"I definitely did have fantasies of killing myself and
destroying their building in the process," Stallman
says. "I thought my life was over."
The level of despair owed much to what Stallman viewed
as the "destruction" of his "home"-i.e., the demise of
the AI Lab's close-knit hacker subculture. In a later
email interview with Levy, Stallman would liken himself
to the historical figure Ishi, the last surviving
member of the Yahi, a Pacific Northwest tribe wiped out
during the Indian wars of the 1860s and 1870s. The
analogy casts Stallman's survival in epic, almost
mythical, terms. In reality, however, it glosses over
the tension between Stallman and his fellow AI Lab
hackers prior to the Symbolics-LMI schism. Instead of
seeing Symbolics as an exterminating force, many of
Stallman's colleagues saw it as a belated bid for
relevance. In commercializing the Lisp Machine, the
company pushed hacker principles of engineer-driven
software design out of the ivory-tower confines of the
AI Lab and into the corporate marketplace where
manager-driven design principles held sway.
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