The Boy Kings (10 page)

Thrax kept a stock of musical instruments in the den that he played whenever there was anyone to listen, and he had a crowd-pleasing ability to instantly play any song he had ever heard. At parties, he entertained guests by playing songs on the keyboard long into the night. Thrax’s total lyrical recall intrigued me from the first, seeming like the musical expression of all the autistic savant tendencies of Silicon Valley, a way of turning all their obsessive, numerical perfectionism into music. Eventually it came to seem, like the emerging social Internet itself, to be just another way of grabbing and keeping attention, of saying, “Look at me.” But, for a while, it was entertaining, even charming, a gift of song in a sterile valley.

One night, at two in the morning, as people gathered with their beers around Thrax’s electric piano, I asked him to play “Hotel California.” For once, he didn’t know the words, so I had to sing them. The boys in the office preferred Daft Punk and the song “Robot Rock” as an anthem, speaking excitedly and without irony of wanting to become robots one day. That made me wonder: Why? What’s the pull of being a robot? I imagined that being a robot sounded as unnatural to me as my obsession with Hotel California must have seemed to them. No one ever asked about the Hotel California record on the mantel or why I’d put it there. The record, like all of this, and like the viral memes we would be in the business of distributing, seemed to have just happened, part of an odd conglomeration of things and people
that have convened here, now, to be grouped together for a while, only to later disperse.

“The site broke,” someone yelled from the den after Thrax’s off-key version of “Hotel California” had trailed off. The boys happily retreated to their laptops to log in and start fixing bugs. They always brought their MacBook Pros with them to parties, and they seemed happy to have an excuse to have their familiar screens in front of them, networked to the system and to distant friends on instant message. When the evening would take its usual, inevitable turn and morph into a laptop party (you could always count on something breaking back then—breaking and bringing the site back up at two in the morning was part of the glory), I would just shrug and go outside to the pool, alone. It wouldn’t be my way to confront the boys about their antisocial-seeming commitment to technology, at least at first. In those early years, my stance toward the company and the new world we were creating remained anthropological and cautiously optimistic. I had some notion that a writer doesn’t intervene in her subject until she feels she understands it. That summer, there were still a lot of unknowns to be reckoned with.

When the house wasn’t swarmed by engineers and their laptops, it was cool, open, empty, mine. I liked to pad around the carpeted rooms, reflecting mostly on the fact that I was happy to be here, now. I was entranced by the deep stillness of Menlo Park, the light, fir-scented breeze that entered through the open windows at nightfall, the way the cool darkness seemed to aid both looking back and looking forward. I felt lucky to have the rich privilege of starting my life anew, with
fifty or so smart people, in very fertile circumstances, though the payoff we were working for wouldn’t manifest itself for a while. For now, the stillness—the absence of the sirens of Baltimore, the cool peace, the warm sense of limitless potential and profit—was enough.

CHAPTER 3
PIRATES OF THE RIVIERA

You run, I con. A tiger don’t change its stripes.—thrax96

Huh?—k8che

That’s from
Lost.
I think I’m going to put that on my Facebook business card.—thrax96

w
hen I first began working at Facebook and Dustin said, “Get on AIM, we’re on it all the time,” he wasn’t joking. Most conversations in the office, from the driest work-related exchange to the most overt flirtation, happened on AIM. At times, this led to confusion—an engineering manager might send you an AIM asking you to go get coffee during work hours but it would be unclear whether this was for professional or personal reasons. At that moment he could be interested in befriending you, just as later he might be arranging your promotion. When you were online, with your Adium (our preferred AIM client) status set to available, it was open season in terms of what you might get in the way of messages: Because we were sitting at different desks and often in different rooms,
separated and protected by technology, anything could happen and often did.

