>> Amy Draves: Thanks so much for coming. My name is Amy Draves and I'm delighted to
welcome Jim Dwyer to the Microsoft Research Visiting Speaker Series. He'll be discussing his
book, More Awesome than Money in which he focuses on the four individuals who created the
open source social media site Diaspora. Jim is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and he writes
the column about New York in the New York Times and has written or co-written six books
including 102 Minutes, Two Seconds Under the World and Actual Innocence. He appeared in
Ken Burns’documentary Central Park Five and was portrayed on Broadway in last year's Nora
Efron’s play Lucky Guy with Tom Hanks. Please join me in getting him a very warm welcome.
[applause]
>> Jim Dwyer: A couple of years ago I, this has nothing to do with my talk, but a couple of years
ago I was a briefly visiting professor at Princeton. I was working at the Times then as I am now
and they all were kind of nice to me down there. They knew I wasn't going to be in their hair
very long. I was therefore a semester. I remember the chairman of the humanities council
which is where I was teaching came up to me and said, you know, people here love the New
York Times. You know what they say? They say the Times is really great in everything except
my field. I am now here in your field and I am quite conscious of all the great and deep work
that you guys do and I'm appreciative of it. I just want to say that sometimes if I do seem like I
know my ass from my elbow, it's only an act, but I'm going to do my best. It's February 2010.
One last time Dan Grippi checked updates from friends. Then he found his way to the account
settings on his Facebook page. Buried several layers deep was the box, Dan, a senior at NYU
was looking for. Delete account. Was he sure? Dan clicked his affirmation. Okay then. The
account would be deactivated but not actually deleted for two more weeks. Any activity during
that time, logging in, checking on friends, the least flicker of digital life would be interpreted by
Facebook as a sign that he had changed his mind and really didn't want to shut it down. This
was all boilerplate, delivered to anyone who declared an intention to leave the flock. The next
message from Facebook was tailored to Dan Grippi. Dan, your friends are going to miss you, it
said. Dan had about 400 friends on Facebook, a number of them people he had never spoken
with in the flesh, or for that matter, online. Someone who knew someone would send a friend
request. He would say yes and that would be the end of it, no loss. But there were others, real
buds from high school, people he cared about in college, family members, authentic friends.
Their pictures were the ones appearing on the screen. It was a simple matter for the Facebook
servers to figure out whose profile he had checked out, with whom he had exchanged
messages, even people who were in the same picture. Facebook kept records of what he cared
about, knowing who and what Dan wanted in his life, knowing more than Dan himself
consciously knew was Facebook's business. It sold that knowledge. Daniel, Facebook pleaded,
wouldn't you want to stay in touch with these people? They were hostages; Facebook was
transforming his attempt to quit the network into a betrayal of his fondness for them,
manipulation. He clicked the delete button. That same winter, Dan and three other friends,
altogether four talented young nerds with time on their hands decided that they should bring
an end to Facebook’s monopoly on social networking. They thought with the right software no
one would need to surrender everything to be companies like Facebook. People could connect
to friends and networks of friends without going through the servers of Facebook Inc. It was a
simple motion of vast disruption. To Dan and his three friends in the computer club at NYU, Ilya
Zhitomirskiy, Max Salzberg and Rafael Sofaer, they thought it would be a fun way to spend the
summer. In the months before then they spent nearly every conscious minute in a computer
club room at NYU working on their upstart social network project. They called it Diaspora and if
you double-click at it you can fix that for me. They set out to create what I guess in essence
would be a peer to peer social network. They call the distributed social networking. I don't
think I need to explain the people in this room the complexity of that possibility or the sort of
simplicity of the idea behind. The four guys who were in on this project Rafael, Max, Dan and
Ilya, of course, were each different personalities. Rafael was a neuroscience major, kind of a
math prodigy in his own right, very cool, calm and collected guy from Palo Alto California. His
father had been a counselor to the State Department during the first George Bush and Ronald
Reagan era and a very levelheaded young man. Max Salzberg was a kind of aspiring CEO. He
had been going through college without a lot of joy until he discovered the computer club and
kindred spirits, people who didn't mind getting their arms deep into code late in the night. Dan
Grippi who was their kind of glamour figure was a master designer. He was a musician and he
worked as a model for a while. And Ilya Zhitomirskiy, who was a Russian immigrant, at age 18
he was taking PhD level math classes. He was -- whoops. Let me get back to this thing here.
