“See that guy? In the shorts? That’s Ron Newman,” Mako tells me this with his excited voice. It’s the voice he uses when he’s sharing something that isn’t really a secret–he just makes you feel like it is. He sounds a bit like Kermit the Frog when he talks in his excited voice. But, instead of sharing the weather or introducing tonight’s guest, he says something about someone, or something, that lets you feel a little bit like you’re being let into a secret club of being in the know.
I had had no clue who Ron Newman is. Mako explains to me that Ron Newman was a developer of the X Window System. This vaguely means something to me. I know X Window System, or X (and later X11), was an early graphical user interface.
In the mid 90s, Newman wrote The Church of Scientology vs. The Net, which he describes as a “large web site documenting the ongoing battle between the Church of Scientology and the Net.”(1) Since this happened, Xenu.net’s Project Clambake was launched, and Anonymous from 4Chan has launched an all out attack on the Church of Scientology.
It is with the most pride that Mako tells me “Ron” is a local guy. He’s big in local bike stuff. He’s big into the local community. He’s a moderator of the Davis Square Livejournal community. The community, Mako says in his excited voice, is bigger than the Boston one. Standing at the fundraiser, wearing past the knee jean shorts and a “I Bike Somerville” t-shirt, Ron Newman doesn’t stand out at all. His hair is kind of curly and a little grey. He’s shorter than I am. But, when Mako talks about him, I can tell that he’s someone special. Whenever Mako tells me about anyone, I can tell they’re someone special.
When I first got here, I met a group of Mako’s friends at a local pub. At one point, towards the end of the evening, he explained that most of the table was, had been, or was in the process of becoming a maintainer of the Debian distribution of Linux. To someone, likely several someones, each of those people were kind of a big deal. Chris is a lead software engineer at One Laptop Per Child. In my world, OLPC is one of the biggest projects there is. To most people I know OLPC is not only important, but it’s a regular topic of conversation. It is the project name that carries the weight the same way names like Google and the New York Times carry weight. It isn’t just a matter of working for them, it’s a matter of being a “lead” for them. Being important to a big project or company is tantamount to being important.
Like Chris, Madeleine and Eric work for things that are important, or viewed as important. I tell a friend who is getting a Ph.D. in bioinformatics about their projects, to ask her what she thinks about them. She thinks it’s cool–the weight of the projects themselves pushes the people up a level from being normal to being special.
As I am introduced to each of these people, the thing that makes them special is announced. This person is a professor at MIT, this person is big in Scratch, this person makes a difference for the Free Software Foundation. It’s not just that they’re special, they’re important. Even when I’m introduced, it’s “[she's our] Resident. She’s writing a book,” as though it too is important and makes me special.(2)
When I first met Mako, it was before I actually met him in person. He was going to be a speaker at an event I was helping to organize. When I was told we were were going to try and get Mako that year, I preformed my usual test of learning about someone–I asked Steven.
“Hey, do you know this Benjamin Mako Hill guy?” I asked him.
This was in 2007. Honestly, I was an FLOSS groupie. I hung around with FLOSSies (FLOSSites? FLOSSers?). I organized events and did some low scale community stuff. I was hoping to get a job like my idol–something I awkwardly told her in an email one day–after I graduated. I wasn’t a disciple. I didn’t know about people or projects, really. I didn’t espouse ideologies or even really consider the arguments that people said around me. I accepted them as part of the noise of my world. They were secondary to the work. I liked the people, they were cool, we had things in common, and for some reason I didn’t understand, they seemed to like me.
I didn’t talk much about this. I tucked it away in my pocket like an open, dirty secret. My friends were patient with me and Steven regularly answered my questions about people before I began my ritual research about them–using the same dedication and methods I used for my classes.
Steven had the same reaction he’d had in the past and would have in the future–quiet acceptance and a muted surprise.
“How do you know these people?” He asked me. He seemed slightly jealous that time. Normally, he wasn’t. He told me a little bit about Benj. Mako Hill and may or may not have used the words “kind of a big deal.”
A few weeks after that, I was with another friend when I was reminded I needed to call Eric Raymond about something. I excused myself and make the call.
“Eric,” I said when he answered the phone. We exchanged a few words, I asked him if he’d be attending a pre-event dinner for guests. He said yes and I hung up.
The friend I was with stared.
“You just called ESR,” he said, amused, astounded, amazed. “And you did it like it was nothing!”
And for me it was.
When actual celebrities talk about other celebrities, they use a casual tone. They use first names. They make it clear that to them this is normal. They don’t do it to seem special, or to set their world apart, they to it because to them it’s just as normal as anyone’s life.
These people are FLOS celebrity. They’re celebrity by association. Their projects carry worth, and sometimes their names do. However, to someone who isn’t just their friends or their family, they’re important and interesting. They are celebrities created by the people who look up to them–personal celebrities who have power from real people rather than the media. People who have never, and may never, meet them follow what they say and do on the internet because of how they say it or what they do. But, they don’t view themselves this way. To them, they’re just another person, who has a job or a hobby. They might think their job is cool. They might think their job pays them too much. They might think they are working for something or someone important, but they themselves are not. To them, what they do and their friends are normal. To others, what they do and their friends are extraordinary.
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(1) http://www.thecia.net/~rnewman/, last modified Fri 09 Aug 2002 02:28:14 PM EDT by (I assume) R. Newman.
(2) Neither of which are a reality as far as I’m concerned, but I’m getting to that point.