“Can you introduce me to that Japanese girl you are working with?” was one AIM message I received from an older database engineer who was known to exclusively date Japanese women. Having read Edward Said’s
Orientalism,
like any liberal arts student, it was hard for me not to find this somewhat suspect. “Not right now, we’re working,” I thought, but simply pretended I didn’t get the message. AIM, like the social Internet generally, was more about your desires than it was about social graces. Any messages you didn’t want to answer, you could just pretend not to have seen it on your screen. Conversations faded in and out, rising and falling in intensity depending on the participants’ interest, with an impunity that would be considered rude in real life.

I quickly learned to ignore most of the random messages from guys in the office—they were just sending out a quick ping to see if I was clueless enough to accept a date from someone who could easily be asking the same thing of twenty other girls at the same time. I paid attention to instant messages from Thrax, though, because we were friends. “I just saw that there’s a shower room on the third floor that has shampoo and towels; it’s well-equipped,” I typed to Thrax at work one day and he answered, with a suggestive non sequitur, “Yes, yes, I am,” and I thought, “Did he just say that at work? Are we awkward, hormonal teenagers or coworkers?” I guessed that, symbolically at least, we were both. Instant messaging, like everything we were building, was a way to play without consequences, the adult-proof playground of the digital age.

At the end of that first summer, the office was a focused hum of work, punctuated by the usual happy hours and periods of playtime. Engineers were preparing to launch News Feed in September, and in customer support we were doing our routine work of answering emails while also helping out with feedback and testing for the new feature. I had received a tiny promotion to senior customer-support rep and an even tinier raise, at fifty cents more than my previous hourly wage.

As we were getting ready to move out of the pool house, Thrax instant messaged me that he and Sam were going to Las Vegas for the yearly hacking convention called Defcon. “You can come if you want,” he typed, and I did. Not just because I liked them and our indie-ish little crew but because, as fun as working at Facebook was, there was a freedom in being somewhere else. When we arrived in Las Vegas, despite the fact that we were in the fakest city in the world, at a convention dedicated to being so far inside a computer that you can break it and everything it is linked to, for three days everything felt real.

It was Sam and Thrax’s first visit, but I had fallen in love with Vegas years ago. In high school, my youth orchestra had done an exchange with the Las Vegas youth orchestra and we spent three days touring the hot Nevada desert, staring big-eyed at the towering houses of money and sex that dot the landscape. On the last day, we finally toured the famous Strip, which was less populated in the 1990s but no less grand. Perhaps it was grander then for being less dense, with casinos spaced widely apart, rising from the desert like Arabian castles. From where I sat on our orchestra’s tour bus, I saw nothing against the horizon but a perfectly sun bleached, gold-accented acropolis with pillars as
staunch and august as those in Rome, only brighter, bone-white against the nuclear blue sky. Our bus driver told us over the PA that Caesars Palace lacks an apostrophe because, “At Caesars, everyone is king.” Taking in that man-made immensity from my shaded perch on the bus as a teenager, I had a sudden, chilling feeling that I, too, could be king.

Perhaps this is the feeling Las Vegas is designed to inspire; against the backdrop of the strip’s perfect strangeness anything you could imagine seemed possible. This is its, and America’s, promise. This is what makes it all okay. “This is America, you live in it, you let it happen,” Thomas Pynchon wrote in a novel about the creation of a revolutionary underground mail system. “Let it unfurl.”

On this second trip, at the height of the real-estate bubble, it felt like America was unfurling grandly: I was at an underground hacker convention with a gay programmer from M.I.T. and a glorified college dropout from Georgia. And we were having fun. Under the neon, away from the fishbowl of the Facebook office, where, at any time, twenty Harvard computer bros were gossiping on AIM, imagining they could track everyone’s every move, we were free. Las Vegas was too big, too fake, too glittering to let anyone in it be tracked by the cool blue frame of Facebook.