He was a competitive swing dancer. He was a tight glider. He was a dumpster diver, a juggler
and spoke several languages and altogether a very charming and delightful guy. The four of
them thought it would be a great idea for them to head out onto Max's mother's basement for
the summer and hack away at this project. They didn't really think that anybody else actually
cared about it that much, but they didn't want to leech off of their parents for the summer.
The youngest of them, Rafael was 19. Max was 22 and he and Dan were about to graduate and
they didn't really feel like they should stick their hands out, so they thought maybe we can raise
$10,000 on Kickstarter which was then a brand new platform. They debated whether this was
feasible or not and then they put together a very slaphappy video and made their pitch on
Kickstarter. They said by the end of the summer they would have built the code base and that
then other hackers could work on and that they would make it public and free and anybody
who wanted to could work on, they called their project Diaspora because one of the meanings
of it is distributed. It comes from the Greek spreading seeds far and wide and, of course, it's
known for people who have left their homelands, particularly, the ancient Jews, but also other
people since then. But they called their project Diaspora and they thought anyone who wanted
to pitch in could help them on the code. They put up this appeal on Kickstarter and within a
couple of days they had gotten six or $7000 and the word started to spread a little bit and they
got $8000. Then they got $10,000 and they had hit their goal. The money didn't stop coming.
They were up to about $25,000 when I heard about it. The way I heard about it is a bit of a
shaggy dog tale, but I might as well pass along here. In 2004 my eldest daughter was going to
college, starting college and she and her roommate got hold of this brand using called
Facebook. It was the first semester that Facebook was widely distributed to schools outside of
the Ivy League. It was so compelling and attractive to them that they spent all of their time on
it and eventually when midterms were coming they realized that they would never get any
studying done if they still were mainlining Facebook all the time. So they swapped passwords
with each other, so that my daughter Maura would have her roommate Katie's password for all
but 15 minutes of the day and vice versa, so they could ease off of Facebook at least through
midterms. They happened to mention this to my wife. Maura happened to tell my wife and
she was finishing her master's work in computer science and was thinking about what her
dissertation project should be and she thought maybe I'll do something on privacy management
in MySpace and Facebook, so she became one of the early scholars in that area and indeed
wrote her dissertation about it. Some years later she heard about these four guys at NYU who
were raising a lot of money on Kickstarter. I had never heard of Kickstarter. And they were
doing quite well and it so happened that it was one of these moments when, as you know,
Facebook has a genius for really getting people furious and they happened to be in the midst of
one of those moments and I'm just going to read a little section about that for you now. What
is the thing they have every year, F8? Something, they have some big conference every year
down in San Francisco where all of the developers come in and this particular year, 2010 when
the Diaspora boys went up on Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg said to the crowd we think that
what we have to show you today will be the most transformative thing that we've ever done for
the web. That day Zuckerberg and his chief technical officer Brett Taylor ran through a series of
changes that would give Facebook a presence on other websites with like buttons. When
clicked, these like buttons would alert the users’ friends and anyone else who viewed their
Facebook pages of their interests, what they had been looking at and presumably thinking
about. The likes were a form of currency that Facebook, of course, would negotiate into
advertising dollars. Other changes were added in including the ability to watch what people
were reading away from the Facebook site. What Zuckerberg and his backers were proposing
was nothing less than becoming the tollbooth and gateway to the whole internet. By following
the interest of its users across cyberspace, Facebook would plant its flag and die on every
corner of the web. What Facebook, and Zuckerberg, and Brett Taylor saw as a great expansion
of human connectiveness, others saw as a silken trap from which there would be no escape.
