The Boy Kings (26 page)

These thoughts brought me as close to philosophical debate as I had been since graduate school, which was fun. But when it came to the prospect of writing for Mark on these topics, it felt close to impossible. These philosophies, while interesting and provocative, weren’t the ones I could write. They presumed some kind of beneficence of technology and its makers that, having spent years at the heart of the Facebook machine, I knew not to put my entire faith in. It’s not that the people making technology were bad. They were just no better than anyone else when it came to understanding humanity and what we need, and giving them the power to decide what we—you, me, people we’ve never met—need as humans didn’t seem like the wisest choice. But then, wisdom is not what technology is about. Technology is about solving things another way; without experiencing the problems, without afterthought, without having to do much at all. Technology can do these things for you so you don’t have to. Sometimes, that can be helpful. Other times, I think that by using technology to accomplish our human goals we end up missing out.

After days and weeks spent mulling over these topics and their implications, I finally came to the conclusion that if Mark believed those things are true, he was going to have to convince people of them himself. The issue wasn’t one of eloquence—simply writing well, which was my task as Mark’s writer. The
question was what did any of these values actually mean, and why should we want them? This was something only Mark could explain. I told him that I was having trouble coming up with satisfactory essays on the topics he’d assigned, and asked him to schedule time to explain his ideas in more detail, but he was too busy or wasn’t inclined to explain further—it was hard to tell. I came to the conclusion that perhaps he thought I could invent these arguments of whole cloth, or that we already were cells in a single organism and I should be attuned enough to intuit what he meant, but I couldn’t, and so the essays were never written or posted.

• • •

Although I liked my new job, I was unsettled as ever by Facebook and the valley’s imperative to technologize everything. Having lived in this world of endless photographs and rankings and updates for years, I had begun to notice that, whether or not there was a correlation, my real-world relationships were becoming anorexic, starved of presence. I didn’t know anyone in the Bay Area—Facebook employee or not—who didn’t obsessively read their social media feeds and construct real and online conversations almost entirely out of these threads. “Did you see that post on Facebook?” or “I saw your tweet,” they’d say. In this way, our posts and public presence online had become the inexorable, primary topic of discussion, rather than anything private or intimate or in person. If you weren’t playing in the public sphere, sporting about on the social media field while everyone watched and clapped, it was as though you didn’t exist.
I knew that if tomorrow I stopped updating my social networks with the ephemera of my tastes and thoughts, no one in the Bay Area would think of me. Even in the office, where I would spend six or more hours a day, I felt more visible online than off. People were too busy reading their screens to talk to each other.

That spring, a new Facebook engineer, not yet indoctrinated into Facebook’s culture of the virtual, suggested a new feature. “I have an idea,” he posted on the internal discussion board, “it would be a feature that allows you to suggest to two friends who don’t know each other that they should meet and hang out.” A veteran Facebook engineer jumped on the thread quickly to correct him. “We already have that feature,” he said, “it’s called the Friend Suggestion feature, where you can suggest that two people become friends on Facebook.”

“No, I meant a feature where you could tell two friends to hang out in real life. . . . Oh, never mind,” the new engineer said, giving up.

Incidents like these, and the contentment people at work seemed to feel as they gazed, mesmerized, at their thirty-inch monitors, made me realize finally that this—Facebook, social media, our apps and phones and screens—was never really about real social life or interaction. Social media is about bringing us online and asking us to play with one another in digital space. Social media then is the ultimate Internet game, played according to the rules and metrics created by the boys who make the games and write their algorithms.

However, it was also as if the boys who knew the Internet best also knew that there was something dark about it, about this drive to have everything while revealing nothing. This, I think, is why they trolled, for trolling in itself is a kind of admission that
we can’t win online as our true selves, that authenticity online makes us too vulnerable, that vulnerability (or “vulns,” as the hackers say) can be exploited too easily in an online world in which information is so widely connected and distributed.

