Read Online More Awesome Than Money by Jim Dwyer - Free Book Online

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 as asking.
    Maybe they could build something better. They had, after all, just built their own printer.
    â€”
    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.
    â€œCollege kids always talk about doing stuff, but nobody does anything,” Max said.
    â€œWouldn’t it be cool,” Ilya said, “if we could just work on it and nothing else for the summer?”
    â€œLet’s just do it,” Max said. “My parents have a place in Tahoe. Maybe my mom will let us stay over there.”
    â€œReally?” 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.
    â€œWe could just go there and live on ramen, and just code all summer,” Max said.
    â€œThat would be awesome!” Ilya practically shouted.
    Suddenly, another student yelled into the hallway.
    â€œDude! 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 wasbecoming 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