This is really a significant step for Facebook, said Taylor. For years we've been saying it's an
open platform, but now for the first time the likes and interests of my Facebook profile linked
to places that are not on Facebook.com. My identity is not just defined by things on Facebook.
It's defined by things all over the web. This may have been seen as an unalloyed giant step
forward to Zuckerberg, Taylor and others in the bubble of Facebook's headquarters. Outside
the reaction was brutal. The toughest, because the non-tech press relied on it to render the
changes into non-geek speak was wired which ran a major essay that became the most read
story on its website for a month. I only need mention the headline was, Facebook Has Gone
Rogue. They called for a distributed social network. Just around that same time a Columbia
professor studied Facebook users asking their intentions and beliefs about their control of the
privacy settings. Then he compared it with their actual settings. These were advanced
students at Columbia. He found that 90 percent or sharing material that they had intended to
keep private and a perfect 100 percent were not achieving their privacy goals. One
consequence of this uproar was that attention to Diaspora, which I gave it some with a column
in the Times, exploded. More than 6000 people from 18 countries pitched in $200,000, 20
times what they had initially sought, and then a half million others joined a waiting list for
invitations. Four guys hanging around a little room at NYU suddenly found themselves handed
a global commission to read bottle the genie of personal privacy. For a time they were the
faces of revolution against this settled digital order. What drove these young men out to, what
inspired them was A, the difficulty of the problem and also the need for it. They had attended
talks by Eben Moglen , who many of you may know is a free software advocate and he's a
lawyer and a technologist and they had become convinced as, I believe, others had that the
web was reaching a kind of a state of social emergency. Since we have a couple of seconds
here, are any of you folks familiar with the Firefox tool Light? Let's look at a couple of things
here to demonstrate how quickly things get linked up. What? I'm on Facebook? How did that
happen? Okay. There's a bank and there's a cabinet company where I'm looking at some
cabinets for my kitchen and Facebook and New York Times. This thing here is called Lightbeam
and what it shows, I don't know if you have had a chance to see this thing before, is all of the
tracking that goes on with each of the sites that you open up. So when the Times opened up,
I'm not sure if that is legible but it says Bizographics.com. I don't know who they are. There are
multiple others. Each of these little advertising, Moitt Ads company, Zila company and so forth
and some of them connect out, Google syndication connects out to 2MDN.net, which then links
over to Chase.com. If we open up a couple of more things, we'll see some other great things.
Let's try the New York Post.com. I'm not sure that's a big paper out here in Seattle, but we get
a lot of it in New York. We'll go to ESPN and let's take a look again at Lightbeam. It's essentially
metastasizing before our eyes. More and more links are spreading out further and further.
What these four guys with this interesting summer plan, they were in the midst of not just a
discussion about rebuilding a social network, but I think they were involved with discussions
about the open web, our surveillance economy, free societies and from their perspective also
love, joy, hubris, bravery and death, actually, as well. They went out to California and were set
up at a place called Pivotal Labs, which does a lot of contract work. They invited them out,
hosted them there. They became actually quite popular among many of the leading figures in
the web. Tim Berners-Lee, they actually hadn't even heard of, was a fan of theirs. Mark
Zuckerberg actually gave $1000 towards their Kickstarter and some of the biggest names in the
venture capital were also interested in what they were doing. For the next three months they
worked pretty much around the clock to build the Diaspora framework. They released that in
September 2015. One of the issues with Diaspora is how many people are using it? Diaspora is
meant to be passed along and used by individuals. It's very much like WordPress. You
download the software and you go to town with it yourself. Clubs or companies or what have
you could set up their own internal social networks with this. Other privacy interested people
could do that. They had quickly kept their promise, but so great was the enthusiasm and the
rush for this that they decided to move on and begin to build what they called a consumer
phasing network and that, of course, was more intensive labor and more intensive coding and