Trolling, I decided, was the native mode of the Internet, and not exactly sharing in the literal way that Facebook declares it. Sharing is complicated and private; humor is entertaining, appropriate to an audience. Neither Mark nor any of the boys said anything that particularly revealed their emotions, for the most part. In fact, it was from them that I figured out early on that serious posts were kind of beside the point, despite Facebook’s business need for us to post transparently about our lives.

So, I would troll instead. However, as a girl, I knew I couldn’t troll exactly like the tech boys. I didn’t want to post indignantly about how some new device or code upgrade was doing it wrong. I decided that, if I were going to troll, I would have to go at it from the opposite direction. Rather than trolling with technical details, I began trolling with a fatuous, un-articulated emotion that the boys could never get away with. “<333333333333333333333,” I posted as my status regularly, sometimes <3-ing particular things and people, with an exuberance that seemed infectious, for my coworkers began doing the same thing. Though I had begun posting hearts on everything as a joke, soon everyone in the office was earnestly decorating their Facebook posts with little hearts, skipping language, hardly bothering to comment anymore. It was if at some level we all intuited that “<3,” whether intended earnestly or as lulz, was all anyone was looking for anyway and so, Facebook, with its ubiquitous
like buttons and comments became a race to bestow and harvest as much digital love as possible.

Around this time, Facebook was testing a feature whereby users could reward each other with Facebook credits (Facebook’s virtual currency, in which one credit equaled one dollar) for posting something particularly entertaining. Rather than rewarding one another by posting <3s in our comments, we could now reward each other with actual money. For the engineers who created the feature, it was as if the two were the same, and the guys in the office participated in the test happily, posting credits along with their comments. Thrax, ever shrewd, decided to take advantage. “This is a stickup, give me all your credits,” he posted as his status one day. The guys in the office, realizing with delight that they had been expertly trolled, handed over their credits to Thrax in the comments under the post. As I watched the stickup transpire in my News Feed, I felt a certain awe. We had finally, literally created an economy of love, in which friendship and affection had a monetary value and a system for transacting it. However, engineers seemed more excited about trading credits to one another as a form of affection than anyone else at the company did, and the adding credits to comments feature was never launched.

“Miss u,” master troll Carles of the blog Hipster Runoff said often, to and about everything, in his daily musings on Internet and popular culture that I read daily at work. Missing, I started to think, was the one true emotion of the Internet. In communicating primarily virtually we are always missing things, missing each other’s points and missing out on the experiences of being with each other. So, I began to post that I missed things—
people, places, brands, states of mind—as much or more as I <3ed them. The only thing we never missed was our screens, staring back at us always, ready to make us feel just slightly less alone. “Miss u, real life,” I could have posted, but few people at work would have gotten it. Real life was something everyone in my News Feed seemed relieved to leave behind, if only for the immediate reason that real life can’t be owned and graphed and, as such, can’t make you famous and rich.

If success is measured, as it is on the Internet, by memes spread and likes garnered, my Facebook trolling persona was successful, but my real life in Palo Alto remained an uneventful routine of work punctuated by runs on the Stanford campus, which swarmed with students dreaming of their own Silicon Valley success story. So, in early 2009, I decided to move to San Francisco and commute daily to Palo Alto. I found a room in an apartment at a messy end of the Mission that had been migrating from a working class to a digital class neighborhood for ten years. I was so excited to start over in the city that I didn’t mind the fact that in the old Victorian I’d be sharing with two roommates the fridge door barely opened and the sills were caked with dust so thick that it might predate the 1906 earthquake (which the house, auspiciously for us if there were to be another earthquake, survived).

However, it was 2009 and, unlike in bohemian times, the past was never really behind us, just as the present was a different place than it used to be. Technology didn’t really want us to ever leave things behind: We were expected instead to carry the past with us, all the time, in the form of pictures and tags and the smiling avatars of every person we have ever met, whether or not
we still cared for them and they for us. The information was just there, populating, feeding, following us around as we conducted our lives. In this way, friendship never waxed or waned, but was always present in digital space. This was the eternal now of the Internet, and this, not Palo Alto or San Francisco, was where we had all begun to live.

