More Awesome Than Money by Jim Dwyer Read Free Book Online

ACM room on the third floor of the Courant Institute was only a few hundred square feet, with five or six computers, but it offered a psychic niche, a hangout between classes. Rafi had been looking for a kind of nest, or safe harbor, and he found one in the ACM room.
    At twenty-two, a few months from graduating, Max seemed to have found his footing in the tech world. He had come to NYU with wide-eyed dreams of being a musicologist, and went to work as a radio DJ on the campus Internet station, then took a part-time job with an independent record company. By the end of two years, the culture of nonchalance in the company, the all-purpose dismissive “whatever” that he heard when he pushed to get music out the door, had battered his spirit. “Nobody likes the enthusiastic music kid,” he said later. “I want to be in a situation to succeed, and have that be a good thing—and not to be shunned because of that.”
    Born in 1987, Max had been reared, like his classmates, in the digital age. He was fluent from an early age in computer programming. His father had spent much of his life in retail food and beverage stores, having worked for the Campbell Soup Company and Gallo wines. As a boy, Max had tagged along on his dad’s visits to grocery stores, and took in the thinking behind their strict layouts: fresh foods like vegetables, meat, and dairy along the perimeters, and categories like soups, soda, and soaps in the center. They were completely engineered spaces, he thought, much like websites.
    His capacious curiosity took him to a course in the anthropology of hackers, and there he became certain that the technology world would welcome his wholeheartedness. “In Silicon Valley, the enthusiastic kidwho has the crazy idea gets very lucky,” Max would say. He was also dogged: good at completing a task. The previous September, he enrolled in a class on heuristics, strategies for solving problems. After the first meeting, he was approached by a slightly disheveled, smiling student. His name was Ilya Zhitomirskiy, and he had noticed Max wearing a button with the logo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a legal nonprofit that fought to keep civil liberties pinned into place as technology created new platforms for speech and commerce that had not been anticipated by centuries of legal precedent and law. Ilya was impressed.
    â€œI really like your pin,” he said.
    â€œDo you even know what it is?” Max asked.
    Ilya snorted. “Of course I know what it is,” he said.
    Officially, Ilya was not taking the heuristics class but dropped in because he had heard, as Max had, that the subject was hard and the professor interesting. That curiosity and fearlessness proved a strong adhesive. They had no doubt about the centrality of programming to life in the twenty-first century.
    Ilya dropped in on another one of Max’s classes, taught by his adviser, Gabriella Coleman. She had asked the class a question. What happens when people are being watched? No one had the answer, but the question she posed and then answered herself, stayed with Ilya.
    When people are being watched, she had said, they perform. Ilya loved that insight. He was an expert at lighting the stage, literally.
    Two years younger than Max, a puppy in spirit, Ilya was already well into PhD-level math courses. His grandfather was a mathematician. So was his father. When he was twelve, the family moved from Orekhovo-Zuevo, a town outside Moscow, to the United States, and began their American life in New Orleans. Ilya was decidedly off-kilter, nervous about fitting in, but saw no reason that he shouldn’t wear pants in the brightest neon colors that he could find, or giant plastic orange sunglasses.
    At his first school in the new country, he was astounded by the familiarities of the teachers, with their cheery greetings of “Hi!” They had none of the sonorous formalities of the teachers in Russia who had