Authors: Katherine Losse
The Boy Kings (23 page)
The simplest definition of transparency that I figured applied to the context of Facebook was a sheer technical one, using technology to broadcast whatever was happening, a Big Brother by another name, but with what the company considered a positive value instead of a negative one. One Saturday in November, when I was in the office (weekends were the best time to work because it was the only time when the office was quiet and I could get anything done), I took a break to play Rock Band with Emile and Thrax in the glass-walled game room on our floor. They decided that it was not enough to simply play the game. Everyone needed to see us playing the game. They rigged a video camera that broadcast our performance onto the wall and also onto the Internet, where Emile and Thrax’s legions of Internet fans were apparently waiting, ready to watch from their bedrooms in Croatia and Louisiana. They also rigged an input device so that the fans could talk to us. Their chats were broadcast onto the wall for us to see and respond to. We were as close as we could get to total transparency, a set of characters in a virtual world full of people watching and listening and talking with us from around the globe.
In the midst of banging out a version of Linkin Park’s “Crawling” on our plastic instruments, a viewer typed “You are gay,” at us, religiously following one of the Rules of the Internet, which is to always question someone’s sexuality, for no reason. “Yes, I am gay,” Thrax typed, following another rule of the Internet which is do not argue with trolls, if you do, they win. I felt a bit like Margaret Mead on Bali, watching the natives of a distant world enact their culture.
The fans watching us on the Internet were perplexed to see me there, since another rule of the Internet states that there are no girls on the Internet, and they proceeded from questioning my gender or even my existence, to telling me that they would like to fill all my holes. This was standard Internet behavior, and I barely blushed, though it seemed a bit violent, in a virtual way, much like the Internet itself. People will do and say anything online because they can. Thrax and Emile were unperturbed, barely registering the curse words flowing at us through the screens, since this was the way the Internet was. Not only were insults the Internet standard but, as Facebook grew, we were becoming the Internet, its new owners, like the rail men of 1880s America surveying their newly installed rail lines in the Wild West, kicking the iron and making sure it worked. And work, it did. Like the boys in their rooms in distant states, we were safe here five floors above Palo Alto, connected by wires to worlds we would never see.
Later that afternoon, I walked the few blocks home to my apartment. As I was cooking dinner, with my laptop open on the kitchen table, my screen was still tuned to the game room in the office, the boys were still playing, and the watchers were still
watching, throwing insults and questions at the screen as Rock Band songs started and stopped, chords scrolling endlessly to infinity. I closed the laptop and drove to San Francisco to meet friends and go out, in real life.
San Francisco is a thirty-minute drive from Palo Alto, but every mile felt like it was taking me slightly closer to reality, or at the least, to some Bay Area approximation—now abuzz with Twitter and a whole new generation of social apps—of it, that I sorely needed. Like the old Facebook relationship status option that we removed some time in 2007 in order to make the site sound a bit more mature, when it came to reality, I was at a point where I would take whatever I could get.
I
f, in 2006, Palo Alto felt like a shimmering, tech Disneyland, a city in circuit-board form, all tidy blocks and green lawns and the near-silent hum of every form of digital device anyone could think of, by 2009, it had started to feel like a shopping mall for venture capitalists searching for the next Facebook. New, glossy restaurants sprang up to serve unending rounds of business lunches; a Four Seasons Hotel went up at the intersection of University and the 101; all last traces of Palo Alto’s scrappier preboom days were washed away, replaced by the town’s brand of bland, midrange minimalism.
