easy ways to defeat the machinery of mass surveillance in the modern empire, Moglen said—or at least easy enough for those who worked with such technologies. The challenge was to spread it beyond the technical elite. “We must popularize it, make it simple, cheap, and easy—and we must help people put it everywhere,” he said.

Or as the Diaspora guys had said: they had to make it for normal people.

—

Diaspora, inspired by Moglen's prophetic warnings more than three years before his Snowden lecture, had not penetrated popular culture; it was not a staple of world commerce; it was not both verb and noun, understood across the globe, like Facebook. Yet Diaspora, with its vision of decentralized, private communications centered on protecting the integrity of human connections, remains one of the most active open-source projects in the world. It has had more than fifty-five thousand lines of code, twenty-two revisions, hundreds of contributors over the course of its existence, and seventy-seven of them still regularly contributing code.

It had not died. It was not vaporware. The four NYU guys had not spent the money on appletinis and hookers. Its imaginative sparks, which could not be tracked completely, had lit up corners of the world far from the third-floor computer club at NYU. Diaspora had become even more necessary than when Dan, Rafi, Ilya, and Max had first been gripped by its possibilities.

As the project they created in 2010 moved to a foundation in 2013, Max wrote to the community that was going to be running it. “Diaspora is more than just code,” he said. “It's about a glimmer of hope that a small group of people could actually make a profound change.”

Or live trying.