they actually succeeded in getting that done too. It was still only an alpha product. It never got
past, at least with the founders, it never got past an alpha stage. But others began to pick it up
and it soon became one of the most widely developed open source free software products in
the world. As the months went on, the tensions began to grow on these young guys and they
inevitably had friction among them. They also did some pretty crazy things. They went to
Kleiner Perkins Caulfield which is a big DC firm in the valley which had been hugely supportive
of them at least in words and encouraging to them, and they put up a presentation to them in
which they asked for $10 million and Kleiner Perkins couldn't understand what they wanted
$10 million for or what they were going to do with it and they couldn't really explain it or how
they would ever get the money back. As the time rolled along their difficulties extended to
running out of money. They had raised $200,000. They were paying themselves a modest
stipend every month. They were paying for server time and developing and various things, and
of course when you are on Kickstarter, one of the things is that you end up promising people
things like T-shirts and little doodads and as one of the guys said, we should have gone into the
T-shirt business because they had to get 6000 T-shirts out to supporters. These are guys that
can order pizza but they are not very good at shipping and handling or ordering T-shirts in 6000
sizes. They had only really in the end netted about $170,000 between the Kickstarter cut and
between the payments for these fulfillment things, T-shirts and things. By the following
summer, they had run out, they were close to running out of money. Reputation.com then
issued them an invitation to come in and they said they wanted to acquire them, acquired
Diaspora and bring it into its fold. Reputation.com, if you are familiar with it, is a company that
whose founder said the first trillion dollars that was made on the web was made off of our data
by advertisers. The next trillion dollars we are going to have a piece of that back. They called
data the oil of the 21st century. He wasn't sure what he was going to do with Diaspora
anymore than Diaspora was sure of what they were going to do with $10 million if someone
had given it to them. They just figured -- they declined the invitation to be brought into
reputation.com and given some money for that. They continued working. Around November
of 2011 Ilya who was sort of their charismatic front man had a depressive side and he took his
life and so the project seemed to collapse at that point, of course, and it was a terrible
catastrophe for Ilya and his family and everybody who knew him, much less whether there was
going to be a Diaspora around after that. It was not a big issue for a while. Eventually, the
three survivors and other volunteers banded together and they stood Diaspora back up and
they continued to work on it for another year in fits and starts. They moved it over to the free
software foundation where it now resides. As I was watching this whole, all these events
unravel over a period of a couple of years, I was struck by the ability of teenagers, guys just out
of college, to build things without a tremendous amount of money. In the 1940s, the early
computer scientists, people like von Neumann and Turing who did work on the Manhattan
project and building early computational machines, they broke the distinction between
numbers that mean things and numbers that do things as the historian George Dyson in
Turing’s Cathedral and our universe would never be the same. You don't need factories or
tanker trucks to write code. Intellect combined with passion or drive can often help run capital.
The sense of possibility that they embodied, I think we can see in other things that have
happened over the last 10 to 15 years online. People perhaps in this room may remember
2004 when the browser wars seemed to have been completed with a victory by Internet
Explorer over Netscape, which was the insurgent browser. They had a product called Mosaic
and then Netscape, and Netscape raised a tremendous amount of money. Then through tough
competition from Microsoft and some crazy things that Netscape did the damage itself, that
company essentially started to fold, to crumble. It didn't fold, but the product of another
browser began to disappear from their horizon. But a group of people inside of Netscape had
formed a kind of skunks work. They called it Mozilla and the name came from Mosaic, which
was the kind of innovative browser that had been developed by Mark Andreas and others at
the University of Illinois. Mosaic and Godzilla, they were going to slay their Godzilla with this
Mosaic and so they called it Mozilla. It's a convoluted, nerdy name. What can I tell you?