San Francisco, by contrast, was still a welcoming, disorderly mixture of tech wealth and street grime. When I went there on the weekends, I could only wear flat gray boots and tights under
neutral skirts, because anything I wore emerged a dirty gray anyway, not unlike San Francisco’s sky with its persistent fog punctuated by sun, and sun only on certain streets. For all the extremes of climate and class—you are as likely to be chased down the street by a bum demanding change as jostled on the sidewalk by a tech multimillionaire focused on his iPhone—San Francisco retains an aura of cool authenticity, the muscle memory of having been once a gritty gold-rush city, packed with drunken miners and the women who tended to their needs. Thus, people flock there from all around the Bay Area on weekends to soak up some remnant of a hearty, physical past, made edible in the form of rustic breads at Tartine, and whiskeys neat at the many bars along Mission or Valencia Street. Whatever San Francisco lacks in leftover grit, it can afford to invent in the form of endless dives (some truly old, some decorated to seem so), handcrafted cups of coffee that take five minutes to brew, and high-end restaurants decorated to look like 1800s homestead kitchens. However stylized, San Francisco is the unpolished flip side to Silicon Valley’s perfect grid.
In contrast to the hardscrabble aesthetic emerging in the Mission, Facebook remained insistent on its high-tech fantasy of a perfected, digital life, where everything was always new and inefficiency was always being outmoded. “Harder better faster stronger,” Daft Punk’s robot vocals still looped in the office and at company parties, perennially picturing a cleaner, faster world. But Facebook’s rapid growth, at 700 employees and 150 million users, strained at its uniform ideals. New offices full of Face-book lawyers, advertising managers, and User Operations (as the customer support staff were now called, in recognition of the
fact that the department served users rather than paying customers) employees sprouted up around Palo Alto, staffed with people of all types, though the engineering office remained as concentrated with young men as ever. The company did its part to maintain a young aesthetic across the departments by issuing branded American Apparel T-shirts and sweatshirts. Other companies in Palo Alto issued their own branded clothing, making for humorous scenes where, say, a team of ten Palantir (another Peter Thiel–funded startup, this one devoted to developing software for military intelligence) engineers in company-branded track jackets faced off at a crosswalk against a team of engineers in the same jackets that said Facebook on the front.
By 2009, the once cool and spacious engineering floors, where boys could ripstik around freely at top speed, were growing crowded with desks, toys, and new engineers who were being hired as fast as they could be found. As the din in the office rose I kept my headphones on and my eyes glued to my screen, monitoring the translation process, my inbox, and my Facebook feed, in which boys took turns noting the failings of some new piece of technology or posting photos of the new devices they picked up that week at Fry’s Electronics.
On Mondays, the albums full of party photos from the weekend would begin their march down the News Feed. Photo albums posted by Facebook employees had more so-called weight in my News Feed because they usually contained other Facebook employees, and the News Feed algorithm assumes that if many of your Facebook friends have done something, you want to know about it. The combined algorithmic weight of friends tagged in Facebook employee party photos and the
sheer number of photos that they posted turned my News Feed into an endless panorama of coworkers socializing, perpetually frozen in smiles with drinks held to their chests. Their photos increased in visibility for the next few days of the week as fellow employees liked and commented on them. The people whose photos were liked most rose further in the rankings so that, the next week, I was more likely to see their pictures, whether or not I ever hung out with them. News Feed was, to my bemusement as a
Heathers
fan, like the algorithmic version of the Heathers in the cafeteria, taking note of whose popularity was rising and falling and making sure that everyone was apprised of the popular people’s movements.
My monitor pulsed with a steady flow of emails and task notifications, some urgent, some not so much. An enduring argument on the engineering social email list about the best way to optimize the temperature on the engineering floors would include exchanges like, “We should vote on what temperature everyone wants it to be,” and the reply, “No, then the result would be suboptimal for at least half the office.” The arguments on email could go on for hours, circling around the logic of what was essentially subjective: room temperature. Subjectivity in general tended to drive engineers crazy: They wanted there to be one answer, one solution, one optimization that worked for everything. As often happens online, these threads devolved into an argument about the communication form itself: “Stop switching the headers on the subject lines,” one engineer would command icily, “it ruins the threading in my inbox.” “Stop sending so many emails to e-social, you’re ruining my productivity,” another would say. “No way, e-social is sacred,” someone else
might claim. “You’re supposed to be able to send anything you want there. If we lose e-social, we lose our culture.” In a pattern common to online communities, the social list began as a dream of easy, fraternal companionship, followed by a rising, fractious concern that the quality of its community was being lost.
