The evening after the release, the four guys began to scatter to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with their families: Max was going to relatives in Seattle, Rafi was heading to Palo Alto, Dan back to Long Island, and Ilya was pointed toward the suburbs of Philadelphia. Before he left, Ilya grabbed Max.
In the weeks since the visit to New York, Ilya had lost just about all interest in the monastic regimen in San Francisco. Even though he had just found the apartment in the Mission District with an amiable housemate, the grind of long hours, the absence of friends outside work, and the months in the depressing hotel had spent all his emotional reserves. Ilya seemed to assimilate the decor of the flophouse. He shaved only occasionally, about as often as he showered. He wanted out, he wanted to return to being a college student in New York, and he told that to Max.
“I’m going to wait it out until Thanksgiving,” Ilya had said.
That, in effect, was the following day, as they would all be going home. Max was furious.
“What are you going to do? You can’t just leave,” Max said. “You have to give me until Christmas to get someone to replace you.”
Ilya could not tolerate a horizon that long. He wanted to restart his life in New York. The man-boy who had been so exuberant, so loud, nine months earlier when he and Max were talking on the phone about their plans to drop everything and make Diaspora that the neighbors had to yell at him to shut up had, it seemed, run out of gas. He was flat.
It was a particularly bad moment for this crisis. Managing the demands of the users who had just gotten the invitations, fixing the bugs that they would spot, would take every BTU of brainpower among the four of them.
“If you leave tomorrow, I will be really mad. But if you give me two weeks’ notice, we will get someone to replace you,” Max said. He retreated on his demand for Ilya to stay until Christmas. “If you tell me you want to go, give me until December 1.”
Ilya mumbled something, seemed to agree. Max put the thought out of his head.
—
Through the night, they watched the site come to life, people joining every minute. Some mentioned they wanted private-messaging ability, instead of having to put everything on the walls of their aspects. A developer in Paraguay checked in and said he would work on building such a feature over the weekend. Serbian users said that they were going to translate the code immediately. A collective in Spain was organizing a meeting. Max and Dan were up all night, replying to comments, pointing people to places where they could file bug reports.
Back in New York, their mentor, Evan Korth, posted the news on his Facebook page: “Diaspora FTW”—in online shorthand, Diaspora For The Win.
In the morning, Dan headed back to New York. At the airport in San Francisco, he went through a new screening device run by the Transportation Security Administration. He sent a quick note about the experience to his Diaspora page, in the grand tradition of social network ephemera: “TSA just saw my penis.”
—
Just as in America the fourth Thursday in November is a ritual of turkey and gratitude, in Egypt that weekend would mark a kind of ritual: the parliamentary elections, which had faithfully returned the party of Hosni Mubarak to power, as it had in every poll since the party was created in 1977. The activists whose agitation had grown louder online and had, on occasion, moved into the streets were not mounting a serious slate in opposition. The rigging of the election was not something they worried about; it was part of the routine. Participation under such circumstances was futile. They decided, instead, that they would document every instance of fraud on a prized, uncensored forum: their Facebook page.
Just a few days before the election, they came up with a bold plan to at least thwart some of the fraud in which ballots were cast in the names of nonvoters. Everyone who was registered would cast a write-in ballot for Khaled Said, a young man killed during an encounter with police.
On that Friday morning, Wael Ghonim awoke to discover that Facebook had unilaterally and without notice taken down the “We Are All Khaled Said” page. A second page, “Mohamed ElBaradei” also was shut down. The news burst on Twitter. It reached across the ocean. Egyptian activists in the United States and Europe tried to contact managers of Facebook, an institution that on regular workdays had no public address, e-mail address, or phone number. On the Friday of a holiday weekend, the hurdle was even higher, because even personal contacts were likely to be away. Nevertheless, by the end of the day, they had lined up people who were in a position to act.
Their reasons for shutting down the pages were not, as many in Egypt had speculated, the result of pressure from authorities. Facebook had received complaints about abuses on the pages, which was not unusual. But the administrators of the pages had used false identities, a violation of Facebook’s terms of service. Knowing real identities of their users, and their appetites, was Facebook’s business. The company also held that real identities provided accountability for what was said and done on the site. The activists, of course, believed that whatever the merits of Facebook’s position, “accountability” in the hands of the Egyptian regime would mean suppression and retaliation.
“Our attempts to remain safe,” Ghonim wrote, “had come back to handcuff us.”
Scrambling to get their pages back up before the elections, they made a deal to have activists outside the country be the administrative contacts. Facebook promised that it would not reveal their names. The “Khaled Said” page and its 330,000 registered users, and the “ElBaradei” page with 298,000 users, were back within fifteen hours. It was Facebook’s world, and they set the rules.
—
That weekend, as she listened to the cell phone rings roll on and on, Stephanie Lewkiewicz wondered if he would pick up.
At last, she heard a human speaking.
“Hey,” Ilya said, barely getting the word out of his mouth.
She had dialed his number and that was his voice, but could these flat, lifeless tones possibly be emerging from the same guy Stephanie had seen two years earlier at the front of the math classroom, practically floating from his seat with excitement?
Was he okay?
“I’ve quit Diaspora,” he said.
Ah. That explained why he was down, but it did not add up to world’s end. Diaspora, hacking, building, activism—whatever he took on, she had absolute faith in him.
Two years earlier, Stephanie had realized that she no longer enjoyed being a theater major and that even if she slogged through another couple of terms to graduation, she would join armies of people struggling to keep themselves together while waiting for a break in the brutally competitive theater world. She didn’t love theater that much. In fact, she didn’t love it at all. She was a natural at math—her father was an engineer—and saw her relationship with that subject as love-hate. Which, at least, was better than theater.
For her senior year, she decided to double major—bring on the math—and shifted into the prestigious Courant Institute at NYU. Many of the Courant professors were too absorbed by research to do much hand-holding; it seemed the students were essentially on their own. Most of her Courant classmates were more introverted and socially awkward than the theater crowd, but she felt they were also more innocent.
Studying kept her up all hours. One night, after crashing on a homework assignment in the math lounge, she curled up on a sofa and closed her eyes. At some point—she didn’t know how long she had been asleep—she heard a voice.
“Hey there,” a guy said.
She blinked her eyes open and lifted her head.
“Oh,” the guy said. “I’ve seen you around. You’re in my analysis class.”
Stephanie recognized him right away. He was the guy who wore a crazy American flag shirt, tie-dyed pants, and sat in the front with his hair sticking up at all angles. How he looked was the least of what made him memorable. Generally, few people in math class spoke
up, and of those who did, Stephanie sometimes felt there was a touch of showing off how much they knew. This guy was always engaging the teacher, but it was different. He was openly, promiscuously ravenous to learn, taking delight in everything about the subject. An explanation, a link made clear, would make him laugh. She had found him compelling.
“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.