More Awesome Than Money (33 page)

On Friday morning, the eleventh, Max saw that Ilya did not seem to have slept. His color was off; it must have been days since his head had been beneath a shower. And instead of his regular machine gun of speech and ideas, he was speaking and moving in slow motion. He was wearing a T-shirt that said “Dawgma,” the name of his high school robotics club.

It was the second day that Max and Ilya spent at Max's rather than Pivotal. A break from their routine, yes, but also a concession to reality. Even if Dan had stayed, they would not have finished, despite all the progress. They had raised enough money, about sixty thousand dollars from donations and parents, to keep going until January. The beta would come out then. There was no getting around the holes left by the departure of Yosem.

That was bothering Ilya; so was another problem, one that had long gnawed at him. He wanted people who used Diaspora to be able to delete material.

Suppose a girl posted a photograph of her with a guy, and they broke up, and she wanted to delete it.

Seemed simple enough. Hit the delete button. The picture disappears—at least from the server that it was deleted from. In a distributed system, each server was an empire of its own, not subject to the rules of a centralized hierarchy. That is, a single piece of data would live on multiple servers.

“It's really hard,” Max said. “You have to go into all the servers and ask them all to do this operation.”

Facebook said that for the most part, it did not continue holding things in its servers that people had deleted from their pages. But because Facebook kept data on multiple servers, all of which it controlled, any item might have to be deleted in its servers around the world, making the process less instantaneous than met the eye. It was like a letter or a picture stuffed in a drawer—until it was cleaned out, someday, someone might open it again.

Not surprisingly, Diaspora faced similar problems—the data was distributed far and wide—without the command and control that Facebook held. So they set a goal to have a deleted piece of data actually dissolved from the network within twenty-four hours. This delay troubled Ilya. It had been precisely what bothered him most when his classmates back at NYU had created a prank Facebook account in his name—that the fake stuff would linger on a server.

They had gone over this issue before. Ilya had taken on the technically complex job of writing the code to address it. It seemed that he could not summon the energy to focus.

Yes, it was Friday, but he was in a deeper slump than would come from simply hitting the end of the workweek.

“Let's take a look at the worst parts of the code,” Max said, “and make it, like, the best.”

Programming, he thought, was like writing. He tried to convey that to Ilya.

“In writing, you're making sure that there is some canonical piece of knowledge in one place; really good writing doesn't need to repeat itself. Clarity and brevity are the values—the most expressive thing in the least amount of space possible.”

They moved deliberately through the coding. Max thought he might be teaching him something, but he realized Ilya was out of gas. He could
not engage. Max was getting weary. At midmorning, they were joined by T. H. Nguyen.

They broke for lunch and went to a taqueria around the corner from Max's place. Ilya picked at a shrimp quesadilla. When they got back to the apartment, he was still dragging.

“Dude, you're really tired, you didn't sleep,” Max said. “We'll break at three-thirty.”

After all, Dan was not around to crack the whip.

“I don't know,” Ilya said. “We have so much to do.”

They beavered away for a while longer. At one point when Max left the room, Ilya confided in T.H. that he was very worried about their pushing the beta back another two months. People were counting on them. Max was back in the room.

“I have a crazy question for you,” Ilya said. “Do you think we will ever really release the beta?”

Fatigue, Max thought.

“Dude, of course we're going to do it,” Max said. “Why would you even worry about that?”

Ilya shrugged. They turned back to the work, and he seemed engaged. Then he leaned back.

They had scheduled a Meetup for the next day, a Saturday, at Noisebridge, the hacker space in the Mission, to get feedback from users. In theory, Ilya had called the meeting, but it had been T.H.'s idea and she would run it. She was fresh. He was swamped and spent, and it was still only Friday.

He'd had enough.

“You know what, man, I am going to take you up on that offer to break early,” Ilya said.

“Hey, dude, see you tomorrow,” Max said, relieved.

