For Ilya Zhitomirskiy

Last Saturday, my friend Ilya Zhitomirskiy passed away. He was spirited and friendly and inspirational. Ilya talked often of slaying dragons. To Ilya, dragons were big organizations which he felt had negative social influences, ranging from Facebook to the RIAA/MPAA to the broken education systems here and abroad to violent gangs. He had an adventure planned to wrestle with each of them, adventures that included all of his friends (and not-yet-met friends).

Ilya's dragons were different from those of yore. His were perhaps less lethal, but much larger, more insidious, and nearly invisible. The dragons we usually think of – large, scaled, fire-breathing, flying lizards – attack the body. His dragons operate inconspicuously (cf user tracking on the internet) to commodify and limit our cyber-selves. Many are aware of the dragons he faced, yet few jump in headfirst. Maybe we're afraid to lose. Maybe we're lazy. Ilya forged ahead anyway simply because nothing stopped him.

That makes him sound more like a Don Quixote than a Beowulf. It sells him short and misses his magic. Ilya's best quality was that, despite  his tenacity, energy, and intelligence, he genuinely believed that he was not special. Maybe inspired, lucky, or whatever, but in no way fundamentally different from you, me, or an underprivileged kid in Mexico City. He reminded us that through technology we all had more power than ever and that we were no longer isolated socially or economically or otherwise. And Diaspora* showed that four plucky kids could engineer a social network good enough to, ahem, strongly influence Google Plus and the way that identities are constructed and shared online. Technology can't solve all problems, but it can fight sour technology; we all take responsibility for our networked futures. What made Ilya memorable to me is not that he was a Beowulf, but that he reminded us that we all could be Beowulves, and that's exactly the champion the internet-age needs.