{"product_id":"more-awesome-than-money-isbn-9780143127895","title":"More Awesome Than Money","description":"\u003cb\u003eCan Facebook be trusted with your data? Years ahead of their time, Diaspora tried to do better. This is their David-versus-Goliath effort to build a revolutionary social network that would give us back control of our privacy.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIn June of 2010, four nerdy NYU undergrads moved to Silicon Valley to save the world from Facebook. Their idea was simple—to build a social network that would allow users to control the information they shared about themselves instead of surrendering it to big business. Their project was called Diaspora, and just weeks after launching it on Kickstarter, the idealistic twenty-year-olds had raised $200,000 from donors around the world. Profiled in the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, wooed by venture capitalists, and cheered on by the elite of the digital community, they were poised to revolutionize the Internet and remap the lines of power in our digital society—until things fell apart, with tragic results.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe story of Diaspora reaches far beyond Silicon Valley to today’s urgent debates over the future of the Internet. In this heartbreaking yet hopeful account, drawn from extensive interviews with the Diaspora Four and other key figures, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jim Dwyer tells a riveting tale of four ambitious and naive young men who dared to challenge the status quo. \u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003eMore Awesome Than Money\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cp\u003e“The  courageous and ingenious actions of these four NYU students and the Diaspora hackers who come in their wake will make you want to stand up and cheer. In an age of self-absorbed tweeting and friending, these young people are our Rocky Balboas and Martin Luther Kings. This book is proof that we are no longer customers of social networks, but rather the merchandise. The advertisers are the true customers, and our private thoughts, desires, and needs are exploited, sold, and bartered among them like trading cards—long after we’ve hit the delete button. The tragic death of the talented programmer Ilya Zhitomirskiy stands as testimony to our own inertia about the commercial forces that seek to control us. I’m glad I met this young man on these pages, and I'm glad that the deeply talented Jim Dwyer—who also wrote the best book on 9-11 you'll ever read—brought him and his friends to us with such stirring clarity. It’s a superb work, and a great read.”\u003cbr\u003e—James McBride, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Good Lord Bird \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e The Color of Water\u003c\/i\u003e, winner of the National Book Award\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Jim Dwyer’s \u003ci\u003eMore Awesome Than Money\u003c\/i\u003e is the story of four young men who dared to go up against the (new) machine—in this case, Facebook. By turns funny, poignant, scary, heartbreaking, and hopeful, \u003ci\u003eMore Awesome Than Money\u003c\/i\u003e includes everything you need to know about how your personal information is being manipulated on the Internet, and what to do about it.”\u003cbr\u003e—Kevin Baker, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Big Crowd\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Books have been written about those who struck it rich in Silicon Valley. The four young idealists in this engrossing book did not. Their dreams of creating a more noble social network failed. Their  names will not shadow Mark Zuckerberg. They may not be deemed ‘cool.’ In the deft hands of author Jim Dwyer, they are ‘cool,’ and complicated. We follow them down the rabbit hole as they, like other forgotten names, travel from euphoria, to doubt, to dissension, to dissolution. Readers of this suspenseful narrative will not soon forget the mountaintop-to-valley drama they endured, the classic business and human mistakes they made, nor the nobility of what they hoped to do.”\u003cbr\u003e—Ken Auletta, author of \u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003eGoogled \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e \u003ci\u003eGreed and Glory on Wall Street\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Failure is all to common for startups, but this is the best-told story of failure I’ve read. I was rooting for the improbable the whole way. It perfectly captures the texture of Silicon Valley’s humanity and dreams better than any success story could.”\u003cbr\u003e—Kevin Kelly, founding editor\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eof\u003ci\u003e \u003ci\u003eWired,\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eand author of\u003ci\u003e \u003ci\u003eWhat Technology Wants\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[A] worthy endeavor…Dwyer has painted a detailed portrait of the enormous difficulties facing female programmers and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.”—\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“[A] tumultuous story of four young men…offers a useful vantage point for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Silicon Valley’s culture . . .”—\u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“[A] lively account…[that] finds heroism and success, betrayal and even, ultimately, tragedy in the hurtling pursuit of a cause.”—\u003ci\u003eWashington Post \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Dwyer’s account . . . is a thrilling read, astoundingly detailed and researched, alternately suspenseful and heartbreaking.”—\u003ci\u003eDaily Beast\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“[A] lively account of Diaspora’s creation as an alternative to the Silicon Valley megaliths. Like any account of the memorable early days of a revolution, Dwyer’s reporting finds heroism and success, betrayal and even, ultimately, tragedy in the hurtling pursuit of a cause.”