Authors: Katherine Losse
The Boy Kings (11 page)
Sam and I spent the afternoon at the pool at Caesars Palace, opting for the iconic hotel’s opulence over the Riviera’s seedy ambience. We were always looking for reasons to lie on chaises in the sun, or in the sauna in Thrax’s apartment building in winter. “Oh, you guys are getting naked again,” Thrax would observe
matter-of-factly whenever, on social occasions, Sam and I would inevitably find the closest pool, beach, or sauna in the area and strip to our swimsuits.
Sam, unlike the rest of the engineers, adopted a wry tone in relation to all of this: the site and the company. He was a military kid whose mother was in the Air Force and acted as the family breadwinner, toting Sam and his sister around to various military bases in America and in Europe. He didn’t have particular attachments to places or even to particular social milieus that the rest of us did. He knew this scene would pass and that there would be another. “You look pale,” we would often say to Sam’s fellow engineers in the office with affectionate sarcasm, quoting
Less Than Zero,
because it was true, and because it was funny. Everyone in the office looked pale—not because they had been away from California, like Clay in the novel, but because they lived indoors. “You look pale,” Emile would sometimes say back to us, trolling, since by the end of the summer Sam and I were well-bronzed.
Thrax called us at three in the afternoon after waking up from a nap or the night before, we weren’t sure. His sleeping schedule was erratic, consisting of twenty-hour days on the computer followed by sleep, from which I imagined him waking only to put his fingers back on the keypad and resume the line of code or AIM chat that he was writing when he passed out. The mere thought of this completely unregulated, unnatural sleep cycle made me imagine a sensation akin to being plugged into an electric socket at all times, minus fresh air, circadian rhythms, or exercise. His apparent lack of the need to exercise or be in nature fuelled my only mistrust of him at the time: Can he be
entirely human? Most boys need to be outside sometimes, to tackle the open street, on a skateboard or a bike. I had never met anyone who could be indoors all the time, who drove everywhere, who didn’t need to burn off energy outdoors. I wondered how Thrax didn’t get rickets, how even his young bones could stay firm without sun.
Eventually Thrax made his way to Caesars to join us at the pool, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt that was slightly too big. Shorts on most grown-ups are automatically funny, and he must have realized that because he told us immediately that he didn’t want to wear them anymore.
“I want us to go shopping to buy clothes for tonight,” he declared, having made reservations at a steakhouse at The Palms, then the most expensive restaurant in Vegas (according to his extensive research). He said he could charge the new outfit to Facebook and, when I thought about it, I figured he could. A one-hundred-dollar shirt was nothing compared to $25 million or whatever our latest round of funding was (at this point, I was losing track).
Facebook was not going to buy me an outfit to wear that night, and I wasn’t even going to try to slip it onto the company credit card. I’d have to wear the same American Apparel tank dress from grad school that I’d been wearing all weekend, while Thrax would don the new outfit that I would help him find. It felt ludicrous, to be shopping for VC-funded clothes for a kid who made more money than I did, but then there was nothing about the entire experience—the hacking convention, my new crew of friends, our Facebook business cards with whatever snippets of pop culture we chose to put on them, like Mark’s “CEO,
bitch” or Thrax’s “You run, I con”—that was not, from some angle, ridiculous.
“I think we should go to Marc Jacobs,” I suggested, because at the time it was my favorite store, and the idea of putting a skinny boy in a pair of skinny pants sounded like a good way to spend an hour.
“Who’s that?” he asked.
I almost laughed. For all his obscure, self-taught knowledge of technology and Internet culture, he really was straight out of Georgia. “His stuff is cool, kind of mod,” I explained. “You’ll like it.” I wasn’t even sure if he knew what “mod” meant but he didn’t ask.
Sam and I continued to lie on the chaises for a while, letting the glittering Vegas sun gradually slip behind the Ionic columns that circle the pool. Thrax didn’t relax, leaning forward on the pool chaise, drumming his fingers against his knees. He looked at Sam and then back to me, and asked, “Is Sam coming with us?”
“Uh, yeah.” I mean, I had assumed so. Sam was sitting right beside us and looked as confused as I was that this was even in question.