“Peace,” Ilya said. He took his bag and left.

M
ore than halfway through the panel discussion, the moderator asked a question that Dan could have spent the rest of the session answering.

“Do you guys have any stories of intrigue or betrayal that you want to share?” she asked.

The auditorium at NYU was full, though it was just nine
A.M
., a most unsociable hour for college students, on a Saturday morning, no less.

Onstage, sipping an orange juice, Dan did not show a flicker of interest in that particular query.

Instead, it was fielded by David Goldberg, who, with his brother, Ari, had started an online company called StyleCaster with the goal of bringing “style to the people.” It was one thing to break up a partnership started with friends, Goldberg said, and entirely different with a family member. There are former friends, but not former family. “Shit is going to hit the fan. There will be moments at every stage and evolution of the business where it's do or die. Or at least in real time, it feels that way,” Goldberg said. “Retrospectively, it probably wasn't that big a deal.”

The program for the gathering had a biographical listing for Dan that went a little beyond his nerd credentials: “Since graduating NYU in June 2010, Daniel has been fighting the good fight, developing Diaspora full-time with his partners in downtown San Francisco. He's responsible for
Diaspora's good looks and product cohesiveness. His pants are tight and his V-necks are deep.”

Dan had told the genesis story, and how they had changed, over and over, the workings of Diaspora until they screamed with doubt, no longer knowing whether it was any good. It was then, he explained, that their design tutor and guru, Janice Fraser, made them draw a triangle. At the base, the widest part, she had them write what they had started out with—privacy and freedom. At the tip was where people achieved those two values.

“In the middle is where it changes,” Dan said. “She told us, ‘Notice that your product has changed, like, about three thousand times in two months. What it's going to do, how we say it is going to work. The thing is, as long as you have that base, every one of those iterations of the product, you can just step back and say: it still goes off those core values.' And I think that's the most important thing you can do.”

He and the others were applauded. There was no sense going over the brutal six weeks that had just passed. Who even knew what it all meant? The Grippis were waiting to bring him back to Long Island. Dan could not find his sunglasses. Rafi's robot passed along his tweet.

@hipsterguido The king has spoken! to the gentleman who jacked my sunglasses: you look like shit in wayfarers. sorry bro.

Dan might have been up early on Saturday morning for the event in New York City, but on the other coast, Max and T. H. Nguyen knew that they had to begin at a more sociable hour for their workday. They arrived around noon on November 12 at Noisebridge for a “Meetup on User Experience,” also known as UX.

The agenda was to watch ordinary people use the Diaspora site and figure out what gave them problems and what they were excited about. Ilya had held one a couple of weeks earlier, and though it was marginally organized, it had given them useful feedback. This session would have a stronger, more purposeful flavor, as T.H. was now helping. She created a sign-up schedule on the Meetup website for one-hour slots, and invited members of the Diaspora group to bring along friends who were:

1. Average social media users (no early adopters, savvy tech people)

2. Female

3. Ages 13 to 25

She didn't need to write the words “No geeky boys.”

She would videotape sessions of “normal people” test-driving Diaspora. Her experience at Facebook had given her a good idea of how corporate focus group studies work. Still, in announcing the session, T.H. made it clear that this was an initiative of Ilya's. She wrote: “Ilya envisions getting into a groove of doing user tests (every other Saturday), digesting learnings (during the week), then hacking to resolve surfaced issues (every other Sunday). Let's keep the ball rolling this upcoming Saturday.”

They got an excellent response. There was only one problem. There was no sign of Ilya when they arrived at noon that Saturday. By one
P.M
., he still had not turned up. Max dialed his number, but the call went right to voice mail. He tried again a few minutes later, with the same result. People were coming for the first session, and although Max was annoyed, he could not give Ilya's absence much attention.

“Do you think he's okay?” T.H. asked.

Ilya had looked wiped out the day before, and Max thought, God knows, there are Saturdays when I don't want to talk to anyone, think about Diaspora, or do anything besides drop off the face of the earth.

