“They’re not going to let me really delete it,” he told Stephanie. “It’s going to be stored on the Internet. It’s never going to go away.”
That single episode aside, he was a bright spirit among the muted tones of the math program. He often wore a shirt designed as an American flag and neon blue pants; he sat near the front, hand up, more with questions than with answers. His wandering curiosity brought him to Max’s heuristics class, and then to the computer club room, which had a much livelier hangout scene than the math lounge.
As it happened, Max and another senior, Dan Grippi, were officers of the ACM, and they had an intuitively subversive approach to computing. Or perhaps they saw it as unmapped land, mostly ungoverned. They turned the club office into a hangout through a satisfying series of small hacks. Until their administration at the start of the senior year, it was hard for anyone to just drop in because only the club officers had keys, but Max and Dan fixed that. Not by going to a locksmith for more keys. One night, they put a little radio frequency identification chip on the door. The chip, known as an RFID, is a simple gadget that sends signals a few yards; it’s what lets an identification card swipe open a turnstile, or lets a driver pay a highway toll without cash. Max and Dan set up their RFID to indicate when the door was opened or closed. The signal was strong enough to reach the computers in the room. Then the computer would send out a tweet under a Twitter account registered as @acmroom.
So the door had its own Twitter account. It tweeted simple messages.
The ACM Room is open.
Or:
The ACM Room is locked.
To accomplish that, however, Dan and Max had to make changes on one of the computers in the room, which ordinarily could be done only by people with the master password privileges, like the university’s systems administrators. The proper way to do it would have been to file a work request ticket through channels. Or they could just hack into it.
With everyone gone for the night, Dan read out the serial numbers from the back of the computer, and Max pulled up the manual from the Dell website. It explained how to reset the administrative password. You open the computer casing and unplug a jumper that supplies power to the motherboard, then waited a few minutes. Then you can put in any master password. Easy.
The door’s first tweet had said:
if a door opens and no one is there to see it, is it really open?
Message number 2:
the ACM room door is now closed!
On his own Twitter account, Max had announced:
sweet, now all of you people can know when I am in the acmroom because i made this door tweet.
Even with glitches, it was a cool stunt that won new fans for the room and the club.
—
For a partner in a minor black bag operation, Max could hardly have done better than Dan Grippi. Patient, methodical, inscrutably quiet, Dan had been elbows deep in computers since he was five or six years old.
During his junior year, he had applied for work at StyleCaster, a website created by two brothers who had graduated from NYU. At the time, StyleCaster offered suggestions on what people should wear that day, based on the weather. During the job interview, Dan noticed that they had a big photo studio. Just for fun, he wrote a short programming script on the spot that automated part of the photographer’s work.
If he were hired, the interviewer asked, how much would he want?
Dan wasn’t sure.
“How about eight dollars an hour,” the interviewer suggested.
“No way,” Dan said.
“Well, what do you want?”
Dan did not have a figure in mind, but wondered if he could get away with asking for fifteen dollars. Maybe they would go for twelve dollars. He often thought before he spoke. Before he could get the number out of his mouth, the interviewer answered his own question.
“How about twenty dollars an hour?” the interviewer said.
“Sure,” Dan said.
Not for the first time, his taciturnity had paid off.
After he and Max took over the computer club, kids were in and out of the place at all hours.
One day, signs appeared around the computer science building:
THURSDAY NIGHTS
COME AND GEEK OUT!
BUILD A MAKERBOT
EAT PIZZA
BRING YOUR SLEEPING BAGS.
The MakerBot is a three-dimensional printer, a contraption of transformational possibilities. It is a machine that makes things. The 3-D printer works like an inkjet printer except that it squirts molten plastic, not ink. As layers of plastic are added, they can rise into almost any shape—bolts, tools, toys, knobs, bullets—based on digital designs sent to the printer from a computer. In short, it was a factory for the desktop. Already, industrial versions of 3-D printers were making exotic furniture for hotels and restaurants, lamps, doorknobs, jewelry, handbags, perfume bottles, clothing, and architectural models; the television personality Jay Leno had one that created custom part models for his vintage automobile collection, keeping a 1907 steam-driven car on the road. The ready-made commercial 3-D printers cost from $25,000 to more than $1 million. All things considered, the notion that a bunch of college kids would be messing with a 3-D printer would have been beyond conception a few years before. But earlier in 2004, members of a hacker collective in Brooklyn had started selling MakerBot kits, the electronic guts and hardware of an assemble-it-yourself 3-D printer. The cost: seven hundred dollars. After it was put together, users could download ready-made designs from the Thingiverse, a repository that anyone was allowed to use or contribute to. It was the perfect teething biscuit for the crowd in the ACM room, decided Evan Korth, the faculty adviser to the group.