“I think it should be just us,” Thrax said, affectlessly, flipping his hair out of his eyes with a flourish. “It’s time for Sam to be the left-out one.” His flinty eyes looked directly at me, as if challenging me to make a choice. What? I thought. Who is this kid? Why do we need to leave Sam out?
Despite Thrax’s wish to leave Sam out and occupy the center of attention for a while, all three of us walked away from the pool and towards the Caesars Forum shops together, racing
through the casino’s deliberate labyrinth on a mission for what Thrax thought would be fashionable clothes. I led the boys past Agent Provocateur with a tinge of longing that told me that in my heart what I really wanted was a boyfriend who would take me to Vegas and buy me a lingerie set that I could wear because I would know he loved me, and it would be okay to be naked, vulnerable in front of him. But I, we, were not there yet. Our scrappiness was exquisite in its own way, but not yet safe, not something I could make myself completely vulnerable to. We were at a hacking convention that was about breaking things, not making them secure. Despite this, I felt better with these boys than I did with the standard, preppy engineers we had left at the office. I thought this was why I sought out the hackers rather than the Harvard bros as friends: If I had to succeed the normal way, I wouldn’t make it. We had this in common.
While I felt comfortable in the hackers’ company, there was also an intense opacity to them. Who were these people that the company adored, and were they people at all, or were they some kind of channel through which an American alpha masculinity was in process of remaking itself? Why else would you want a friend to be left out except to even the score in a game that you’re inventing so you’ll have something to win? In college and at grad school, there was a notion of politics, of some kind of larger human goal to one’s work. Here, in the valley, it seemed that life was a game and the goal was just to win.
But what did it mean to win? At the time, I thought it meant that we got to be everything we imagined for ourselves, that we got to write the script to get exactly what we wanted. But what we wanted and how we would get there was not yet clear, quite.
It was a strange feeling knowing you are supposed to want to win when you aren’t sure what it is you are winning.
• • •
That evening, the three of us were sitting at a table at the Palms, Thrax in a Lacoste button-down I had picked out after we spent two hours in Caesars Forum, rejecting everything else for being wrong in some way—too trendy, too fratty, too try-hard. There were celebrities in the restaurant but we barely turned our heads. We were at the center of things, even if no one else knew it yet. Thrax ordered a $175 bottle of wine that only Sam and I were old enough to drink. We poured him thimblefuls while the waiter wasn’t looking, and cut zestily into our steaks, feeling more sophisticated than usual in the sleek atmosphere created by the room’s mirrored columns, modern furniture, and soft lighting filtered by palm fronds. It felt, suddenly and intensely, that we had arrived.
That night, back in the hotel room, I really did have to choose between them, unlike earlier that day by the pool, since there were two lumpy Riviera beds and three of us. I didn’t hesitate—it seemed right to sleep in Thrax’s bed, and so I did, and the three of us talked ourselves to sleep. Thrax’s hand and mine stretched near each other instinctively and I woke up later with my arm slightly touching his. His skin felt cold, almost inhuman, but I didn’t pull away.
For several years, we slept this way on work trips or social ones—they were one and the same: connected, but not quite, like the physical enactment of the AIM messages we tossed back
and forth just to show each other that we are here, online, simultaneously together and apart. In retrospect it seems that this, a tangential state of connection, never total, never lost, always there at midnight when you are bored or lonely and need a slight, subtle reminder that you are loved, was one of the things Facebook was about, and it was our job as employees to embody it. Thrax’s and my insistence on a noncommittal proximity was the perfect manifestation of what we were creating for the whole world: a system devoted to potential connection, a way of being always near but never with the ones you love, a technology of forestalling choice in favor of the endless option, forever.
At the time, nobody, maybe not even us, quite understood this. One day, as we were driving to a pinball convention in San Jose, the song “Face to Face” by Facebook engineers’ favorite band, Daft Punk, was playing on the radio: “It really didn’t make sense, just to leave this unresolved.” Sam blurted out in pent-up frustration, “This song is about Kate and Thrax! Why doesn’t Kate just go over to Thrax’s house?!” I instantly thought, but didn’t say, “Because that would be too real,” and I meant it—the thought of showing up at Thrax’s house, looking him in the eye, and admitting that in some weird circumstantial way we liked each other seemed impossible. Because, at some point, around that time, in the little society we were constructing out of bits of code, it seemed that privacy—true intimacy—had become too scary.