—\u003ci\u003eDenver Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“A thoroughly compelling account recommended for those interested in general technology books and business narratives. This book is a welcome addition to the literature on start-ups, particularly for its focus on notions of privacy in the digital era and how entrepreneurs are working to address these critical needs.”—\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“This is a greatly informative book.”—\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003ePraise for \u003ci\u003e102 MINUTES\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A masterpiece.”—Kevin Baker, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A heartstopping, meticulous account.”—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Impressive.”—\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003c\/i\u003e magazine\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eJim Dwyer\u003c\/b\u003e, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter with the New York Times, has written or cowritten six books. He lives in New York City.\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eINTRODUCTION\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIf his laptop had been a mirror, the face staring back at Dan Grippi would have been some blend of boy and wild man. Nature had given him full, pouty, rebel-without-a-cause lips, and a jewelry shop in the East Village had given him a piercing in the bottom one a few days after he started college. He fastened a ring in the hole. His father was not thrilled.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLong and lean to begin with, Dan grew sideburns that ran down below each ear, sketch-strokes of whiskers that further drew his angular face to a point. He gave himself another inch of height by heaping his black hair in a pile, occasionally pinning it to the air with a generous, retro slathering of gel. On his ring finger he wore what appeared to be a cyanide capsule. Most of his arms rippled from short-sleeved white T-shirts. With the Elvis hair, the Springsteen sideburns, and the scary jewelry, Dan Grippi turned out for the world looking like a hybrid greaser-punk.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eExcept that he was neither. He smiled easily and warmly, spoke softly, but thought twice or three times before uttering a syllable. On the cross-country team, he logged miles in silence. His digital graphic artwork won awards for him while he was a teenager. A portfolio of that work had gotten him into college, overcoming indifferent grades at his high school in the Long Island suburbs of New York. His striking looks got him work as a model, and his mastery of the blend and stitch of music beats scored him gigs as a DJ. The menacing-looking cyanide ring was really a spare piece salvaged from a build-it-yourself printer he had helped assemble. He was a nerd with muscles.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn a February night in 2010, he stared at a page on Facebook, the soul-sorting social network machine. It was time for him to get out. He had joined in 2005, when he was sixteen. Facebook had started circling the globe a year earlier, college by college, working its way to high school students. It became the gyroscope of a generation, a tool for high-speed social navigation. Long after Dan’s high school classmates had scattered to colleges all over the map, their friendship had a digital pulse on Facebook. At New York University in Greenwich Village, Dan would check out the Facebook listings of people who caught his eye in a class or at a party. He could see who they knew in common, sniff their electronic pheromones. By now, in his final months of college, he was so hooked on Facebook that even when he was entertaining guests in his apartment, he would often sit with a computer in his lap so he could keep track of what people were up to elsewhere. That was sick, he knew. But that wasn’t the worst of it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfter a week of fiddling with the settings, clicking and unchecking boxes, disabling certain notifications, he kept coming to the same end point. It was hopeless. While he might be able to regulate some settings on his own account, he had no control over what his friends did with the applications that they ran on theirs. They could, for instance, permit a game to contact everyone in their address books, giving access to everything Dan had shared with friends to these third parties. Facebook was everywhere: go to a music website, and there would be a Facebook “like” button, meaning that it could follow him there. It knew what he read and knew what he listened to and knew what he watched. This was not just an extension of the high-octane party scene that defined his weekends. He could barely think a thought without giving some hint to the machinery that was recording it all. The site had grafted onto his personality.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEnough, he decided.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUsing a piece of software, he scraped all the information and pictures he had posted on Facebook. That got him a copy of everything.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne last time, he checked updates from friends. Then he found his way to the account settings. Buried several layers down was the box he was looking for.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDelete account.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWas he sure? the software asked.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDan clicked his affirmation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOkay, then. The account would be deactivated but not actually deleted for two more weeks. Any activity by him 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 didn’t really want to shut it down. That was all boilerplate delivered to anyone who declared an intention to leave the flock.