Mozilla was part of Netscape and as Netscape was acquired and required this group inside of
Netscape was eventually discharged. They were sent away with about a million or $2 million
worth of seed money and then they disappeared. This was in the late ‘90s. And then really
unnoticed by most of the world, I would say. Perhaps people in tech were watching this, but I
think it came as a huge surprise in 2004, in November when the people from Mozilla
announced that they had a new browser to distribute and it was called Firefox. Firefox was
built on virtually no money by people who had left Netscape, which had all the money you
could possibly ever want and it quickly became a roaring, roaring success. It was built by
volunteers from around the world. We're all probably familiar with the privacy setting on our
browsers now which some people call the porn setting. Actually, it was developed by a
volunteer working on the Mozilla fire escape project who lived in Tehran and who was not
concerned, he was concerned about what people might find on his browser if the authorities
came in and seized his computer. It wasn't smut or dirty pictures or what have you that he was
worried about. He was worried about looking at the wrong kinds of political material,
something that would be far more transgressive. Firefox was translated quickly into 70
languages. The group wanted to hold a party, release parties on every continent. They had six
continents lined up and then they felt, well, that's about it. That's about as global as we're
going to get and then an e-mail arrived from a guy named Ethan Hicks who was working at the
Amundsen-Scott station at the South Pole, and he said he was going to hold a launch party too.
I love the signature on his e-mail. The temperature was -66 degrees when he announced his
plans to hold the Mozilla launch party there. I think what Diaspora ends up teaching us and it's
within the tradition of people who are fighting to keep the web open, democratic, a place that
empowers individuals and it's part of this tradition from which Firefox, Linux and some other
great innovations have come. Diaspora inspired by Eben Moglen and his warnings more than
three years before Edward Snowden emerged had not penetrated popular culture. It was not a
staple of world commerce. It was not both verb and noun and 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 more than 55,000 lines of code, 22 revisions, hundreds of
contributors and dozens of them who are still working on it regularly. It has not died. It was
not vaporware. Contrary to what some of the skeptics had predicted when they first raised
their $200,000, the four NYU guys had not spent the money on Appletinies and hookers. Its
imaginative sparks had lit up corners of the world far from the third-floor computer room at
NYU. Diaspora had become even more necessary than when Dan, Rafael 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 they could live trying to." I will be glad to take questions and discuss
Diaspora or anything else. [applause]. Thank you.
>>: I'm curious about where are the remaining three now.
>> Jim Dwyer: They are, one of them Raphael is in the Navy. Max is running a company that
essentially does what he wishes someone had done for Diaspora, which is fulfill Kickstarter
requests for startups, apparently quite a good business. And Dan is working as a software
developer in New York City. Somewhere in here I had a slide. This is a thing called the Open
Hub net that tracks open source products. I took this picture I guess last week and it says that it
still has very high activity. So there are others, mostly European hackers who are working on it.
>>: Are you a member of Diaspora?
>> Jim Dwyer: I am. I'm also, someone at a talk in New York last week asked are you on
Facebook. I want to point out before I answer that question, that hypocrisy is more widely
practiced than any religion or creed on earth. [laughter]. I am on Facebook. Yes, sir?
>>: Are you conscious about your activities on Facebook now more than before?
>> Jim Dwyer: Having been married to essentially the Paul Revere of tracking, I am deeply
conscious of it and more so than before. I'm also conscious of the incredible value people get
out of connections on the web. When I was a kid growing up, I grew up in New York City. I was
born there. And I lived in basically a regular neighborhood in Manhattan before it was the
Disneyland of money, and when we were kids we used to play on the street all the time and the
moms would kind of stick their heads out the window and look at us once in a while and go
back inside. If somebody was getting into trouble or had an accident or what have you, down
the street, and your mom wasn't looking out the window, one of the neighbors would be likely
to go and the steam pipe and the message would go up and down the building and your mom
would know to go stick your head out the window. I've often thought about that internet in
line with the pleasures I get out of connecting with people from my old neighborhood who
many of them I had lost touch with because we all grew into adulthood. We sort of had a
minor resurrection you could say on the Facebook page after having met in person. I think one
of the most interesting things about Facebook is how it grew. It emerged, as we all probably
know the creation myth of Facebook, right? Zuckerberg in his dorm at Harvard with some
friends and it started at Harvard and I don't know if it went to Yale next door Stanford next, but
it went school by school, but what it did is it moved from real world networks. I'm in Spanish
class and I want to know about the cute girl over there, or I'm in bio class and I want to know
about that cute guy over there, or whatever. I'm just curious about someone I see at school.