“We should have stayed at the Wynn,” I told Thrax and Sam when I noticed that the administrative assistant had booked them a room at the Riviera, one of the oldest casinos on the strip, with the thin, quilted, flower-print bedspreads to prove it. As soon as I mentioned the Wynn, though, I almost wished I hadn’t. It would be the last time any of us ever stayed in a
cheap hotel together on Facebook’s dime. From what I had read of the first dot com boom six years earlier, when programmers went from working in nondescript cubicles to throwing money around on bottle service in downtown Manhattan like they were bankers in
American Psycho,
it seemed only a matter of time before we would all realize the full extent of privilege that comes with working for the next big thing on the Internet. Not just a good salary and bragging rights over your friends but the right to expect to stay in five-star hotels and sleep on 400-thread-count sheets every night.

We couldn’t use our computers anywhere near the convention; the security of anything with a circuit was most probably compromised. In order to go online at all and remain in contact with Palo Alto, we had to connect via an elaborate system the boys wired in our room, draping cables over the headboard and across the floor. While the boys were at Home Depot buying cables to rig the room, I parted the faded chintz curtains to enjoy the vertiginous view of the backside of the Strip, concrete parking garages and hotel towers reminiscent of Eastern bloc buildings. I reveled in the cracked, gold-speckled Formica sink and the smoke-stained walls of our room. “Let it unfurl,” felt like a goad to some grand experiment, bigger than any of us, and it was already happening.

Downstairs, the Riviera casino was at once garish and dim, thronged with pale hacker types wearing black T-shirts, shorts, and tall boots. Some had ponytails and beer guts, others were skinny punks. All were busy hacking or going to talks about hacking. The entire convention was a contest to see who could outhack the hackers, war games for people who didn’t feel
comfortable in sunlight. Las Vegas was the perfect host, since in the August swelter it was too hot to leave the hotel during the day.

In the elevator on our way to the conference, a
goon,
as the Defcon staffers are called, told us that the elevators had been hacked to go twice as fast as usual, and we laughed nervously as we sped the thirty floors down to the casino.

As we walked across the casino floor to a talk on hacking forms of identification (which, fittingly, I got into by wearing Sam’s badge, since Sam had decided to go to the pool instead), Thrax asked passersby rhetorically, in an exaggeratedly pretentious voice reminiscent of a BBC announcer, “Are you the wheat, or are you the chaff?” The young men scurrying across the floor in their oversized T-shirts printed with the names of obscure Web sites didn’t notice him, intent on winning their next hacking competition. Though the diffuse hacker community was connected twenty-four hours a day via IM and Internet Relay Chat throughout the year, Defcon is the one time where they get to come together with their people, their tribe; there are tests, levels, judgments. It felt, appropriately, a bit like being in a video game, finding our way down long hallways and bypassing the goons who guarded certain rooms.

I didn’t know what Thrax considered wheat or why he was posing the question to the room, but at that moment I felt like I was the perfect actor for my role there, as girl to these boys: I knew to be graceful where the boys were gawky, savvy where they were clueless, sociable where they were awkward. I also felt, in my own way, that I was a hacker, too; I had found a side route into a technical world at Facebook where otherwise I wouldn’t
really belong. In computer hacking, gaining ground-floor access to a system is called
getting root,
or having the security key to the entire system, meaning you can change things or delete data at will.“If you have root, you can do anything,” Dustin said sometimes as an admonition to engineers, warning them never to give up root access to Facebook to an outsider. And I was getting root.

• • •

As we were lounging on the beds in our room at the Riviera later that afternoon, avoiding the 110-degree heat outside, Thrax announced, with an air of finality, “I am going to make a reservation at the most expensive restaurant in town,” as if this was a sport and finding not just any expensive restaurant but the most expensive one would score us the most points. And why not? Facebook was paying. Thrax had figured out that much about his position of privilege: that he had an expense account and that we should use it. Sam and I said nothing, continuing to stare up at the Riviera’s yellowed ceiling. Though younger than us and with fewer diplomas, Thrax was the man on this trip: He was keeping the receipts, he had the company credit card, he was Facebook’s green-eyed, adolescent hacker, leading man. We were just along for the ride.