The Boy Kings (17 page)

The customer-support reps who wanted to go to F8 could only attend on the condition that they serve as coat checkers. Perhaps I was as guilty as the engineers of feeling starworthy and VIP, but I wouldn’t accept being treated like the second-class help, and this would serve me well. While the engineers were huddled in a room at San Francisco’s W Hotel, where they could concentrate away from the crowds of press and developers swarming the conference, furiously preparing for F8, I left the Bay Area to spend the weekend with my parents in Huntington Beach. At the beach house my parents rented, I had to sleep on
the couch, but it was better than checking coats at a conference called “Fate.”

• • •

The following weekend, I was lying on a futon in Thrax’s apartment late one night, listening to Sam, Justin, and Emile rehash F8. Thrax told a story about the night of the conference, hours before the Facebook platform was announced. The engineers were all holed up at the W, coding as quickly as their fingers could type. The problem was that the revolutionary platform, which Mark had announced in his keynote with the words, “Today, together, we’re gonna start a movement,” wasn’t ready. The boys were still writing code and patching bugs to make it work at all.

Even though Thrax and Ariston began building Facebook Video in defiance of Mark’s orders (as Video gained traction in the company and all employees were using it, Mark came to accept it) it turned out to be a boon, as it gave him a Facebook application built on the platform to announce as part of the launch. But at the eleventh hour, the platform and video were still unfinished, so even as Mark announced them, Thrax was writing furiously to code. As he told us the story, he had been coding for three days, and his body and vision were starting to fail. When he fixed the last bug to make video work, he left his laptop on the bed and went to the bathroom to get a glass of water. He didn’t make it to the sink. He collapsed on the marble floor, exhausted, and fell asleep. Later he woke up and, in a half-dreaming state, tried to move but couldn’t. His exhaustion was
so extreme that his limbs couldn’t register his thoughts. “It was scary,” he remembered, “it was like my body wouldn’t ever work again.”

As the guys reminisced excitedly about the heroics of F8, congratulating themselves on their latest victory in the march to take over the world, I thought about Thrax’s story. It was as if, in the process of building out his technology, he had reached the technologists’ desired state in which he no longer had a human body. If the scene had been a video—and, for once, it was not, for there was no one there to record Thrax’s fall—Daft Punk’s “Robot Rock” would have been playing. This, maybe, was Face-book’s primal scene: The moment when technology consumed the body, reality, and what was left of the physical realm.

Bored with F8 and Platform chatter, which was all anyone at work had talked about for months, I suggested watching
The Wire
. Sam agreed and Thrax quickly downloaded the first episodes of season one from one of his many pirated media sites. A few minutes later, Mark and a few friends arrived at the apartment to hang out. Mark said that he wanted to play video games and, since even at that late hour of the night he was still the boss, we let him commandeer the television in the living room for video games while Sam, Thrax, and I retreated to Thrax’s bedroom to talk. Eventually, Mark left and we wandered back out to the living room to make up songs on the electric piano.

It was close to three in the morning when I left the living room and went to the kitchen in search of eggs. Thrax always had eggs, if nothing else, in the fridge, and it seemed like a comforting sign of a domesticity that couldn’t be coded away. I made sandwiches out of eggs and stale bread, as Thrax and Sam tinkered
in the dark on the piano. It was just us here, now, without the crowds and Mark and the blogs and the excited worship of influential Silicon Valley tech bloggers like Robert Scoble, for whom the Facebook Platform was the next great technical revolution, at least until the next exciting new application or platform came along. The only reason I knew who Scoble was, and that he had been raving about the platform, was because I was accidentally there, watching and listening to the boys that occupied the center of it. As I buttered the bread slices and slid the fried eggs onto them I wondered if the world would ever care as much about any of this—being technical, building applications, making platforms, owning platforms—as Mark and Scoble and the rest of the Valley did, and where all of this was going to lead.