“He's okay,” Max said. “He's done this before.”

Through the afternoon, Max sporadically tried Ilya's phone, but he didn't answer, and he and T.H. were busy with a full house through all three testing sessions. At the end of the day, T.H. posted an announcement.

“Thanks to all the people who let us pick their brains! We ended up having more users to test than video capacity to record . . . so we're canceling dinner to give people a breather.”

—

Katie Johnson had just gotten a new job that came with a place to live in Pacific Heights, a tony part of the city, but most of her friends were still in the hipster parish of the Mission. She turned twenty-five at the beginning of November, and Tony Lai was hitting thirty. With so many friends in common, he invited her to cocelebrate their birthdays at the Hive on that Saturday evening, the twelfth of November.

They met at a Costco to load up on supplies, and then she headed back out to her house to get changed. Tony returned home. Festivity fatigue was settling on the Hive, which had been the scene of eight parties in a two-week span in October, including three back-to-back Halloween events. Ilya's birthday had been mashed in there. After tonight's gathering, the calendar would open up for a while and provide a revelry reprieve. Gardner and David were hanging out in their rooms as Tony unpacked. Ilya's door, which opened into the main living and cooking area, was closed.

—

A few blocks away, Max, who had no real connections with anyone involved in that night's Hive party, was making his own plans for the evening. A text arrived from T.H.

“Ilya's mom called me. He was supposed to call her four hours ago, and this is one of the last numbers he called.”

Since Ilya's phone was on his parents' account, his mother had been able to look at the online billing record to see numbers of people he had spoken with recently.

Max answered: “He's ok.”

T.H. replied: “R u sure he's ok?”

“Yeah,” Max wrote. “He's stressed out. Sometimes he gets like this. No big deal.”

“R u really sure? His mom just called me.”

“I'll track him down,” Max said, but he could not raise him, either.

To his surprise, Max did not have the number for David Kettler, the Hive roommate whom he knew best. He sent him an e-mail.

—

Around that moment, as Tony was unpacking the supplies, his phone rang, displaying an unfamiliar number.

“Hi, this is Ilya's mother,” the caller said. “Have you seen Ilya? I haven't been able to reach him.”

“Sorry,” Tony said, slightly startled. He had never spoken with Ilya's mother, Inna Zhitomirskiy, or anyone in the family. “I haven't seen him for two or three days.”

Tony said he would pass along a message for Ilya to call her when he saw him, and signed off. David was sitting on the couch, and Gardner was
in his room. Neither had seen Ilya for a couple of days. Nor had Bobby Fishkin, who was arriving for the party. Behind him were more friends of the house.

“The party is going to start,” Fishkin said. “Where is he?”

“We haven't seen him,” Tony said.

“Have you checked his room?” Fishkin asked, simultaneously banging on the bedroom door and hollering Ilya's name.

“It's locked,” Tony said.

Gardner felt his stomach knotting. They never locked the doors. He looked at the knob, which could be jimmied with a thumbnail: a hack. He pushed open the door, stepped into the room, followed by Bobby, Tony, then David. In a glance, Gardner saw all that he needed to, and turned around.

Fishkin looked at the bed.

“Ilya!” he shouted. “Wake up.”

From the bay window of the bedroom, San Francisco sparkled and winked against the plane of a November night. Below, in the courtyard, stood the tent-cabin that had kept them warm on the chilly San Francisco nights. Notions and schemes had been shot from that third-floor window as if from one of those air bazookas that fire confetti at sports events.

The walls of Ilya's bedroom were lined with lists compiled after late-night bull sessions, composed on paper torn from the rolls of butcher paper. Next to the queen-size bed was a spindle, the kind of spike that restaurants use for paper receipts. This one held Post-its:

Go Skydiving

Start a company

Brush teeth

Sneak into a company and re-arrange everything in the file cabinets

Go to Burning Man

Live in a castle

Which Silicon Valley company is going to do the most to colonize Mars?

