The Boy Kings (18 page)

The plane landed and we were released into the temple of tackiness that is the mirrored McCarran airport and the city it serves. The first blast of heat on leaving the terminal was liberating, soaking into my skin with an intensity that both awakened and calmed me. In the taxi line, I ran into a business development guy from Facebook whose movie-star good looks were widely considered to be the reason that he was hired, perhaps in addition to his Stanford MBA and whatever actual smarts he had. He was also there for the party, so we shared a cab to the Mirage Hotel and Casino. While he checked us in at the hotel desk, I stood on the busy carpet and watched enormous fish swim in the floor-to-ceiling tanks that line the lobby. As the fish watched me from the water I was not sure if I could tell the difference between observer and observed.

The view of the strip as we entered the penthouse suite the engineers had reserved for the party was breathtakingly bright and dark at the same time. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave onto an endless desert night punctuated by glittering signs that barely penetrated the blackness. The penthouse was entirely covered in marble, so it was like walking in a mausoleum. Sam and I
retreated to the bathroom and took photographs of ourselves splayed suggestively against the tub. When we would get back to Palo Alto we would post them to the Facebook group we had made devoted to homegrown Erotic Photo Hunt pictures, as in the bar game where you look at two pictures of a lightly clothed person and try to find five differences. We created pictures for the group by first posing for a picture, then taking another picture in the exact same pose, but with a piece of fabric slightly moved, making a game of teasing the viewer. These tame Erotic Photo Hunt pictures were the premeditated, ironic version of the suggestive party photos that our colleagues posted on Face-book at the end of every weekend.

The mirrors lining all the walls of the bathroom multiplied everything, extending us to infinity, adding to the hallucinatory feeling that all of Las Vegas is designed to trigger. When we emerged from the bathroom, the penthouse had filled with friends, or rather coworkers, preparing for the party, dressed uniformly in collared shirts and skinny blazers. People brought bottles of liquor and lined them on the bar, like a movie about a birthday party in a suite in Las Vegas.

Everyone left for dinner except Sam and me, who remained in the suite like kids at an emptied-out grown-ups’ party. The boys were going someplace expensive that I couldn’t afford and, like the good friend he is, Sam skipped dinner and stayed behind with me. We turned the radio up loud and blasted the Cure, singing aloud to the sky and the lights twinkling for miles in the distance. “Love cats,” we sang, tiptoeing around on the marble, spinning in circles until we were dizzy and collapsed on the lacquered sofas with a view to the Mirage’s pools thirty floors below.

Eventually we descended the elevators to the casino with the intention of finding the boys, but were distracted by everything else: the lights, the tinkling of coins in the slots, the crowds thronging the casino, going to and fro as if orchestrated by machines. Disoriented, we walked outside to breathe in the arid desert air, and kept walking, down the strip, farther and farther from the Mirage. We came to a towering old-time neon sign for the New Frontier Casino. “Closing night, July 14” it read. That was the next night. We had to go in.

The New Frontier was in a sorry state, barely hanging on until its slated demolition. The slot machines continued their relentless beat, tinkling and singing with the sound of fake coins, but the air was heavy with smoke and dread. We toured the casino floor and put a few dollars in the machines. A waitress, soon to be unemployed, brought us white Russians made of the harshest of vodkas. We chatted with a few security guards near the cage, where all the money was dispensed, who told us the casino would be demolished in a few days. I decided that I already missed the place even though it wasn’t gone yet. As we were leaving to walk back toward the Mirage, I took a picture of the New Frontier’s neon sign, which read, “Thanks for the good times.”

By the time we got close to Caesars’ Pure nightclub, where the others were, we could barely walk, not because we were half drunk, but because our feet were worn out from trekking down a few miles of Las Vegas concrete. I checked my phone and realized that the others had been texting us all night. Their texts grew less grammatical as, I imagine, they grew increasingly drunk. “Where are you?” they asked, and Sam and I texted back that we were outside Caesars, collapsed on a patch of grass next
to a barely clothed Roman statue that gazed seductively at the Imperial Palace casino across the street. “Come, we need you” they texted, over and over. What did they mean, they need us? I wondered. They never said that. They had never needed us so badly before. They never needed anyone. As far as I could tell, our entire lives at Facebook and within the site itself were being reconstructed so that no one ever really needed each other, as all our needs for attention could be satisfied by whomever was online, chatting with us or viewing our updates and making comments. “Should we go?” Sam asked. “I don’t want to,” I replied, “they only want us because we aren’t there.”