You could do that on Facebook. It was an adjunct to a real world network. Its success, I think,
was that it emerged from the template of real-life and the networks that we have in real life. I
think the failures or let's say the limited success that has been had by Diaspora and other would
be social networks is that they don't have organic networks that are part of their DNA. They
have aspirations. I'm into privacy. I want to be against Facebook, but that's not the same
connection as the kid I used to play tag with on 95th St. or my friend from work who has now
moved on to a another job. Those are different kinds of connections then some of these other
emerging social networks can offer. Last month, sorry. Go.
>>: An online question, any thoughts about tracking and potential connections being made by
governments such as the NSA, government agencies, such as the NSA?
>> Jim Dwyer: If you have a chance and can go look at, I don't know if it's on YouTube. The
video is online of this talk by Eben Moglen, which inspired these guys. They call it Freedom in
the Cloud. And Moglen talked in 2010 about virtually every single thing that Edward Snowden
revealed to us in 2013 about the interrelationship between the commercial surveillance
economy and the ability of totalitarian and non-totalitarian regimes to monitor us. That
industry, that industrial-strength, data mining and so forth has been a very, very important part
of government surveillance expansion. There's a story in the book about, when I started on this
project it was right before the Arab spring and I met a whole bunch of people from Syria and
Egypt and Tunisia and Thailand and some other places where there was going to turn out to be
a lot of upheaval and they were very much concerned about the double-edged sword of being
online, about how it was this enormously powerful tool for communications. I remember that
Thanksgiving in 2010 there was a Facebook page in Egypt that was devoted to the name of a
young man who had been killed while in police custody and it had become a rallying point for
the opposition to the Mubarak regime. There was an election that was going to be held what
was our Thanksgiving weekend. I'm not sure what the significance of the date is in Egypt, but
every election year they have polling at that time of year and there was actually a single
candidate being put up as authentic opposition. Facebook struck down the page 3 days before
the election. I believe that being in a big organization where stupid things often seem to
happen for sinister reasons, but they are really stupid. I think that that was probably a stupid
thing. But the Facebook does have enormous power over our communications and they
become more and more dependent on it. There is also, one of the people I spoke to for this
was a young Iranian man whose father was the spokesman for and opposition presidential
candidate in I think 2009 in Iran. His father had been very conscious of avoiding surveillance.
There was a very intensive surveillance force regime in place by the security regime. Yet he was
trailed up to a remote village where he had been essentially kind of living incognito and found
and arrested and brought out for sedition or something like that and beaten to a pulp and put
into prison where I think he still is now five or six years later. What had happened was the
father had used his Nokia phone to communicate with foreign journalists during this campaign.
Nokia had sold an entire suite of products to governments that enabled a very powerful
tracking capability. They got hold before the European Union’s committee on privacy or civil
liberties or something like that, how can you do this? And Nokia said look, we're really sorry.
We regret this and we're going to be more careful. But they said we just want you to know
every single one of the governments represented at this hearing, Western Europe, every single
one of you put it in your specifications when you ordered these systems that you wanted this
ability. So it's a vexing problem. But I don't think it's an unsolvable problem. I don't think that
anything is unsolvable because I think that smart people, like the people in this room and smart
kids like these guys down at NYU, I think you can almost solve anything. You can fix stuff. You
can, one of the great things Moglen said was that the beginning of the 20th century the
countries that were the most powerful had the most steel, the best steel. Now it's going to be
the countries that have the best math that are going to be the most powerful, and I think the
truth is we are still in the big bang moment of the digital era and the atoms have not yet settled
into their final shape. And the forces that are driving them, we can't even act them out yet, but
you are all part of it. So whoever asked that question online about, yeah, I think it's a big deal,
this capability and I think it's a big responsibility for everybody who has the abilities that you
guys have. A lot of folks are just going to swipe and get on their mobile phone and be online
and make themselves very vulnerable in ways that they don't know about. Maybe it's not such
a big deal in this country, but there are a lot of places in the world that it is a big deal.
>> Amy Draves: Thank you so much.
>> Jim Dwyer: Thank you. [applause].