The Boy Kings (28 page)

And that was it. Like the security detail’s van emerging from the tunnel, I felt like I wasn’t locked in anymore. I could finally breathe. If Mark had figured out over lunch that I didn’t believe and that I had a mind of my own, it didn’t matter. Game over. And, who knows, perhaps he knew it all along.

• • •

Making the decision to leave Facebook, which, by the time I returned to Palo Alto in September, I was convinced I would do, and actually leaving Facebook, were two different things. Once one was that far into the company’s tightly wound web of self-interest, in which everything we did was for the purposes of Facebook’s god and country, you could not just put your security badge on your desk and walk out the door. First, there was the matter of appearances: How it would look. Facebook wanted everyone, especially its celebrated stars, to seem perpetually happy and gung-ho about the enterprise, and leaving implied that you weren’t. Second, there was the matter of money: By the end of my career at Facebook, I was earning as much as a
mid-to-senior-level engineer and, with that salary, had grown accustomed to luxuries that formerly were far out of reach. I had recently traded in my old Toyota Camry for a lightly used BMW 325i, which was the smallest and most entry-level BMW, but a BMW nonetheless. I liked eating Tartine pastries for breakfast and arugula salads and pasta at Beretta for dinner, none of which were cheap. I had become a card-carrying member of the San Francisco tech bourgeoisie, whether I loved technology or not, and, as I first noticed when I moved to the Bay Area in 2005 and was on the outside looking in, everything in that world—rent, smart-phone bills, restaurant meals, BMW payments, and Barneys purchases—was expensive. If I were to quit Facebook, I would need money.

Fortunately, my stock options had begun to develop significant value and, in 2009, a secondary market had sprung up in New York to trade in Facebook stock, despite the fact that the IPO was still far off. I found the number for SecondMarket on the Internet and retreated to a Facebook conference room to call them. I spoke quietly, wondering if the wires were tapped and assuming that they were, or that they at least could be listened in on if someone wanted to. At Facebook, you had to always assume surveillance, as that was our business.

The finance guys at SecondMarket were of course happy to hear from me and promised to arrange a sale. There was one caveat: In order to sell company stock prior to the IPO, one had to enter a byzantine process of paperwork, contracts, and lawyers, and one last stumbling block: Facebook had to be notified of the sale so that they could, if they chose, exercise what is called Right of First Refusal and purchase the stock back themselves.
By this point, I already knew for sure that I wanted to leave, so I said that it was fine, I would go ahead with a sale, even though Facebook would find out and I hadn’t yet told them that I was leaving.

I knew that Facebook had been alerted that I was selling stock when I came to work several months later and Mark gave me a long, cold look. The friendly smirk was gone; I was no longer his bro. Sheryl gave me a similar look, not bothering to hide her disdain when we crossed paths in the bathroom later that day. I understood Mark’s coldness: This company was his baby, and he had always been in control of it and, while we worked there, of us. It must be strange to see your dependents—people whose careers you have made possible, even as their long hours of work have helped your company prosper—asserting independence. However, the reactions of other executives and managers seemed strange to me. Don’t they know this is just business—a huge, personal business, but business nonetheless? And, who was Sheryl, with her hundreds of millions of dollars, to begrudge a woman her first financial independence? I had worked for that stock, and now I needed it, because, unlike Mark and Sheryl, I was not already a multimillionaire. What for them was just extra, expendable wealth was, for me, money to live on. Whatever I was going to reap from my years at Face-book and my accumulated stock, Sheryl would reap more by a factor of millions. But, for them, I supposed, this really was by now all just a game, and they could afford to overlook any financial necessities, since they had bypassed the need for such considerations many millions of dollars ago. Sometimes, in the heady air of a bunker occupied by billionaires who could fund
entire legacies solely on investment interest, it seemed like it was getting hard to breathe.

“I heard that you are selling stock,” a manager on the PR team said to me in early 2010 after calling me into a tiny, airless conference room for a special meeting. “Yes,” I replied slowly, thinking, “Are they going to stop me? Can they? Isn’t the stock mine?”

“This really just makes me question your judgment,” he said.

“You know, not everyone already has millions of dollars and can afford to wait years for Facebook to IPO,” I explained.

“When people sell stock that means they are getting ready to leave,” he countered.

Good, I thought, that means that I’m not the first person who has done this and it’s a perfectly logical thing to do.

“I just don’t know why you would want to leave,” he continued. “Facebook has so much further to go; we’re just getting started on our mission. This makes me think that you don’t believe in our mission.”

I began to feel like I was having flashbacks to television documentaries about church-cult indoctrination. Is he really talking about missions and not believing? I had heard this talk before (and had written some of it for Mark) but the fact that they were citing the mission and the question of believing just as I was trying to escape seemed extra creepy, as if this really were the Hotel California and even if I were running for the door, they weren’t going to let me out.

To my chagrin, I burst into long-repressed tears, losing control after so many years of remaining stoic. “I can’t believe that after everything I have done for this company you are treating
me like this,” I cried, my voice muffled by tears and mucus that were beginning to stream from my nose. “I know it’s hard for you to believe, but not everyone is like you, not everyone wants to work for Facebook forever,” I explained. “Some people want to leave and do something else. So, that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Okay, well, it seems you’ve made your decision,” he concluded.

