The Boy Kings (25 page)

With the new rush of money came not just new activities but increasing power and attention. Celebrities like Katy Perry and Tyra Banks stopped by regularly to take tours of the office with Mark, and employees would stop what they were doing to take pictures and post them to Facebook. All of Facebook’s Hollywood dreams were coming true.

Like any power mogul, Mark’s desk in the bunker was surrounded by the work stations of people he liked and had fashioned as his closest deputies. At his pod were Schrep, the engineering director, and Chris Cox, the product director, both affable white guys with friendly faces. Sheryl kept a neat desk next to mine, a few feet away from Mark’s pod. Her desk, as cool and efficient as she was, held a conference phone and digital pictures of her children and husband. She spent her time either in meetings with high-powered executives or on the phone with them at her desk, which I couldn’t help but overhear. I admired her firm yet dulcet phone voice, which could be both decisive and quiet at the same time. She enunciated precisely, so as to make every thought seem like a decision, like the matter was always closed and the conversation had always already reached its resolution. It was comforting to imagine the world as it sounded in Sheryl’s voice: a world where every question is already answered, where efficiency is assumed, where we all, like her, are on the path toward or have already made it to the executive suite.

The floor around Sheryl’s desk was piled with the endless gifts that she received from business contacts in lofty positions
at Fortune 500 companies. People sent her Louboutin heels and Frette candles the diameter of dinner plates, which she unpacked while on speakerphone with some CEO or another. Sometimes, she passed them over the desk to me offhandedly, just trying to get rid of them, but usually they just sat in piles under the desk until someone cleared them away, to be replaced by new, just as superfluous, luxury gifts. Mark’s desk was similarly surrounded by boxes and gifts, but they were more boyish: a sports jersey signed by a soccer star, some video game that hadn’t been released yet. I didn’t have any presents (other than Sheryl’s cast-offs), but I had a front-row view of the business lives of the extremely rich and powerful, whom I now knew spend much of their days managing the world’s desire to be close to them.

• • •

Once again, six months after the move to the new office, Thrax and I were thrown together. I was informed by Chase, who came by to tell me, with the same smirk he always had when trying to get us to hook up, that Thrax was moving in to my pod. “Oh,” I replied coolly, but thought to myself, “Lol, of course.” Sometimes, Facebook was like the world’s most well-funded preschool, as if we were all sitting around playing with our Matchbox cars and singing “So and so and so and so sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.” We even had ants on a log at snack time sometimes, which was funny enough to me to capture in a photo and post on Facebook. Thrax’s new job was to be Mark’s technical advisor, where I was Mark’s writing advisor.

These were recent roles that Mark had invented, jobs that
were not so much about doing things as being something, some version of Facebook that he wanted us all to personify. It felt as if the company’s drive to convert us all into characters for the world’s consumption was part of what was leading to the creation of these new roles. While Mark delighted in Facebook’s ability to create infinite stories and characters, he didn’t want to be the only character associated with the network. He wanted company in his position as the leader of our new social media enterprise. I felt sympathetic and almost protective of him in this impulse, as I privately always had: It must be hard to be a figure that everyone expects to represent an entire paradigm shift, a new and virtual way of being. Mark, with his preternatural, abstract focus on data and systems, needed charismatic, likeable people to share in this burden. Also, perhaps, I wondered if Thrax and I had by some accident of personality personified Mark’s idea of what Facebook culture was: sarcastic sponges soaking up and performing all the American culture we could find. And, most important for Mark, we shared an impish delight in conquering.

Thrax arrived in the late afternoon, as usual, and piled his new desk with games, digital components that I couldn’t identify, and books. The books were a comically academic touch for someone meant to serve as the face of education’s new irrelevance to success. “Hey,” he said, grinning, and I returned, “Hey,” as the administrative assistants watched. I felt a sudden urge to turn to my screen and resort to IM to communicate, rather than sitting here and chatting as though we were colleagues working at real desk jobs, which I wasn’t sure was accurate, sandwiched as I was between Sheryl’s piles of luxury gifts and Thrax’s electronic toys.
Mark’s office sat adjacent to our pod, with its secret back room (for especially important meetings, because the front room of his office had a glass window onto the hallway that made meetings transparent) hidden behind a wallpapered door and a single table illuminated by a
Mad Men
–style modern lamp, receiving a constant stream of celebrities and tech luminaries and wealthy Russians in silk suits.