• • •

Some weeks after I moved and was settled into my new place, Thrax asked me on AIM, “Do you want to go out in the city tonight?” He wanted to hang out because I’d left Palo Alto, in address at least. Men never want you to leave if they think you are really leaving. In this way, men and bosses are the same. And further, at Facebook, watching out for the boys was in a way my job, whether I wanted to hang out with them that night or not. “They are your boys,” Mark’s administrative assistant would say to me sometimes, implying that I shouldn’t leave them entirely to their own devices, even though they were always up to their own devices, trolling and playing and judging, wielding their digital might. Devices, after all, was what it was all about, as Justin knew in advance when he spent all of Coachella struggling to receive a signal on his new, now completely outdated, BlackBerry Pearl.

“I’m tired, I woke up early today,” I typed back to Thrax. I was tired because that morning I had to be at work at a somewhat normal working hour—ten o’clock—to star in a video detailing Facebook’s completed internationalization process, which a documentary filmmaker had been hired to produce. “You are going to be the star of the film,” the filmmaker had told me, and
it reminded me of an old Hollywood scene of a starlet fresh off the bus from Iowa. “Are you a producer who is going to make me a star?” I felt like asking.

The shoot that morning had been long, the lights bright, and in my interviews I kept saying the wrong things—things that weren’t peppy and fawning enough—and we kept having to reshoot scenes to get things right. I was not as good an actor on film as I was on Facebook, where I could craft my lines and persona in advance. So, by seven o’clock, I was tired and, like a Hollywood diva, I was already in bed.

“I’m wearing my pajamas already,” I typed to Thrax.

“So am I,” he typed back. “I just woke up. Let’s go out.”

Oh right, I remembered—the star engineers didn’t have to go to work at all if they didn’t want to. At this point, Thrax went to work maybe three days a week.

“Maybe,” I typed. That’s the thing now, with texting, you don’t have to decide what you want to do until a second before. Technology enables an intoxicating degree of freedom, endless opportunities to do something or not.

An hour later, I had time to rest and get dressed, out of my pajamas and into a pair of jeans and a sweater. I flitted through the littered streets alone to meet Thrax; Ethan, a designer who lived near my new place in San Francisco; and a newer engineer, Liakos; at The Phone Booth, a dive bar on South Van Ness Street. It was a dirty, hip place, lit all in red and purposefully seedy, the scene of many Mission love crimes, I was sure. As always, the louche aura and grime of San Francisco were comfortingly authentic. In this bar, people could even smoke due to some archaic loophole in San Francisco smoking laws, adding
to its stench of authenticity. I greeted the guys at the bar and ordered Fernet—an herbal, oily black liquor from Italy, popular in San Francisco for reasons no one knows—and went to put the Cure on the jukebox. It was a simple recipe for Mission happiness, as far as I was concerned.

I decided that I had good cause to celebrate with witchy drinks in darkest Mission: Improbably, I had come to occupy the highest position I could at the biggest tech company of the decade. I had become the boss himself, or at least his ventriloquist’s voice. And while I could be scared—what if I fail, what if he fires me, what if they find out I don’t wholly believe in our world-bending mission—I felt mostly just relieved. Everything that could have gone wrong already had, but I was still there and, unlikely as it might seem, I was winning. My stock options were starting to be worth enough that I could leave Facebook at any time and still have a livelihood. From then on, whatever happened at work wouldn’t really matter.

The bar filled with taut-muscled gay men in leather jackets, like some movie version of New York in the 1970s. Inspired by their seventies vibes I played Fleetwood Mac songs on the jukebox and danced on the sticky dance floor. Amid all this vintage authenticity I forgot myself. “Second hand news,” Lindsey sang on the jukebox, not referring to News Feed or any other form of mediated information, but to a different kind of connection that never seems to die. “When times go bad, when times go rough, let me lay you down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff.”