Korth had spent a good part of his ten years as a faculty member hunting for new trails into the world for NYU’s brilliant math and computer science students. The easy, obvious route led to Wall Street, which had an insatiable appetite for programming whizzes. But Korth wanted the students to see that not all paths led to the investment banks, where so many of them would end up twirling algorithms in the financial services rodeo. With Hilary Mason, a data scientist from Bit.ly and Chris Wiggins, a physics and math professor at Columbia University, Korth started a nonprofit called HackNY. Its unofficial slogan was “Save the kids from the Street”—meaning Wall Street. They staged hackathons, twenty-four-hour competitions for teams to hack together a software program that did something fun.
Korth did not begrudge his students the respectability of sweet-paying internships, but he wanted them to also see the possibilities in hacker spaces, the lofts and storefronts occupied by cooperatives of tinkerers. His students were the first generation for whom it was simply intuitive that power was exercised in 1s and 0s. They appreciated technology, but neither feared nor revered it. The most adventurous of them opened the backs of phones and appliances, heedless of the perils of voided warranties, to see what new, unplanned tricks the gadgets could be made to do.
Korth brought the ACM group to Brooklyn to visit NYC Resistor, a hacker space up four flights of steep wooden steps on the top floor of a nineteenth-century building that had once been the home of the Long Island Brewing Company.
“NYC Resistor is a force of chaos in the world,” said Bre Pettis, a member of the collective that started the hacker space. “Imagine kittens with jet packs—flying around in a room.”
It was there that the MakerBot had been conceived by Pettis and a group of hackers who thought that 3-D printing was exciting and that nothing about the technology warranted a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars. (In 2013, MakerBot, with backing from the venture capital arm of Jeff Bezos, was sold to an industrial maker of 3-D printers for $403 million.) They had started their business creating build-it-yourself kits and selling them for less than one thousand dollars apiece; with a few extra dollars in the budget, Korth bought the forty-sixth
one produced. He invited the two officers, Max and Dan, to figure out something to do with it.
The Association for Computer Machinery began in 1947, after modern computing began to grow from concepts developed by Alan Turing and John von Neumann before and during World War II.
The work of Turing and von Neumann “broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things,” the historian George Dyson wrote. “Our universe would never be the same.”
Almost seven decades later, college students could try to build their own desktop factory. Max posted the signs inviting people to geek out and build the MakerBot.
—
The early versions of the MakerBot kit required lots of assembling of hardware parts. Ilya showed up the first night with his own soldering kit, which was supplemented with an electric hot plate for baking parts. To make sure that no one would mistake this cooking appliance for something to actually cook on, one of the students wrote a felt-tipped warning on the lid: “No Food! Lead Only!” A cheery-looking skull and crossbones emphasized the point.
The building sessions went on for weeks, late into the night. Korth, who lived not far from the school, usually stopped by with snacks to fortify them. One time he brought a date along. Afterward, the woman asked: “Who was the kid in the neon blue pants? He was hitting on me like crazy.” That was Ilya, Korth realized, laughing at the audacity.
As the semester was coming to a close, they had not quite finished assembling the bot. Max was determined to see the project through, and the group agreed to gather for a final push on the last Saturday of the term. They hooked up a camera to document progress on the contraption, and streamed video live to the World Wide Web. The revolution was being televised. Korth, at a party, spent most of the time in the host’s bedroom watching the video feed on his computer.
After going at it hard for an hour or two, Ilya’s stomach was growling. There had been no pizza that night. His voice rose from the box.
“Can we get some food?” he asked.
Max broke the news. “We have some crackers,” he said. “Let’s finish the food we have. We’re running out of money.”
Korth left the party and headed for an all-night deli to pick up ice cream for them. Dan noticed that the official MakerBot site was tweeting updates on their progress to Twitter, and also sharing a link to the live stream. “Over two thousand people are following MakerBot, so they’re going to see what we’re doing!” he shouted.
From his perch inside the box, Ilya gave a small sigh of satisfaction as he got a tricky piece connected. “There is something to be said for having the right tools,” he declared.
“And that thing,” Rafi said, “is ‘awesome.’”
Ilya dug into the ice cream. Rafi pushed a button on his laptop, which loaded the design instructions and sent them to the printer. The first layer of plastic was squirted precisely into place. It would take an hour or so, but eventually their first creation would take shape: a plastic shot glass, the traditional product to mark the inaugural of a new MakerBot.
The shot glass came off the printer near four A.M. A credible result, if a bit lopsided. They poured Maker’s Mark. Dan and Max, Ilya and Rafi, were elated. College students are known to like a drink, but not for making their own shot glasses, much less building a machine to custom-manufacture them.
It was worth toasting, and they did. By the start of the second term, they were looking for something new to do together. The long nights with the MakerBot had baked the four guys together. So when Korth told them that the Internet Society was sponsoring a talk by Eben Moglen on a Friday night in February, they had been ready to hear him say that the world needed fixing and that they could start with social networking. There was indeed something to be said for having the right tools.
CHAPTER THREE
Dan was in agony after Moglen’s talk. He had not gone to it, as he was backed up with homework, due to graduate in May, and feeling some parental pressure to find a job. So he stayed in his apartment in the East Village. But the other dudes were there, and he wanted to at least be conversant. So he had surfed to the webcast of the speech, and he set it as his aural wallpaper, half listening, then three-quarters, and then stopped everything else.