End bribery in Congress

Party with the Amish

Gardner shook Ilya's foot.

The laptop had been open on the bed, and one final Post-it note was stuck to it.

“Thank you to everyone who was kind to me. Please know this was my decision alone. Please post this.”

Gardner eased the plastic bag from around Ilya's head. On the phone with 911, the operator wanted to give Tony instructions on resuscitation. He told her there was no point.

—

At his parents' home on Long Island, Dan had watched texts of people trying to find Ilya flying across his screen. Then his phone rang, lit up with Max's number. In the instant before answering, he had a single thought: Fucking Ilya had offed himself.

Ilya had been dead all that sparkling Saturday in San Francisco, as his mother and father and little sister went about their lives in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, and his partner Max ran the Diaspora users' tests in Noisebridge, and his friends bought provisions for yet one more party at the Hive.

He was dead as Dan spoke that morning on the other side of the country to the audience at New York University about the joy of building something.

They were still doing Diaspora, Dan had said that morning, because people wanted it. As many changes as the project had gone through, to whatever effect, they always rested on the core values of privacy and freedom.

When they started out, he said, “We never saw it as a start-up, necessarily. At the time, we were four geeks, wouldn't it be cool to make this distributed platform?” And then, he said, with the flood of money, they realized: “People really want this. We have to make this thing for the Internet. People are giving to the project because they believe in what we are doing. It's kind of wild. That's why I say, it's not the real world.”

The moderator had asked about that very subject—on when the real world began for young people, the sails of their lives billowing with ideals and ambitions and things that had not been done or dared before.

“I went from school, doing something that I love, to, like—doing
something else that I love!” Dan had said. “Yeah, you trip up sometimes. It's a real rush.”

“You're telling us the real world hasn't begun yet?” she'd asked.

The audience laughed. Dan smiled.

“Ahhh,” he had said. “Yes.”

He and his parents, Carolyn and Casey, stayed up all Saturday night. Sometime after midnight, Dan posted a tweet.

FUCK NOTHING AND EVERYTHING.

—

He and Casey took the first flight out of JFK to San Francisco in the morning.

Before the investigators from the medical examiner's office left the apartment with the body on Saturday, they told the roommates that Ilya had purchased the tank of gas that he had used to suffocate himself on Wednesday. They apparently had been able to get his credit card records. Max recalled his strange start-and-stop behavior leaving the office that night, when Ilya, T.H., and he were all ready to go and Ilya pulled back, telling them not to wait for him.

He had picked up the tank sometime on Thursday, along with a package of balloons, which apparently were thrown in as part of the rental. The balloons were untouched on his desk. On Friday at Max's house, he agreed with his suggestion that they knock off early for the day.

No one had seen him since he left Max's Friday afternoon.

On Saturday night, Elizabeth Stark, who had been eating in a restaurant a few blocks away, arrived at the Hive soon after the body was discovered. Elizabeth and Ilya had had a platonic friendship of rare power; she had been a guest at the Hive on a number of evenings when the talk had stretched too deep into the night to return to Palo Alto, where she was teaching. They had shared his bed companionably. In crowded rooms, each would know where the other one was.

No surprise, then, that even though Ilya had been the cryptography czar for Diaspora, Elizabeth figured out the password to his laptop in a minute or so.

Ilya, who had often joked about his tinfoil hat affectations, frequently used anonymizers when browsing the web that disguised his location
and identity. That made it hard for anyone or any machine on the other end to know who or where he was. But his laptop had no such obfuscation. His browsing history was spelled out in unmistakable detail. For months, he had been looking at sites that discussed suicide techniques. A few minutes after nine on Friday night, he had downloaded a PDF document that gave the instructions; he had already downloaded the same file several times that evening.

Just after eleven
P.M
., he telephoned a woman he had spent some time with, but she was in her car and didn't answer.