Just as in earlier days, users fretted constantly that Facebook was becoming MySpace; as we grew, we fretted constantly that we were becoming not-Facebook. By 2009, everything that happened at work seemed to prompt the feeling that, in Facebook’s perpetual nostalgia for its own early culture, we were losing our utopia. It was starting to always be the “end of an era,” as the boys commented often and nostalgically when looking at old photos of themselves in the office: The boys were growing older despite themselves; the office was growing bigger despite Mark’s desire that it stay small and focused. “Smaller companies are always better,” he would say in All Hands meetings that year to explain hiring plans and why, even though we were growing quickly, he wanted to avoid uncontrolled hiring. Size was the enemy of swiftness, and swiftness: “Moving fast and breaking things”—was the company value that Mark repeated most often. (The others, like “be bold” and “be open,” were less punchy and required more effort to explain.) As the engineering team grew into the hundreds, the product teams were refashioned on the model of little startups, with their own war rooms, so that they could feel like small companies despite being part of the larger group.
Despite all these attempts to remain small in feeling if not in reality, in meetings, almost daily, someone would say, “I am worried that we are losing our culture,” and everyone would look around helpless, as if they didn’t know what to do, or how to
save the precious essence that they felt slipping from their grasp. Sitting on a meeting room couch, listening once again to this exchange, I recalled my Hopkins advisor saying, “You are what you do. If you don’t do it anymore, how can it be your culture?” He was making a point about cultural identities in America and our constant fear of losing them, even when we don’t practice them anymore. I came to realize it was the identity of a nineteen-year-old boy, forever youthful and reckless, unmonitored and unstoppable, that the boys were so anxious about losing. They were worried, perhaps, about growing up.
Facebook culture,
by another name, then, might be a fear of adulthood, a desire to put off commitment, responsibility, and the difficult work of relating in real life and in real terms, forever. But how do you save your youth? How do you stay nineteen forever?
• • •
In December 2008, I was tapped again to do a job that didn’t exist before and didn’t have a name. “We are looking for someone to write for Mark,” Facebook’s Communications Director Elliot Schrage, a public policy lawyer turned PR executive who came to Facebook from Google, told me. “We’re going to send out the job opening to the company so anyone can apply, but I think you would be great for it.” Lols, I thought, slipping into the emoticon talk that had begun to move off my screen and into my speech. I was, after all, the only writer there, or at least the only writer who had been at Facebook long enough to justify entrée into Mark’s exclusive inner circle. In the past year, Mark’s circle of confidants had thinned as his original
cofounders, like Dustin, cashed out in the billions, and it had to be restocked.
This shouldn’t be hard, I thought. I had been listening to Mark speak about product launches for three years, and I knew all his rhetorical tics and gestures, even if I was still not entirely sure what he truly wanted for the world, or what drove him, beyond a fascination with youthful insolence, ever-expanding territory, and control. His voice is a combination of efficient shorthand (no overly big words, no overly long sentences) and imperialist confidence, always gesturing toward the next stage of the product’s growth, depicted as inexorable and unlimited. Things were always being “pushed forward” in Mark-speak, as if he and the company were Atlases simultaneously shouldering and spurring the world’s advancement, moving it forward with their own digital might.
Just as in the Daft Punk song, in Mark’s rhetoric, Facebook’s work was never over. It wasn’t a Web site or a set of apps, but a platform that grows and grows, adding more users and entities (brands, places, events) and going deeper into our lives, mining that data for the benefit of the platform and, he argues, all of us. Who wouldn’t want to have easy access to everything, every person and place and event around the world? he wanted to know. For a second or more, as long as it takes to log in to our Face-book accounts and survey the world before us, we all say
yes
. We too want that. Who wouldn’t? As the hackers who devote themselves to pirating know, free data is seductive, enticing. There is always more and better and newer data to obtain, and new and faster ways to acquire it.