• • •

“Are you coming to Thrax’s birthday party in Las Vegas?” Sam asked me over IM while we were both at work.

“I can’t . . . it’s going to be like five hundred dollars for one night with airfare and the club and hotel,” I typed back.

“Jamie says that you have to go. We need you,” Sam returned.

“I know, but I can’t afford it. I make a third of what you guys make. If they want me to go, they’re going to have to help.”

“Okay, I’ll talk to Jamie and see what he says,” Sam said, switching to a different AIM window to talk to Jamie.

Later that day Sam messaged me with an answer.

“Jamie says they’ll pay for the club. He doesn’t seem to get why, though.”

“Ugh, I don’t get how they don’t get how rich they are compared to everyone else. It’s like they think everyone is a rich guy from Harvard.”

“Well, what they don’t realize is that you’ll remember this.” Sam was right, just as he usually was when it came to reading the idiosyncrasies of the social world we inhabited. While I tended to observe things quietly, Sam unabashedly posted mocking witticisms on the other boys’ walls, making loving jokes of everything they held dear. This was Sam’s brand, and he could get away with it because, as an engineer, he knew they needed him. He was also gay, and cute, and being both made him an asset to others rather than a source of competition for female attention.

“They want us around to spice things up,” Sam once said to me at a party, as if we occupied the position of some kind of self-aware court jesters. Sometimes, when we made fun of the more staid engineers, they liked it because mockery was another form of attention. Other times, they didn’t realize we were poking fun. For example, rather than remembering the names of all the latest smart-phone models that were released every week, we began calling smartphones “technologies,” refusing to differentiate between all the different versions like the Bold, the Pearl, and the Curve, that were being released as fast as RIM (and, very soon, Apple, with its iPhone, which first went on sale in late June 2007) could make them. “Use your technology,” we would say when we needed to call someone or get driving directions. Soon some of the other engineers were calling their phones “technologies,” too, either not realizing or not caring that we were gently mocking their and the company’s obsessions.

While I made no secret of the fact that I found technology
to be as silly as it sometimes could be useful, I knew that I was still expendable, especially in the age of the technical company and the purge. My thoughts about Sam’s conversation about the upcoming Vegas trip with Jamie, which I kept to myself, had to do with the Harvard guys’ paradoxical cluelessness about the very things that they claimed to know most about: money and power. Their success in life, achieved in their teens or earlier, blinded them, I suppose. They assumed everyone had the same chances in life, the same easy path to wealth, where knowing just a little more about gadgetry than everyone else went a very long way.

Despite the fact that I was the poorest guest invited to the birthday party (everyone else was an engineer) by millions of dollars, I agreed to buy a two-hundred-dollar, round-trip Southwest ticket to Las Vegas for one day of partying. I figured that I’d just drink cocktails beforehand at the hotel instead of throwing hundreds of dollars at bottle service. Not going to Vegas for Thrax’s birthday wasn’t really an option. I was the only girl who was considered one of the boys. They needed me there, a female presence, an anchor around which they could keep oriented and keep things from spinning wildly out of balance. I felt like we were always in danger of that, as if with a little nudge, the entire enterprise, social and business, could veer out of control, fast. We had too much power, and very few checks on that power.

One day, at around this time, one of the Harvard guys posted a screenshot in News Feed of a new application that he, Thrax, and Emile were developing. It was not an official Facebook application. It was intended to be released as a platform application, meaning that users could add the application to their profiles if
they wanted to, but that they didn’t have to. I could see from the screenshot that the application was called “Judgebook,” and that its purpose was for Facebook users to rate female users on their appearance. The screenshot showed two women’s Facebook profile pictures, set side by side, with a space for the viewer to input a score for each. The tagline of the app was, “
Judgebook.com
: never judge a {face}book by her cover,” which hardly made any sense, but the photos side by side made clear what the words couldn’t: This was a way for men on Facebook to explicitly judge women’s looks and assign them a score. For what? I thought, but then I remembered that Mark’s Facemash application, which predated Facebook as his first popular Harvard site, was based on the same concept. The difference was that to make Facemash Mark had to steal students’ photographs from the Harvard servers (for which he was famously disciplined by the university administration), but in Judgebook’s case, the photos were already there on Facebook, submitted by users themselves.