As at the summer house years before, Thrax’s and my schedules rarely overlapped, as I left the office in the late afternoon just as he was waking up and arriving at work. When he was there, he received a steady stream of engineers coming to pay their respects, to trade jokes, and to ask him to play video games or go out that weekend. The constant visitors trekking through the center of the office—executives, celebrities, endless young men in hoodies—were another reason that accomplishing any actual work was nearly impossible. We mostly just sent instant messages and read Facebook and trafficked in lulz. When Kai came by one day looking for Mark and Sheryl and they weren’t there, I said in character, “They’re gone, I got rid of them,” like a demonic child, and he said, “Good,” and we laughed. Always be trolling.

Behind our pod were circles of desks, beginning with Mark’s preferred engineers, like William, a skinny Stanford grad with longish curls whom all the boys claimed to have man crushes on, due to his immaculate code. Behind him was a set of newly graduated, mostly white engineers from Stanford and Harvard who were emerging to take the places of the now departed engineers who formed the first fraternity class at Facebook. Behind them in rows were many Asian and South Asian faces working
on infrastructure, mostly people I had never met, many of whom spoke to each other in languages other than English. Some of them worked so far back in the building that their desks sat in windowless rooms, invisible and far from the endless games of ripstiking and chess that went on in the center of the floor. I was thankful for their work because, without them, nothing would ever get built or fixed. The Ivy League engineers, who formed the All-American window dressing of the company, were too busy making Facebook feel like what it originally was: a youthful, half-hacker and half–Ivy League enterprise, populated with smooth white faces, native and familiar.

One aspect of my job was to post updates to Mark’s Face-book fan page, which, like writing his blog posts, was a fun puzzle, an impersonation challenge. I took pictures in the office and from the travel albums on his personal Facebook page and constructed spare captions in his voice, sticking to his main themes of information flow and changing the world. Cool-sounding posts about world travel and company news were easy to write: No one can argue with a photograph of a beautiful mountain or an historic site. But, when it came to posting to my own profile, the answer to the question of what to say and how to say it was increasingly unclear. I wanted to be authentic. I wanted to say something real. Facebook tells us to share “What’s on your mind?” so it should have been easy, shouldn’t it, to just say what I feel? But the prompt, and the system of liking and ranking that it feeds, always gave me pause. I was not sure whether the idea of sharing was that easy.

Facebook employees tended to post about their good fortunes and their increasingly glamorous lives at the company.
They also acted as Facebook’s constant cheerleaders, posting news articles about the company, photos of employees at work, and celebrating the latest user growth numbers and feature launches. They believed, or seemed to, that the smallest, luckiest details of our lives were of utmost importance to share with the world, despite the fact that, since the stock crash in 2008, the global economy was slipping further into insolvency. To read their posts about fine dining, new cars, and luxury vacations, few employees seemed very concerned or aware of the deepening financial crisis. There was only one exception to this rule of sharing: No one ever posted anything critical of the company on Facebook. It would be like committing treason, to question the thing that fed us, both with food and attention and with a continuous drip of information. Facebook wanted us, like all of its users, to depend on it.

As 2009 progressed, I learned, both offhand and in closed rooms, that there were those who shared my skepticism about our goal of transforming the world into a virtual theater of ourselves. All that spring and summer, a team of product engineers worked on a remodel of Facebook’s privacy settings that, unlike previous models, made certain information, like one’s profile photo and friend list, public. This meant that absolute privacy from strangers on Facebook, which was the thing that I first originally loved about the site, as compared to sites like MySpace, would finally be obsolete.