It was a bleary, undignified end to a long and, on balance, rewarding and exciting adventure, but at least it was finally the end. As a parting shot, Mark told his assistant to move my desk to another floor, removing me from his exalted engineering department, even though he knew my last day would only be weeks later. This was a symbolic gesture that relayed in no uncertain terms that I no longer belonged as a soldier in his technical empire, but, fortunately, I had already figured this out. I never even went to my new desk; I didn’t know where Mark told his assistants to put it. In my last weeks, I came to work only to say my goodbyes, fill out exit paperwork, and eat the fine pastries prepared each day by the pastry chef. “Let them eat cake,” I remembered thinking in 2006, when capital companies delivered cake to our offices, and indeed, as my last act as a member of the Facebook dynasty, that is what I did.

• • •

The day I left Facebook, in spring 2010, my life became instantly better, turning into a chillwave summer of nothing but late breakfasts at Tartine and long evenings at the park, the Phone Booth, or the Uptown, my favorite dive bars at which to talk
and drink Fernet and listen to music on the jukebox. I hung out often with a new friend that I had met when he began following me on Tumblr. He listened as I talked about my recent departure from Facebook and the ideas I had about it that I wanted to write about. He had his own idea as to which television series closely corresponded to my experience. “You were like Peggy on
Mad Men,
” he said, and I realized that, yes, it was kind of like that too.

In January 2011 I said goodbye to San Francisco and moved to Marfa, Texas, to write this book. Marfa, unlike San Francisco or Palo Alto, has no great need for the connectedness that we experience now over the Internet and on our phones, and perhaps that is why I was drawn here. In Marfa, it is the land and the sky, rather than any human enterprise, which scales, extending farther than the eye can comprehend, creating nightly sunsets that seem unworldly, even in contrast to any other sunsets one has been fortunate to watch. In Marfa, the ephemera of the social web recedes; it is the land and the art, like Donald Judd’s one hundred sculptures in mill aluminum, that ask you to pay attention and consider them daily.

Marfa’s disinterest in the social Internet isn’t just metaphorical: The phones are slow for data retrieval, so posting a tweet or reading a feed is nearly impossible, at least from the phone. AT&T’s lack of investment in data infrastructure there has similar effects to the town’s lack of commercial and residential development, leaving the town in a masterfully preserved condition, as if the railroad age never left. Marfa, in fact, was founded as a function of the 1880s railroad boom: It was built to be a water stop for trains to take on water to make it across the next stretch
of desert. I often found similarities between the railroad boom and Facebook: The builders of each made great fortunes by connecting with great centralized lines places that hadn’t previously been connected, sometimes inventing things, like photo tags or Marfa, that weren’t there before.

One night in January 2012, with nothing much else to do, my friends and I walked to an old Ice Plant left over from the railroad days, now turned into an art space, where a well-known artist from New York, Rob Fischer, had assembled a glass house on a trailer and suspended it from the ceiling. He proceeded to roll and swing the house by means of a pulley back and forth from one side of the ceiling to another, sometimes smashing it against the steel beams supporting the building. At one point, as I was videotaping this (old Facebook habits die hard), the house began to swing and roll and shimmy on the pulley ever more violently. At a brief lull in the house’s movement, I turned off the camera, thinking I had captured all there was to be seen. Only a few seconds later, the house shifted violently, and one of its glass panes broke loose and slid the length of the house’s floor only to crash out the other side, creating a beautiful (and dangerous) cascade of broken glass that fell just feet from where I was standing. Not one of the forty people in the room with cameras had captured that exact moment on video, though it was the unintended climax of the piece.

I think that this may be the truth of these technologies that we carry around: We film and post and read social media constantly in order to capture something, some exciting moment or feeling or experience that we are afraid to miss, but the things about life that we most want to capture may not be, in the end,
capturable. And, perhaps, planning and efficiency themselves, the things that technologies like Facebook want to make easy and constant, are not as easily grasped as we think. Because, in all of our newfound efficiencies, what have we lost? What, like the moment at the Ice Plant when the glass shattered, is too unplanned and ephemeral to predict and capture with our technologies? Should we keep trying, or should we take a breath, and let some things go unshared and unrecorded, realizing that this ineffability may be the essence of life itself?

POSTSCRIPT

Thrax96: Are you living in Marfa?

K8che: Yes, are you in Austin?

Thrax96: Yeah.

Thrax96: Should we go in on a yacht?

Thrax96: Like a rapper video yacht

Thrax96: Except we actually own it, unlike rappers who rent it

K8che: Haha

Thrax96: Remember the multiple times we almost had sex?

K8che: Lol

Thrax96: Lol

Thrax96: In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

K8che: Not sure what you mean. Is that a metaphor about you and technology? Like the camera on your iPhone and MacBook and how you were always filming? You were the king.

Thrax96: That was a double entendre.

Thrax96: One eyed man.

K8che: Oh, I get it.

I still think that’s a metaphor about technology, I mused after I had signed off. “I’m going to put that in my book.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

F
irst, I want to acknowledge my family for their love and encouragement.

I would like to thank everyone on my team at Free Press, including Dominick Anfuso, Daniella Wexler, Carisa Hays, Meg Cassidy, Nicole Judge, and Claire Kelley, for their enthusiasm and support for this book. In particular, I am very grateful to my editor, Alessandra Bastagli, for her great eye, judgment, and editorial vision; and to Melissa Flashman, for being a dauntless, loyal agent and friend.

I would also like to thank all of the friends, artists, writers, and places, many but not all of whom are mentioned in this book, from whom I have drawn inspiration and with whom I have felt connected in the course of my adventures. I am especially grateful to Dana Armstrong for her friendship, to Ashley Nebelsieck for her wit, to Owen for being my true bro, to
Danish Aziz for listening, to Thrax for being there even when he wasn’t there, to California for always shimmering off somewhere in the distance, to Baltimore for being my school of hard knocks, to Frank Ocean for being my 2011 muse when I needed one, and to Winter 2012 Marfa for all of its art and light.

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