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe next message from Facebook was tailored for Daniel Grippi. “Your friends are going to miss you,” it said.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDan had about four hundred “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’d say yes. And that would be the end of it. No loss.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFacebook kept records of what he cared about. Knowing who and what Dan Grippi wanted in his life—knowing more than Dan himself consciously knew—was Facebook’s business. It sold that knowledge.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDaniel, Facebook pleaded. Wouldn’t you want to stay in touch with these people?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey were hostages; Facebook was transforming his attempt to quit the network into a betrayal of his fondness for them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eManipulation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe clicked the delete button.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e—\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the winter of 2010, four talented young nerds with time on their hands decided that they should bring an end to Facebook’s monopoly on social networking. They were man-boys, college students who became friends while staying up all night, eating pizza and hacking at geeky projects in a computer club at New York University. Their mission would have been literally inconceivable just one generation earlier; social networking barely existed when they began high school; Mark Zuckerberg had not yet started “The Facebook” in his dorm room at Harvard. But by 2010, Facebook had become such a global behemoth, joined by hundreds of people every minute, that a revolt seemed inevitable. Someone had to do it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLike most “free” web services, Facebook was a middleman that made money by peeking into everybody’s business. With the right software tools, the four guys believed, no one would need to surrender everything to big companies like Zuckerberg’s. People could connect to friends and networks of friends without going through the servers of Facebook, Inc. It was a simple notion of vast disruption. Such an alternative would mean remapping the lines of power in digital society. To Dan Grippi and three other guys from the NYU computer club, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Max Salzberg, and Raphael Sofaer, it would be a fun way to spend the summer of 2010. In the months before then, they spent nearly every conscious minute in room 311 of the math building at NYU working on their upstart social network project. They called it Diaspora.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“We’re not about killing off Facebook,” Raphael said. In Diaspora, they aimed to create a tool that would emancipate the power and vitality of social networks from the control of a single company. “Social networks have only existed for 10 years. We don’t really know what’s going to happen to our data, but it’s going to exist into the foreseeable future. We need to take control of it.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHis words were printed in the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times,\u003c\/i\u003e and the notion that such a thing was possible thrilled hundreds of thousands of people. Social networking occupied an essential place in society, but was Facebook—avatar for the commercial surveillance embedded in the digital infrastructure of modern life—an irreplaceable link for all vital communication and connections? The Diaspora vision was thrillingly countercultural.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe four set out at a pivot point in human history, their project a single tiny pixel on a vast screen of rapid change, watched by millions. In June 2010, they moved to California to build the tools that would save the world from Facebook. Also, they hoped, to have fun. Dan and Max had just graduated. They had the most programming experience and chops. Dan, besides his strong eye for design, had a will of steel when it came to coding. Max, the eldest of the four, would pile thankless tasks on his back until he resembled an ant carrying five hundred times his weight. With a gift for turning phrases, Max described himself as an “effusive salesman type,” and said that his rhetoric often benefited from a “cold bucket of water” dumped on it by Rafi, the youngest of the group, who possessed a cool detached intelligence. He was a quick study in programming. With some trepidation, he took a leave from school. So did Ilya, a math prodigy, Russian émigré, and idea-heaving furnace. Technically the weakest software programmer of the group, Ilya was their most potent spiritual force. No one could imagine Diaspora without him. Once they relocated to San Francisco, Ilya’s home, an apartment on Treat Street in the Mission District, became a center of gravity for all manner of grand schemes and hopes. It was called the Hive.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e—\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe neighborhood of the Hive pulsed with people in their early twenties, constellations of dreamers and engineers and strivers in the expanding universe of the tech boom. Google ran a private bus system to bring employees to its offices forty miles south. But the area was not just home to the well-salaried and corporate-backed. Computers and computing had become dead cheap, a fraction of what they had been a decade earlier, and shrinking by the day. Brainpower, not money, was the essential capital.