In another screenshot in the same album, the Harvard engineer posted a screenshot of the domain names he had purchased to host the application:
Judgebook.com
and
Prettyorwitty.com
. It was like Mark’s comment at the barbecue about having to choose between a girl who looks like a model or is smart, all over again, only in web application form. You could either be pretty or you could be witty and, in either case, you would definitely be judged and scored and rated. It was at moments like these that I realized it was the great and twisted genius of Facebook for anyone who was interested in rating things constantly, as Mark and the engineers who made these types of applications seemed to love doing. Facebook made it possible for men to have endless
photographs of women available for judging, and women simply by being on Facebook became fodder for the judging, like so many swimsuit models at a Miss America pageant. Because, with Judgebook, like all Facebook platform applications, women did not have to consent to have their photographs used by the application. The application would alight upon your data and feed it into its database whether you wanted to be judged or not.

Sometimes, that year, I got a sick feeling in my stomach that I didn’t want this world in which we are all ranked virtually, by virtual strangers, on the basis of popularity and appearance. Even worse, I felt like I might not have a choice in the matter. I didn’t want it to be like this: I wanted us to make things better, not worse, for humanity and, especially, for women. I thought that more information would be helpful, not realizing that
information
as defined by these engineers was not value free. There were different kinds of information that we could be exchanging and receiving but, instead, we were learning about how pretty people were and whether people liked them, and how much. The world the boys were building was as weighted against the less powerful as much as the analog one they seemed to want to disrupt and leave behind.

• • •

On a flat, dry Friday in July I boarded a Southwest flight to Las Vegas for Thrax’s birthday, happy as always to escape Palo Alto, if only for one night. I didn’t care that I was about to spend my last five hundred dollars for what was basically a bachelor party without the wedding. I had been teetering financially for so long
that this kind of budgetary risk just seemed normal. Besides, the cult of money and power that we belonged to was only getting deeper and bigger. I may have only had five hundred dollars in the bank, but there was an iceberg of money building under us all in the form of the stock options that we were all vesting month by month. The stock options still had very little value, as there was no public market for them yet, but, by May 2007, the site had grown past 24 million users, had 40 billion page views per month, and was already the sixth-most-trafficked site in the United States. As Facebook’s potential to IPO became steadily more secure, though we knew it would be years off, it felt a little like we were all fronts for something else, faces of some future that hadn’t yet been realized.

The year before, when Thrax and Sam and I had played at being high rollers at the dinner table at the Palms, it all felt adorable and twee, a grand lark, like we were Silicon Valley’s version of starlets about to get discovered. Now I wasn’t sure; things were more serious, less playful, heavier than before. Facebook was growing steadily bigger, but my doubts about the new digital world we were all beginning to live in were growing too. But, regardless of how I felt about the big picture, I had been at Face-book long enough, almost two years, that I knew I too had to win, regardless of what it cost.

A man sitting next to me on the plane took my mind off my brooding by buying me a gin and tonic from the always cheerful Southwest flight attendants, whose jokes on the PA system became bawdier the closer we got to Las Vegas. We toasted to the fact that in an hour we’d land at McCarran Airport, the gateway for so many unrepentant sinners longing for release into Las Vegas’s
bacchanalian excess. As we sipped our drinks and watched the red desert pass by underneath us, he told me about his job at a company in San Jose, which manufactured the security keys that we used to authenticate ourselves when we administered Facebook. In a way, we were in the same business: His job was to authenticate my employee identity, and my job was to authenticate his social identity. In the Internet’s turn from anarchy to being a proxy version of real life, authentication was becoming big business.