It was a few nights after the talk that Dan started peeling back the settings on his Facebook account, curious to see if he could find a way to regulate his privacy.
He could not. When Dan saw the guys in the ACM room, he told them that he had quit Facebook, and was going through withdrawal. They really had to build a better social network. In bull sessions there and elsewhere, Max and Ilya, Dan and Rafi, and a few other friends talked about Moglen’s assertion that Facebook was just a collection of PHP doodads, with spying thrown in for free.
The running updates from friends? “There’s nothing unique about activity streams,” Rafi said.
Pictures?
“We’ve been putting pictures on the web since 2000,” Ilya said.
If nothing about Facebook was technically exotic, the elements were all pulled together so crisply that hundreds of millions of people had joined, drawn by a package of cumulatively attractive parts available nowhere else. From its birth in a Harvard dormitory, it had achieved a generational and social ubiquity. It also served as a platform for commercial causes and, occasionally, political ones, providing that local officials did not lean on Facebook to pull pages that gave offense: freeish speech. And access to it was free, as long as the users consented, passively, to a wholesale, virtually uncontrollable surrender of their privacy.
In truth, the social networks were no worse than other web functions, like news, shopping, gossip, pornography, sports, entertainment. Each of them collected shocking amounts of data from users who did not realize little trackers were recording the pages they looked at. Facebook was just the most familiar example of the profoundly uneven bargain that was the hidden secret of the evolving web.
Indeed, by the spring of 2010, it was finally dawning on Facebook’s users, as the columnist Michael Hiltzik wrote in the Los Angeles Times, that they “are not the sites’ customers; they’re the merchandise. The real customers are the advertisers and the aggregators who suck up the data on the users and use it to target commercial come-ons more effectively.”
The NYU guys did not see why that had to be the only deal possible. Their ideal network would be decentralized from the beginning. Moglen had spoken about tiny servers that were starting to come on the market, devices no larger than a cell phone that would be able to securely handle a person’s e-mail accounts, web browsing, and social networking. A stack of free software would make the thing run. Plugged into a socket at home, or running at very low power on a battery, they would liberate individuals from giant central servers. Moglen had called it the freedom box. Maybe, the four NYU guys mused, their contribution would be a social network with people controlling their own data on their own individual servers. They could build the scaffolding for the distributed network. Sure, it might be a while before everyone would be living with a twenty-nine-dollar gadget plugged in behind the sofa, but in the meantime, people could use servers of trusted institutions—their schools, for instance, or jobs—to host the new social site. And leave Facebook out of it.
With the exception of Ilya, they all, in one way or another, had grown up with Facebook. Rafi used it to stay in touch with friends he made during summers. Max was on it all the time. Dan, too, until he bailed.
Ilya had never bothered to sign up. For him, abstaining from Facebook was both a political statement and a matter of personal aesthetics. Having instant access to a person’s profile short-circuited the evolution of an acquaintance to a friend, he thought, an unnecessary sacrifice of the mystery and pleasure of getting to know someone.
All of them were instinctively antagonistic to, or at least suspicious of, large systems that hoarded and peddled personal information without so much a
s asking.
Maybe they could build something better. They had, after all, just built their own printer.
—
Late one night a few weeks after the lecture, Ilya called Max. This was a hard, interesting problem, deliciously so, and it took up every minute between job searches and schoolwork. It had a high purpose: they would join the ranks of people who had built free software, the backbone of the open Internet. They were a good foursome. Rafi and Ilya were into encryption. Dan had a design eye. Max knew how to write code and was unafraid of drudgery.
Max and Ilya lamented their halting progress.
“College kids always talk about doing stuff, but nobody does anything,” Max said.
“Wouldn’t it be cool,” Ilya said, “if we could just work on it and nothing else for the summer?”
“Let’s just do it,” Max said. “My parents have a place in Tahoe. Maybe my mom will let us stay over there.”
“Really?” Ilya was standing in the hallway of his apartment building, near the garbage cans, his voice rising as it often did when he got excited.
“We could just go there and live on ramen, and just code all summer,” Max said.
“That would be awesome!” Ilya practically shouted.
Suddenly, another student yelled into the hallway.
“Dude! Can you shut the fuck up? I have a test tomorrow.”
Ilya dropped the decibel level. But he and Max, then Dan and Rafi, had a fever.
Logistics were not terribly interesting to them, but, as it happened, Max had read that the cost of starting new technology companies was becoming dead cheap. Virtually all the essential software was now open source and free. Computers got cheaper and more powerful every few months. In fact, for the mature technology companies, often lumbering masses no longer recognizable from their sprightly beginnings, it was less expensive and simpler just to buy promising start-ups than to create new products themselves or spend a fortune recruiting someone.
Max had read essays by an entrepreneur named Paul Graham, who created a program that allowed users to build their own Internet stores. Yahoo! bought it for stock worth nearly $50 million.