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNot only were there fortunes to be made; there were also fortunes to shape. Who could resist? Like steel at the start of the twentieth century, software had the power to win wars, bring prosperity, change lives. It could guess your appetite before the first pang of desire had struck.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis generation had come from cities around the world, out of schools and universities certainly, but also old factories and basements, derelict garages, and warehouses that had been turned into hacker spaces—rooms where they could tinker with software and cheap electronic parts, write programs and build robots or break into virtual cabinets where they didn’t belong.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSaid one hacker: these spaces are a force for chaos in the world; when you walk in, you expect to see kittens in jet packs flying around the room.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey slept in mansions tricked up as dorms, rented rooms in flophouse hotels, surfed from couch to couch, shared apartments at places like the Hive. Creature comforts were for later; right now, the act of creation, of making—not of making \u003ci\u003eit\u003c\/i\u003e—was all that mattered. Fall on your face? Get up. Fail faster. Like mentalists playing tricks with a spoon, the young people were sure they could bend the steel of their era just by thinking long and hard.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey had a suppleness of spirit unburdened by the thickness of middle-age expertise in what couldn’t be done.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe Hive was a perfect space for parties, and Ilya was the ringmaster. Its spacious backyard included a tent-cabin, a fixture adopted from the utopianist desert festival Burning Man, and a necessity for outdoor gatherings in the foggy perma-chill of the Bay Area. Parties at the Hive customarily had a meme, or perhaps it was the other way around: someone would think of a meme and a party would follow. There was “We Are the Internet and We Come in Peace,” and later, “FuckYeahCarlSagan.” When someone in the circle revealed that his Wi-Fi password was “FuckTomCruise,” the meme for the next party was declared “FuckYeahTomCruise,” and Tom Cruise–themed drinks, like the Top Gun cocktail, were concocted, while the dome of the tent became the screen for a continuously looping video of the actor speaking about Scientology. On any given night, the sound system might be knocking out techno-jams, or music for swing or ballroom dance, or all of them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHardly any activity would not be considered: a woman who had cultivated an interest in a diet of insects was invited to whip up something on the barbecue, and she produced plates of grilled-cheese-and-mealworm-larvae sandwiches. These were washed down with craft beer and Two Buck Chuck, the value wine from Trader Joe’s.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRaucous and humming, the Hive parties were descendants of the gatherings eighty years earlier of the young and poor, philosophers and scientists and artists, in a marine biologist’s lab in Pacific Grove, forty miles to the south, caught in the amber of John Steinbeck’s \u003ci\u003eCannery Row.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne weekend at the Hive, there was a contest to break the world record for links of plastic monkeys, each arm hooked into the next until the line stretched up three flights and right to the big bay window that looked out over the yard, the tent, and the city. The window opened from Ilya’s bedroom. He had practically invented this place.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eConvener of many parties, Ilya was the one who stayed up latest talking longest with roommates, or with strangers he’d met somewhere and had invited to hang out, or with people who’d wandered in.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne night, from behind the closed door to his bedroom at the Hive, he’d heard his lawyer roommate and math roommate talking in the living room. The lawyer asked the math guy about the importance of a high-level mathematical theorem; Ilya, dissatisfied with the explanation he heard through the door, burst out of the bedroom clad only in boxer shorts. He proceeded to sketch out the implications of the theorem on the floor. Then he returned to his bedroom, where he had been entertaining a young woman visitor. Of which there were many: he had little reticence about hitting on girls, and many found it hard to resist the package of a slightly disheveled guy who wore giant plastic orange sunglasses and aquamarine neon pants, a brainy polymath who actually wanted to learn what other people were passionate about.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Gather epic people,” he often declared, “and make unreasonable demands.” He was a nerd who glowed with warmth and humor. The world he and the other Diaspora guys had settled into was one of pure buoyancy; the work they were doing was all gravity.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e—\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the tenth century, Rabbeinu Gershom, a sage in Mayence, Germany, set out a series of prohibitions that would be enduring parts of Jewish life. They were issued in response to human impulses that he deemed to be socially destructive, not to mention an offense against the Creator. For instance, Rabbeinu Gershom barred polygamy and forbade divorce of a woman without her consent.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe rabbi also banned the reading of other people’s private mail.