More Awesome Than Money (7 page)

For months, Komisar had been thinking about how to refactor the terms. He had spent time with the developers of Bynamite, who were building a little add-on to browsers that would, in effect, track the trackers—keep an inventory of the information that was being collected by advertisers as people surfed the web. It was a first step.

Describing his thinking later, Komisar said the goal was to “create privacy controls that effectively allowed for me to own my data, and thereby derive the value of that data. That doesn't mean I would keep it to myself. It means I would share it with who I wanted to, when I wanted
to, for purposes that I wanted to. That was the context in which Diaspora came to my attention.”

That was practically the language from their Kickstarter pitch. “With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms,” they had written.

In essence, web privacy could be seen as a commodity, not necessarily a right. A large part of the economy of the web rested on data mining; the question for Komisar was the matter of who got to trade in the privacy.

“What was great about the web—which was free information and content—couldn't exist in a world where privacy was strictly protected. If you strictly protect it, you would not be able to do effective marketing, and with no effective marketing dollars, none of that information content could be created and shared. Until someone owns that information, there's no interest, desire, to protect it. It's less a notion of blocking and more an issue of controlling, and thereby deriving value. If I could derive value from my data, I would suddenly become a lot more responsible with it. That became my angle, my thesis.”

He asked about what they were going to do.

The current plan, they explained, was to go to Max's family's house in Lake Tahoe for the summer and code like crazy.

Komisar was charmed.

—

As they spoke with Komisar, their Kickstarter page had started to hum. Another thirty people pitched in that day. Word began to spread that there was a Facebook alternative. The Brooklyn hacker space NYC Resistor posted an item about the project. The news moved over to Reddit, a site where people shared links to news items that interested them. In Sweden, Peter Sunde, one of the founders of The Pirate Bay—an anticopyright, propiracy website that provided digital torrents of music, movies, and other material, and a legendary force among hackers—sent out a message on Twitter: “Looks like NYC. I don't know them, just love the idea. I know some people they know and they say they're cool!”

On Tuesday of that week, four senators called on the Federal Trade Commission to regulate online privacy. By the end of the first week, the
four Diaspora guys had raised five thousand dollars, half of their goal, and were getting fifty to seventy donations every day.

A careful reader of the Kickstarter website could have seen another trail, which did not directly involve money. The Diaspora Four were showing that at a bare minimum, they had the temperamental chops to develop a big software project in public. Someone named Mike complained that they were giving updates through Twitter, a centralized service, when a perfectly good decentralized system called Identi.ca was available to perform the same function.

Rafi replied: “Good point, Mike!” and immediately posted a link to their brand-new Identi.ca account.

On the Kickstarter comments page, many people invoked a blog post written by Luis Villa, an intellectual property lawyer in California who had also worked as a programmer on many open-source and free-software projects. He said he supported Diaspora but was skeptical, and asked provocative questions, among them: Did they know about other projects that had tried similar things, and why did they think those hadn't worked out? Would they integrate any of the latticework of existing programs that would be useful in creating a social network website? There were more questions, and Max answered them all. In conclusion, he wrote: “The problem itself is not what server architecture, or what language we code in, or even what standards we support. While these questions are very important in making any solution better and more robust, they are all implementation details. The core problem is that users who want to share with their friends have no better alternative. We think any solution which addresses this problem is a step in the right direction.

“You said yourself that you have seen vaporware projects in this space in the past, and we have too. We think a project focused on getting something out there should be priority #1. We need to try a bunch of approaches, and see which ones take off, and we need to do it quickly.

“We want to be an independent code base because the four of us work fast and well as a team. Our arguments are short and solved by someone writing better code.”

There wasn't a hint of defensiveness in the long, thoughtful answer.
In Max's closing words, he implicitly acknowledged that even other geeks who were philosophically aligned with them might have good-faith doubts.

“You say you don't have the time or money to work on such a project, one you yourself identify as important. That makes tons of sense to us. There are plenty of things we would like to do and we don't have the time for, and we are not even married or have jobs.

“If that is the case however, what would be un-pragmatic about giving four excited dudes who spent their last semester of school thinking about a problem you are ‘worried-about-but-can't-deal-with-now,' twenty bucks so they can take an honest crack at solving it? :)”

Questions answered, the man pitched in.

—

A few days after they launched Kickstarter, Evan Korth set up a dinner for the four with Eben Moglen at Apple, a fancy restaurant in Greenwich Village. They told him the risks involved with Kickstarter, and Moglen said they should not worry.

“If you need a thousand dollars or so to get over the top, I'll get it for you,” Moglen said.

They were planning to incorporate as a regular corporation; Moglen's arrangement with the Free Software Foundation was that he would not advise for-profit companies. Since they were not organizing themselves as a not-for-profit, he could not be their lawyer. But, he told them, if they ran into any problems, they could call on him. He just didn't want it to be widely known. The free-software world was highly ideological about such matters.

—

The recruiter welcomed Dan, hoped his flight from New York had been good, and explained that they were looking for promising young programmers.

“So,” she said. “What kinds of things are you interested in?”

Dan thought for an instant about Diaspora, then about a technology product that had been released a few weeks earlier and had become an instant, startling sensation.

“The iPad is very cool,” Dan said.

