Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook
August 18, 2014
Journalist Dwyer (102 Minutes) chronicles the noble yet tragic failure of four NYU undergrads who aimed to ignite a social media uprising with Diaspora, an open-source alternative to Facebook. Diaspora took arms against the stealthy business practices of social media companies and provided users control over their personal data. It won immediate support, raising $200,000 dollars through a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. The book traces the constantly morphing, publicly scrutinized efforts of the founding members over three years. Dwyer fits the 2010 uproar over Facebook’s privacy policies and the dawn of commercial surveillance into a history of the Internet, from the birth of the World Wide Web to the creation of Mozilla’s open-source browser, Firefox, providing context to Diaspora’s herculean task: to meet the expectations of thousands of free-Internet advocates and those of savvy venture capitalists, all in a San Francisco–startup pressure-cooker. But Dwyer is quick to lump his four protagonists—Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, Rafi Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy—into a category of “man-boys... eating pizza, and hacking at geeky projects.” The emotional stakes are extremely high, and when tragedy strikes, Dwyer’s characterizations lack the development to really make us feel it. Agent: Flip Brophy, Sterling Lord Literistic.