We lay back on the grass for a while and let the twinkling sky descend upon us, bathing us in uneven light, bright for nighttime. When we tired of the outdoors, we returned to the penthouse. None of the guys had returned from the club so we realized with glee that the one bed in the suite was ours. We jumped in, and I picked up the phone to call room service to deliver us a large plate of grilled cheese sandwiches, charged to Jamie’s room tab. After eating the sandwiches, we fell asleep under the crisp white comforter, our fingers still oily with grilled cheese. Later, as the light was dawning over the strip through the floor to ceiling windows, all the guys tromped in, in various stages of drunkenness, and fought for space on the bed and on every available soft surface. Realizing that we wouldn’t be able to continue our luxurious sleep, Sam and I got up and walked down to the pool, where people were already starting to gather in bikinis and swim trunks. We lay out on the chaises and tanned, half asleep, until it was time to catch a cab back to McCarran and fly home.

That Sunday, after I’d slept off our long night, I logged in to Facebook to see an endless stream of videos that the boys had filmed at the club. In them, the boys were not chatting up or kissing girls they had met, as I had expected. Instead, they were performing an elaborate ritual only they would have the strange, cold vanity to invent, in which they would methodically chat up and reject girls that the bouncers had brought to their table. “Leave! You’re not pretty enough!” one of them seemed to say over the din of the club as he shooed the girls away in succession like so many servants.

Even though I had been living in this boys’ world for almost two years, I was still a bit shocked. Their products ultimately reflected their real-life behavior. Instead of making a technology of understanding, we seemed sometimes to be making a technology of the opposite: pure, dehumanizing objectification. We were optimizing ways to judge and use and dispose of people, without having to consider their feelings, or that they had feelings at all.

What would happen to me? I wondered. Was I pretty enough to make it past the bouncers? Was that, in the end, what this was about? Was it even possible to be pretty enough? Were my colleagues ever satisfied with reality, or was reality always deficient in comparison to the perfected digital image? Did I even care? Did it matter if I was trying to win a war I didn’t believe in? I wasn’t sure, any more, what I believed in, but I knew that I didn’t want to live in a world where I appeared only for a bunch of engineers to judge me and shoo me away.

In their minds, perhaps, the way this worked was that everyone who wasn’t them was deficient. They were architecting a system
that placed them on top. “I was born perfect,” Thrax would say to me, in all honesty, the following year at Coachella, gazing down at his body as we lay around in bed, chastely as always. When he said it I, as I usually did upon hearing one of the boys’ preposterous statements, laughed at the absurdity of his claim. What does being born perfect even mean? I didn’t know, but perhaps your own perfection is what you would have to believe in if everyone else in the world isn’t good enough. And that’s why you’d want to reinvent a world in which everything had to appear perfect, all the time, as if forcing everyone else to believe in being perfect, too, or at least try. With my instinctive desire for authenticity and the slightly worn-out thing—the soon-to-close New Frontier—I didn’t even know what perfection looked like. Perfect, to me, was the not perfect, the unfinished, the thing you loved because it had depth and edges and idiosyncrasies.

As I sat at my kitchen table in the Casa Real reading my News Feed and its exaltation of a boyishly cold, digitally perfected ego, I realized that I was furious at all this. I hate Judge-book, I hate rankings, I hate algorithms, I thought, in a moment of total rage at everything—the company, these boys—that was near, but also far beyond my control. I just wanted to be happy and loved for who I was and I wasn’t sure all the algorithms or fame in the world could produce that.