Its sleek style was galvanizing, of course, but Dan realized immediately that naming an Apple product was not the most politic statement. He was, after all, sitting in Redmond, Washington, at the headquarters of Microsoft, the prosperous but stodgy foil to Apple's hipness.

“Also, the Zune,” Dan said, without conviction. Zune was a digital player that was Microsoft's attempt to compete with the iPod.

“I don't have anyone to meet you about them,” the recruiter said. “We are interested in SharePoint.”

Before he had gone into the office, Dan had shut off his phone, purposely. Now he could not wait to get outside. He did not care about Microsoft's SharePoint, a program that allowed people in an organization to develop and share websites. The meeting came to a quick end. He stepped into the hall and switched on his phone. What was the latest from Kickstarter?

—

When Dan got back to New York, there was another conference call from Randy Komisar. He had spoken with his partners. They had an invitation.

“You know what,” Komisar said. “Why don't you come out here and spend the summer with us? We have an incubator right downstairs.”

He stressed that there were no commitments by the other side.

“God, that's a great idea,” Max said.

They were dizzy.

—

Every Wednesday afternoon, a group of invited academics, lawyers, and technologists gathered in a seminar room at New York University School of Law to discuss emerging issues in privacy, the Internet, and computers. It was convened by a law professor, Katherine Jo Strandburg, and Helen Nissenbaum, a professor of communications and computer science who was among the leading privacy researchers in the world.

Perhaps inevitably, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the drop-in artist, turned up one afternoon. After the seminar ended, he blotted the anxiety from his palms and approached Nissenbaum. He told her about the Diaspora project. Nissenbaum, delighted, had one piece of advice: “Keep your eyes on the prize.” Ilya left feeling commissioned by a great authority.

News about Diaspora ricocheted from family and friends, around the Internet and NYU. A few weeks later, it came back to the Nissenbaum
seminar. Finn Brunton, a postdoctoral fellow, opened the session by giving the customary rundown of new developments. Among them was the Diaspora project, now raising funds on Kickstarter, and getting a strong response.

In fact, they had gotten to five thousand dollars, halfway to their goal, after a week. Five days later, they had hit ten thousand dollars. Then twenty thousand dollars. The money kept rolling in.

Among the people at the seminar when Finn Brunton mentioned the project was Cathy Dwyer, a professor at Pace University; she was one of the first academics to research privacy management tools in social networks, as well as commercial advertising tracking practices.

That night, she mentioned Diaspora to her husband, the About New York columnist at the
New York Times
—that would be me, the author of this book—and suggested the students would make a good subject for a column, pointing out that they had not only hit their goal of ten thousand dollars but were by then over twenty thousand dollars. I got in touch; they were insanely busy, but agreed to do a conference call on the evening of May 10. We spoke at eleven-thirty at night, which was the loin of the day, as far as they were concerned.

They had decided, ahead of time, not to tell me about their conversations with Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. The Kickstarter campaign was succeeding beyond their most exuberant hopes, and perhaps they really did not need to get involved with the venture capital world yet.

Ilya was not available, cramming for a final the next day. Rafi did not want to do the interview—arguing with Dan and Max that they had not written anything yet—but the others prevailed. Despite his reluctance, Rafi was the first to speak, explaining what inspired them.

“Eben Moglen gave a talk about how we're surrendering privacy to cloud systems,” he said.

The value of the services, Max said, was negligible, given the scale of data collection that was going on. But they all used social networks.

“Certainly, as nerds, we have nowhere else to go,” Max said.

Would you describe yourselves as nerds?

“Oh,” Max said. “We're big nerds.”

They were winningly modest and smart.

A picture session was organized for the following morning—the only
time they'd be available, as it was the first of two graduation sessions for Dan and Max. All four gathered at the Courant Institute building, and posed in a classroom in front of a blackboard. Wearing a T-shirt and a watch cap, Dan sat at the front, holding open a laptop that showed the message they had posted on Kickstarter: “thank you friends.” It also displayed the name of the project as “Diaspora*,” the asterisk a graphical flourish.

As soon as the last shot was clicked, Dan and Max rushed off to meet their families.
At midnight, my column was posted on the
Times
website:

“How angry is the world at Facebook for devouring every morsel of personal information we are willing to feed it?

“A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn't force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on.

“They gave themselves 39 days to raise $10,000, using an online site, Kickstarter, that helps creative people find support.

“It turned out that just about all they had to do was whisper their plans.

“‘We were shocked,' said one of the four, Dan Grippi, 21. ‘For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing.'

“They announced their project on April 24. They reached their $10,000 goal in 12 days, and the money continues to come in: as of Tuesday afternoon, they had raised $23,676 from 739 backers. ‘Maybe 2 or 3 percent of the money is from people we know,' said Max Salzberg, 22. . . .

“As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Mr. Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary. ‘In our real lives, we talk to each other,' he said. ‘We don't need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn't all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren't really rare things. The technology already exists.'

“The terms of the bargain people make with social networks—you swap personal information for convenient access to their sites—have
been shifting, with the companies that operate the networks collecting ever more information about their users. That information can be sold to marketers. Some younger people are becoming more cautious about what they post. ‘When you give up that data, you're giving it up forever,' Mr. Salzberg said. ‘The value they give us is negligible in the scale of what they are doing, and what we are giving up is all of our privacy.' . . .