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA millennium after Rabbeinu Gershom, other people’s business was sheathed in fiber-optic cable. Ancient human urges to snoop had lost none of their voltage, but the prohibitions and social inhibitions were dissolving. In a virtual instant, forward-thinking businesses data-mined, data-scraped, data-aggregated. As these became exalted missions, digital culture erased social and legal boundaries that had been honored, however imperfectly, for centuries. Commercial surveillance was built into the ecology of everyday life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLike nothing else since humans first stood upright, the World Wide Web has allowed people to connect and learn and speak out. Its dominant architecture has also made it possible for businesses and governments to fill giant data vaults with the ore of human existence—the appetites, interests, longings, hopes, vanities, and histories of people surfing the Internet, often unaware that every one of their clicks is being logged, bundled, sorted, and sold to marketers. Together, they amount to nothing less than a full-psyche scan, unobstructed by law or social mores.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Facebook holds and controls more data about the daily lives and social interactions of half a billion people than 20th-century totalitarian governments ever managed to collect about the people they surveilled,” Eben Moglen, a technologist, historian, and professor of law at Columbia University, observed in 2010.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat shirtless, drunken picture? The angry note to a lover, the careless words about a friend, the so-called private messages? Facebook has them all. And its marketers know when it is time to pop an advertisement for a florist who can deliver make-up flowers, or for a private investigator.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStudents at MIT figured out the identities of closeted gay people by studying what seemed like neutral information disclosed on Facebook. At the headquarters of Facebook in Palo Alto, Mark Zuckerberg was said to amuse himself with predictions on which Facebook “friends” would eventually hook up by watching how often someone was checking a friend’s profile, and the kinds of messages they were sending.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe uproar over Facebook’s privacy policies obscured intrusions on an even grander scale by other powerful forces in society. Everyone had heard of AOL and Microsoft; few were familiar with their subsidiaries.Atlas Solutions, purchased by Microsoft in 2007, told businesses that it deploys “tracking pixels”—a kind of spy cookie that cannot be detected by most filters—to follow Internet users as they look at billions of web pages per month. These invisible bugs watch as we move across the web, shopping, reading, writing. Our habits are recorded. The pixels live in computer caches for months, waiting to be pulsed. Facebook bought Atlas in 2013, helping it track users when they left the site.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd virtually unknown to users, AOL’s biggest business was never the cheery voice announcing, “You’ve got mail”; it was the billions of data items its subsidiary, Platform A, mined from Internet users, linking their interests and purchases, zip codes and significant others. The data was stored on servers physically located in giant warehouses near Manassas, Virginia. AOL boasted that it followed “consumer behavior across thousands of websites.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFacebook was a proxy in a still larger struggle for control over what used to be the marrow of human identity: what we reveal and what we conceal, what we read and what we want. Just as human tissue is inhabited by trillions of bacteria, so, too, our online life is heavily colonized by external forces, invisible bits of code that silently log our desires and interests, and, at times, manipulate them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAn experiment conducted in 2010 by the \u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e showed how far commercial interests could penetrate personal information, unbeknownst to web users. As part of a remarkable series called “What They Know,” the \u003ci\u003eJournal\u003c\/i\u003e team set up a “clean” computer with a browser that had not previously been used for surfing. The results: after visiting the fifty most popular websites in the United States, the reporters found that 131 different advertising companies had planted 2,224 tiny files on the computer. These files, essentially invisible, kept track of sites the users visited. This allowed the companies to develop profiles that included age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status, health worries, purchases, favorite TV shows, and movies. Deleting the tracking files did not eliminate them: some of them simply respawned.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHandling all the data they collected was possible because computing power continued to double every eighteen months to two years, the rate predicted in 1965 by the technologist Gordon Moore. Cheap and prolific by 2010, that power enabled the creation of bare-bones start-ups and the granular monitoring of personal habits. “We can uniquely see the full and complete path that your customers take to conversion, from seeing an ad on TV to searching on their smartphone to clicking on a display ad on their laptop,” a business called Converto boasted on its website in 2013.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe online advertising industry argued that the ability to tailor ads that appeared on a screen to the presumed appetites of the person using the computer was the foundation of the free Internet: the advertising dollars supported sites that otherwise would have no sources of revenue.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhatever the merits of that argument, it was hard to defend the stealthiness of the commercial surveillance. No national law requires that this monitoring be disclosed, much less forbids it. A few halfhearted efforts by the Federal Trade Commission to regulate the monitoring have gone nowhere. There was no way for people to get their data back.