At ‘Hacker Hostels,’ Living on the Cheap and Dreaming of Digital Glory

The tenants, mostly men in their 20s, sleep next to heaps of dirty laundry. There is no television set; the men watch online video, on laptops with headphones. On a recent afternoon, 23-year-old Steve El-Hage, who came here from Toronto in May, ate slices of ham straight out of the package: “As you can see, I was going to make a sandwich, but I didn’t get there.”

This is not some kind of dorm, but a “hacker hostel.” It’s one of several in the Bay Area that offer short- or long-term stays for aspiring tech entrepreneurs on the bottom rung of the Silicon Valley ladder, those who haven’t yet achieved Facebook-level riches. These establishments put a twist on the long tradition of communal housing for tech types by turning it into a commercial enterprise.

The San Francisco hostel is part of a minichain of three bunk-bed-stuffed residences under the same management, all places where young programmers, designers and scientists can work, eat and sleep.

These are not so different from crowded apartments that cater to immigrants. But many tenants are here not so much for the cheap rent — $40 a night — as for the camaraderie and idea-swapping. And potential tenants are screened to make sure they will contribute to the mix. Justin Carden, a 29-year-old software engineer who is staying in another hostel, in Menlo Park, while working on a biotech start-up, talks about the place as if it were Stanford.

“The intellectual stimulation you get from being here is unparalleled,” Mr. Carden said. “If you’re wanting to do something to change the world and make it a fundamentally better place, you need to be around the right people.”

Hackers — the Mark Zuckerberg variety, not the identity thieves — have long crammed into odd or tiny spaces and worked together to solve problems. In the 1960s, researchers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory slept in the attic and, while waiting for their turn on the shared mainframe computer, sweated in the basement sauna.

When told about the hacker hostels, Ethan Mollick, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who studies entrepreneurship, said they reminded him of his days in the last decade studying at M.I.T., where graduate students would have bunk beds inside their small offices.

“We work so hard and we don’t care about where we’re staying,” he said. “That’s how you learn. People always complain that academic study of computer science doesn’t do a lot for you as a programmer. What does are these sorts of environments.”

Airbnb, a popular Web rental service for apartments or single rooms, has helped commercialize this idea. A quick search for “hacker” on the site turns up dozens of listings in the Bay Area. Not all the operations are above board. Katy Levinson, who runs another hacker house, declined to give its exact location because she had heard about several houses being shut down after running into trouble with landlords.

The other houses run by the operators of the San Francisco apartment, who call themselves Chez JJ, are in Mountain View and Menlo Park. Each one has a host, or “captain,” who sifts through the requests pouring in on Airbnb from would-be guests.

The captains, all women, screen for personalities and occupations, rejecting applicants who are not techies or simply have a poor attitude. Sasha Willins, a 26-year-old graphic designer who is captain of the San Francisco apartment, has a gentle way of saying no. “It’s not so much rejecting as it is asking so many questions until they withdraw their application,” she said.

New guests get a pillow, comforter, sheets and a towel. The captains occasionally cook meals for everyone, like a pancake brunch with mimosas. As payment, the captains get free rent and a private room.

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Digital Domain: Movie Screens, Small to Big to Small Again - Digital Domain

The earliest motion-picture viewing was a solitary experience. One looked through a peephole at the top of a Kinetoscope, a waist-high cabinet in which a light illuminated the frames of a continuous film loop. A magnifying lens was attached to the peephole, but the images remained tiny. That means the first cinematographers didn’t have much to work with.

When projection arrived, movie images could be made life-size in a theater, then larger than life, on a big screen accompanied by big sound. Taking in a movie became not just an immersive experience, but also a social one, with members of the audience sitting in the dark together, laughing, crying and shrieking.

Today, we’ve reached the acme of technical sophistication — and have come nearly full circle. Movie watching is, again, a solitary experience, involving small images on a laptop, a tablet and, tinier still, a cellphone. The convenience is wonderful, of course, but it comes at a price: the loss of the immersive cinematic experience.

Americans will pay to watch 3.4 billion movies online this year, IHS Screen Digest estimates. That’s much more than double the number for 2010.

It’s impossible to say exactly how many of those movies will be viewed on which portable devices. A spokesman for Netflix, the leader in streaming older movie titles, declined to share details about streaming device destinations.

We do know that the newest movie titles, including the most visually spectacular, are available through Apple or Google for inexpensive rental on the small screen. (Apple made movie rentals available for phones starting in 2008, and Netflix introduced a smartphone app in 2010). Cellphone owners can rent “Hugo,” the 2012 Academy Award winner for cinematography, for $3.99 and watch it on a screen whose size is not much larger than the image seen through the Kinetoscope’s peephole.

When an online movie is viewed at home on a giant flat screen and heard through an expensive sound system, the sensory experience surely exceeds what might be had at a rundown multiplex on a bad day. But movies viewed on mobile devices aren’t going to give the brain’s sensorium much stimulation.

“It’s a sensual experience when you go to a theater, if there’s sharp projection and six-track sound,” says John Belton, a professor of English and film at Rutgers University. “That is a very different experience than watching on an iPad” or on other portable devices.

Professor Belton points out that the first projected images in theaters were not all that large. In a movie palace that might hold 5,000 people, an early screen might have been only 15 feet wide. But the images became larger around the time that sound arrived in the 1930s.

Then, in the 1950s, as Hollywood found itself competing against television, it used special lenses to create movies for screens of expanded width. Marilyn Monroe’s body, in languorous repose, would stretch across screens as wide as 64 feet. This was an intentional shift, Professor Belton says, to “an image that overwhelms the spectator,” part of Hollywood’s campaign “to show the limitations of television.” Later, Hollywood reversed course and began selling to television, though that meant cropping its wide-screen pictures so they would fit on a small screen.

The most glorious attempt to fully engage the theater spectator’s senses was Cinerama, introduced in 1952. Filmed with three cameras outfitted with wide-angle lenses, it used three wide screens, put together in a sumptuous near-semicircle of 146 degrees.

“This gives you a ‘first-person’ experience,” says Thomas Hauerslev, editor of the Web site In70mm. “You see what you’d see if you were sitting where the camera is.” He says IMAX “is not a first-person experience — it’s just big.”

Each frame in Cinerama is 50 percent taller than a regular frame, providing more detail. This makes the cinematic illusion “extremely realistic,” Mr. Hauerslev says.

Cinerama was costly both to film and to exhibit, and its commercial life was short. It was used only for travelogues, except in 1962, when the only two story-centered features were released: “How the West Was Won” and “The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.” The Cinerama name was transferred to a smaller format, and then that format, too, was abandoned.

Cinerama was the high-water mark in sensory immersion. Yesterday’s Kinetoscopes and today’s smartphone screens, the low-water marks.

“If you look at the great Hollywood classics in the 1930s and 1940s, you’ll see many wide master shots and sparing use of close-ups,” says John Bailey, a cinematographer with more than 60 feature credits who serves on the executive board of the American Society of Cinematographers. “But with the advent of TV and now also with smaller screens, we’re seeing more close-ups.”

The problem, he says, is that “if you use close-ups immoderately, then when you need to make a more dramatic point, you have no other option but to use extreme close-ups.”

“The best camera,” the old saying goes, “is the one you have with you,” and a similar thought is apparently held by increasing numbers of movie viewers, happy with the screen they always have with them. And movie producers, just as they have in the past, will probably keep adapting, changing movies themselves so that they look better on a tiny screen.

“You can say it’s ‘watching a movie,’ ” says Professor Belton of viewing on mobile devices. “But it’s not cinema.”

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

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