Mark’s reasoning for this move was in line with his general vision of the world and where it was going, as he often put it. “We are pushing the world in the direction of making it a more open and transparent place,” he would say at All Hands meetings,
“this is where the world is going and at Facebook we need to lead in that direction.” A guy on the PR team that I worked with sometimes mentioned this change as we stood around drinking beer at happy hour. “I don’t think that I want Facebook or any site to push me to be ‘more open.’ What does that even mean?” he wondered. I agreed that it was an opaque and strange concept. Forcing people to be more open implied that we were all in some way closed, as though there was something wrong in the way we conducted our personal lives. How was it a Web site’s place to say that we needed to reveal more about ourselves publicly? Why couldn’t Facebook just let people share as much as they were comfortable with?

Most employees I talked with seemed not to be particularly bothered by the company’s decision to forcibly adjust people’s expectations of privacy, preferring instead to focus on the light and almost childlike-sounding goals of sharing and connecting people. “She just doesn’t get it,” a user support manager told me about one employee who was soon to be terminated. “She doesn’t believe in the mission. She thinks that Facebook is for people without any real problems and isn’t actually changing the world. Can you believe that? This afternoon I’m going to have to let her go.”

I wondered who the heretic employee was. I guessed that she must have been like all of the user support team members: well-educated in the humanities at an Ivy League school, and probably unaware when hired that she had walked into a new kind of technical cult. At any rate, her awareness of issues beyond Facebook was a problem. The company wasn’t paying anyone to be aware of the world beyond the screen. The only questions
you were supposed to ask or ideas you were supposed to have at work, as a good citizen of the Facebook nation, were about new ways to technologize daily life, new ways to route our lives through the web.

One afternoon in his office, Mark asked me to detail his thoughts on what he deemed to be “the way the world was going.” “I have a series of blog posts in mind that I’d like you to write, I’d like to you to write a post on each idea, so people can understand what we are trying to do at Facebook,” he explained.

“Okay,” I said. “Shoot,” taking out my Facebook-branded notepad to jot everything down.

“These are the topics I’d like you to write about,” Mark said, listing them off. “Revolutions and giving people the power to share; openness as a force in our generation; moving from countries to companies; everyone becoming developers and how we support that; net-native generation of companies; young people building companies; purpose-driven companies; starting Face-book as a small project and big theory.”

“Uh, okay,” I said, feeling a bit overwhelmed. I was not quite sure what all of this meant to Mark or what I was supposed to do with it. I thought it was interesting that he was still into “revolutions,” as was I, but his list then veered into territory I wasn’t sure about.

“What does ‘companies over countries’ mean?” I asked, starting with the first one that jumped out at me.

“It means that the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company. It’s the best model for getting things done and bringing your vision to the world.” He said this with what sounded like an interesting dismissal of the
other models of changing the world. I could imagine, like he may have, that countries were archaic, small, confined to one area or charter. On the other hand, companies—in the age of globalization—can be everywhere, total, unregulated by any particular government constitution or an electorate. Companies can go where no single country has gone before. “I think we are moving to a world in which we all become cells in a single organism, where we can communicate automatically and can all work together seamlessly,” he said, by way of explaining the end goal of Facebook’s “big theory.”

“Okay, I’ll think about these and get to work,” I said. A set of designers were waiting with laptops in hand outside the glass-walled room, so we wound up the meeting and I went back to my desk.

I liked the idea of constructing philosophical blog posts, but when faced with Mark’s topics I felt a curious sense of displacement, like I couldn’t do this even if I tried. “I may not be really sure what Mark means by this, but I know I don’t believe in it,” I thought to myself as I walked back to my desk. It sounded like he was arguing for a kind of nouveau totalitarianism, in which the world would become a technical, privately owned network run by young “technical” people who believe wholeheartedly in technology’s and their own inherent goodness, and in which every technical advancement is heralded as a step forward for humanity. But that reasoning was deeply flawed. While technology can be useful, it is not God; it is not always neutral or beneficent. Technology carries with it all the biases of the people who make it, so simply making the world more technical was not going to save us. We still have to think for ourselves, experience the world
in reality as well as online, and care about one another as people as well as nodes in a graph, if we are going to remain human. And finally, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be one of many “cells in a single organism.” I liked my autonomy, my privacy, the fact that I was different from everyone else—a unique individual.