D
o you live within the mile?” employees asked often in the fall of 2006, as if testing each other’s commitment to the company cause. At an All Hands meeting that April, after listing the company’s latest news, such as the $25 million round of funding (at a company valuation of $525 million) that Facebook had recently received from several venture capital firms in the valley, Mark had announced, “We’ve decided to offer a six-hundred-dollar-a-month subsidy to employees who live within a mile of the office.” The company asked engineers to be on call and able to rush to attend to site crashes or other technical crises at any moment. Engineers were issued company BlackBerrys that they kept turned on at all hours, grabbing their phones instantly upon waking to scroll through the night’s
engineering-related emails. Customer-support employees were hourly rather than salaried workers and thus could not legally be called on twenty-four hours a day, but we were nonetheless expected to remain alert to any critical emails and available to drop other plans and help with any last-minute testing or crisis response.
We didn’t have a nonwork life: Life was work and work was life. We did this because we expected that we would be rewarded accordingly—any short-term losses, such as the option to date casually and devote energy to nonwork pastimes, would be more than compensated by long-term gain in the form of stock options we hoped would one day be worth millions of dollars. Facebook, we understood implicitly, was looking for soldiers, not journeymen. But keeping us close to our work and ready to jump into it at any time wasn’t the explicit purpose of that six-hundred-dollar-per-month housing subsidy. “The reason for the subsidy is that I’ve heard statistics saying that people who live within a mile of their workplace are happier, and I want people to be happier,” Mark explained. My immediate feeling in response to his announcement was indeed happiness, and slight surprise; he didn’t usually mention mood-related words like “making people happy” at All Hands meetings, preferring to discuss technical goals like scaling and growth. But my goal for Facebook, when I thought about it, was to make people happier, and so it seemed important that we, its employees, be happy, too.
However, what we customer-support employees didn’t realize when he made the announcement, was that by “people,” Mark was referring to engineers, as an email that was sent out that evening to clarify the announcement explained. Engineers
were the only ones covered by the subsidy, which struck all the support employees as shocking since we, with our $30,000 a year instead of their $80,000-and-up salaries, most needed it. But this privileging of technical people wasn’t an anomaly. As a young designer explained to me bluntly, “Everyone upstairs is dumb,” referring to the floor above the engineering lair at the 156 University office where customer support, administrators, and salespeople sat. My impulse was first to laugh at his ridiculous, blithe dismissiveness, until I realized that it wasn’t very funny. The way that things were going, these guys might actually rule the world some day. And, being that I was nontechnical and, also, I believed, not dumb, I wasn’t sure what this preference for engineers over anyone with a different type of skill set would mean for me.
The fact that support employees were not, in Mark’s view, “people” at the company sparked a revolution. Surely, what we couldn’t contribute to the company in technical skill, we contributed in social skill and compassion for users. “We thought we were all in this together,” we complained among ourselves, and then in emails to executives, like Chris Kelly, Facebook’s general counsel, who occupied the rare position of being both nontechnical and also somewhat important, due to his law degree and political connections to Washington. The few executives, like Chris, who understood the cost to company spirit of leaving customer-support employees out, eventually sided with us. In an announcement that Mark made just slightly apologetically at the next All Hands, the subsidy was extended to everyone. After that, almost everyone, if they hadn’t already, moved within a mile of the office. It was, in retrospect, the only time
employees mounted significant internal resistance to a decision Mark had made.
With everyone living nearby and our rent subsidized and food catered and even our clothes washed for free by Facebook’s designated laundry service (which would also develop film, shine shoes, and mend purses if you simply dropped them off in the laundry bag every week with your clothes), we now had the makings of a self-sustaining compound from which we might never have to leave: If not a fully fledged compound, at least the perfect cast of characters and lifestyle to richly populate the pages of Facebook for our and others’ entertainment. Bringing us nearer to work, in small apartments instead of gathered around a pool, was a necessary move by the company: The summer house, though only three miles away from the office, was a bit too far, a bit too fun, a bit too much of an escape from our burgeoning digital reality. There, people gathered and talked and played in real life. This next phase of the company’s growth would be about making our Hotel California a virtual rather than actual reality, and this would require an absolute commitment to cause and digital country: this is where we would make the Facebook nation real.