Free More Awesome Than Money by Jim Dwyer Page A

started working for Kickstarter and was impressed by the progress they had made in the two months since the speech.
    â€œThis could work on Kickstarter,” Benenson said.
    That thought had crossed their minds. In fact, Korth had mentioned it to them as a possibility.
    â€œE-mail me,” Benenson told Max.
    They soldiered on through the twenty-four-hour hackathon, taking a break at two A.M. when Korth and Hilary Mason showed up with ice cream and toothbrush kits. They ate bagels at dawn, and hung around until noon to watch other teams collect prizes. Then Max charged off to write to Benenson, putting the skeleton of the idea into an e-mail. A social network built around privacy. You owned your data. Decentralized.
    Fred loved it.
    The calendar had to be taken into consideration. Although Kickstarter allowed up to ninety days to collect contributions, this was a summer project, so they had less than two months to raise money.
    Before they got to that problem, though, they had to find out if Kickstarter would even let them post. Certainly, it helped to have someone onthe inside, like Fred, pulling for them, but real estate on the website was valuable. Benenson gave the matter some thought. He could simply extend an invitation to Diaspora—Max, after all, was his friend—which would practically guarantee the guys a spot, but it seemed that going through the Kickstarter review process would sharpen their presentation. The guidelines broadly required that the pitches be for projects that had some creative purpose, like making a film or a new game, and a clear end point. It was not a place to raise money for overextended credit cards.
    Fred coached Max and Dan. The project had to be clearly, concisely explained for the website. They should also make a video introducing themselves and the project; it would give people a chance to connect with them as humans, not just concepts. It was one more thing to do for the end of the term. Max had a senior thesis to write for his favorite teacher and adviser, Biella Coleman, the anthropologist who introduced him to the study of hacker culture. Dan was thinking about jobs. And their nights in the ACM room, grinding away on Diaspora, were getting longer and later.
    â€”
    On April 15, Max and Dan simultaneously started getting messages from other students that they had better get over to the ACM room, fast. Max was blocks away in his apartment, but Dan was nearby, and he arrived in a few minutes.
    All the computers were gone. One of the systems administrators had come down and seized them because the university network had not registered any activity on the machines in the room for months. They had virtually disappeared from the network. The systems administration wanted to know how that could be.
    â€œI was one of the people who broke into them,” Dan said, explaining that they had hacked into them so the door could have a Twitter account.
    â€œSo,” the administrator said. “You thought this was a good idea.”
    Dan considered this formulation. They had wanted to make them better. Filing a service ticket and waiting for however long it would take to get the system updated did not make a lot of sense.
    â€œWe weren’t doing anything bad,” Dan said. “We were just exploring the machines.”
    â€œSo you thought this was a good idea,” the administrator repeated.
    It seemed that the man wanted Dan to say those words.
    â€œReally, we didn’t do anything malicious,” he said. “When are we going to get the computers back?”
    Negotiations ensued. Korth, the adviser to the ACM club, was brought in as an intermediary. The settlement was a letter of apology, which only the seniors signed, under a tacit understanding that they would take the blame, such as it was, for breaking into the machines and making them work better. The computer club really did need computers in the club room.
    A final tweet was issued by the ACM Room