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOr even their thoughts.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn mid-2013, two researchers published a paper entitled “Self Censorship on Facebook,” reporting that in a study of 3.9 million users, 71 percent did not post something that they started to write. That is, they changed their minds. While this might look like prudence, or discretion, or editing, the researchers—both working at Facebook—described it as “self-censorship” and wrote that such behavior was a matter of concern to social network sites. When this happens, they wrote, Facebook “loses value from the lack of content generation.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe company maintained that users are told that it collects not only information that is openly shared but also when you “view or otherwise interact with things.” That means, the company asserted, the right to collect the unpublished content itself. “Facebook considers your thoughtful discretion about what to post as bad, because it withholds value from Facebook and from other users. Facebook monitors those unposted thoughts to better understand them, in order to build a system that minimizes this deliberate behavior,” Jennifer Golbeck, the director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, wrote in \u003ci\u003eSlate\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt every instant, the fluid dynamics of the web—the interactions, the observations, the predations—are logged by servers. That such repositories of the lightning streams of human consciousness existed was scarcely known and little understood. “Almost everyone on Planet Earth has never read a web server log,” Eben Moglen, the Columbia law professor said. “This is a great failing in our social education about technology. It’s equivalent to not showing children what happens if cars collide and people don’t wear seat belts.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e—\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOne day in the 1970s, a man named Douglas Engelbart was walking along a beachfront boardwalk in California when he spotted a group of skateboarders doing tricks.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“You see these kids skateboarding actually jumping into the air and the skateboard stays attached to their feet, and they spin around, land on the skateboard, and keep going,” Engelbart remembered many years later.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor Engelbart, those skateboarders were a way to understand the unpredictability of technology. “I made them stop and do it for me six times, so I could see how they did it. It’s very complicated—shifting weight on their feet, and so on. You couldn’t give them the engineering and tell them to go out and do that. Fifteen years ago, who could have designed that? And that’s all we can say about computers.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA little-celebrated figure in modern history, Engelbart had spent decades thinking about how computers could be linked together to augment human intelligence, to solve problems of increasing complexity. At a gathering of technologists in 1968, he showed what could happen when computers talked to one another. For the occasion, he demonstrated a device that made it easier for the humans to interact with the computer. The device was called the mouse. The cofounder of Apple, Steve Wozniak, said that Engelbart should be credited “for everything we have in the way computers work today.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe emergence of the personal computer and the Internet, with its vast democratizing power, were part of Engelbart’s vision. He died in July 2013, a few weeks after revelations by a man named Edward Snowden that the United States National Security Agency was collecting spectacular amounts of data. Writing in the \u003ci\u003eAtlantic,\u003c\/i\u003e Alexis C. Madrigal noted: “We find ourselves a part of a ‘war on terror’ that is being perpetually, secretly fought across the very network that Engelbart sought to build. Every interaction we have with an Internet service generates a ‘business record’ that can be seized by the NSA through a secretive process that does not require a warrant or an adversarial legal proceeding.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe business purposes of such data collection are apparent, if unsettling. But what need did governments have for it? Among Western democracies, the stated purpose was piecing together suggestive patterns that might reveal extremists plotting attacks like those carried out on September 11, 2001. The dystopic possibilities of such powers had, of course, been anticipated by George Orwell in \u003ci\u003e1984,\u003c\/i\u003e and by the visionary cyberpunk novelist William Gibson in \u003ci\u003eNeuromancer\u003c\/i\u003e. But fiction was not necessary to see what could be done: in 2010, its utility as an instrument of surveillance and suppression had been realized in, among other places, Syria, Tunisia, Iran, and China.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo, too, were its other properties: as the Diaspora guys were making plans for their project in 2010, the Arab Spring was stirring to life, some of it in subversive online communications that either were not noticed or not taken seriously by the regimes that would soon be toppled. The same mechanisms allowed more alert regimes to surveil opponents, or to\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301982523621,"sku":"NP9780143127895","price":24.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780143127895.jpg?v=1767732962","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/more-awesome-than-money-isbn-9780143127895","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}