CHAPTER 7
I’D RATHER BE CONQUERING

T
he Facebook Platform that was launched at F8 was, already within weeks and months of launch, winning. In fact, the platform grew exponentially overnight, to Mark’s and many of the engineers’ surprise and satisfaction. Application developers signed up by the thousands and built applications like Farmville and Scrabulous, as users’ increasingly cluttered walls showed, soon gained wide distribution. By November 2007, over seven thousand applications had been created and each day a hundred new ones were being launched. In Mark’s and some engineers’ views, the rapid and unrestricted growth of the platform was good because it proved that at Facebook, technical development, not the desires of marketers or users, was king.

Not everyone was convinced that the rapid growth of the
platform was such a good thing: for the company, maybe; for the users, not necessarily. As customer-support reps, our job had always been to keep the site clean, monitoring for spam and aggression from individual users, doing our best to keep the virtual neighborhood tidy, and, we hoped, meaningful—a true “place for friends.” We painstakingly and manually deleted accounts that we thought were fake, and warned people whom we thought were contacting users en masse, rather than communicating in a personal way. Though paid very little compared to the engineers, we were in a sense the defenders of authenticity on Facebook, at least until engineers could figure out a way to approximate our labor with algorithms, which they eventually did, to some user consternation as accounts came to be easily erroneously flagged and deleted.

But now, developers, who could sign up to develop on the Facebook Platform from all over the world, were pumping thousands of apps and millions of formulaic News Feed stories into our carefully walled and defended network. As far as external developers were concerned, the sole purpose of the platform was to generate more users for their app and, therefore, more money for themselves. In a sense, they were simply mirroring the engineering ideology of Facebook itself: Scaling and growth are everything, individuals and their experiences are secondary to what is necessary to maximize the system. Facebook, as we learned early in the case of the group titled “If this group gets 100,000 members my girlfriend will have a threesome,” is the world’s most efficient viral marketing platform, a way to turn automated word of mouth into gold.

The idea of providing developers with a massive platform for
application promotion didn’t exactly accord, I thought, with the site’s stated mission of connecting people. To me, connection with another person required intention: They have to personally signal that they want to talk to me, and vice versa. Platform developers, though, went at human connection from a more automated angle: They churned out applications that promised to tell you who had a crush on you if you would just send an invitation to the application to all of your friends. The idea was that, after the application had a list of your contacts, it would begin the automated work of inquiring about people’s interests and matching people who were interested in each other.

Soon, developers didn’t even ask you if you wanted to send invitations to your friends. Simply adding the application would automatically notify all of your Facebook friends that you had added it and invite them to add it, too, using each user as a vessel through which invitations would flow, virally, without the user’s consent. In this way, users’ need for friendship and connection became a powerful engine of spam, as it already was with email and on the Internet long before Facebook. The same “We’ll tell you who has a crush on you if you just send this email to your address book” ploys were familiar to me from Hopkins, when spammers could blanket the entire email server with such emails in a matter of hours, spread virally by students gullibly entering the names of their crushes and their crushes’ email addresses.

When I first started working at Facebook, I wanted to believe that my experience there could have been a love story. That is, I thought, in some sense, that Facebook could be what we all—the employees, the users—sometimes wanted: A network through which we could connect and love each other more readily
and more easily and with more permanence, a place in which we could feel more authentically ourselves, together, like every new model of social organization has attempted to engender since history can remember. However, as I gradually started to ascend the ranks that year, living in its virtual reality, I began to wonder whether to make a love story out of Facebook might be, despite our desire that it be so, impossible.

In some ways, Facebook’s early years had all the makings of a bright, shimmering tale: an odd assortment of smart and dedicated people thrown together to try and figure out the parameters of a new platform, a better way for people to communicate. I wanted what I assumed everyone wanted: to bring people closer, to share important information faster, and to make everyone feel less alone. And, because most celebrated people at Facebook were, technically, if not intuitively, smart, and we all seemed to believe in the same things—in making something new—I thought it might work. I wanted the world to be better than before. I wanted to help people. If there was a big paycheck waiting for you at the end, I wanted it to be an incidental outcome of the revolutionary work we did together.