The Boy Kings (27 page)

After more Fernets and a lot of talk about Facebook and our aim to create what one of the boys excitedly called a new social operating system, Thrax and I walked back to my apartment on
Valencia Street. So did Liakos, who, like many of the Facebook engineers, followed Thrax’s activity closely and seemed not to be able to bear to let him out of sight for a second. Thrax was as bewitching to his coworkers as to his distant Internet fans who followed his antics online. I could never tell, with all their liking and following of him and his online presence, if they wanted to be him or they wanted him. Was he their hero or their object of desire, and are those two things all that different when it comes to boys and their icons?

Silicon Valley’s culture of the boy king made gay icons and followers out of people who aren’t necessarily gay. Desire is strange, and our digital world made it even stranger, for we could consume and get off on anything we wanted, in any combination of people and things. As another Rule of the Internet reads: “There is porn of it,” where “it” could be whatever fetish you desire, in any digital format: “There are no exceptions.” The Internet has made it so that there are no limits to what we can do to gratify ourselves. If hackers are what you want, they are there for the watching.

But, that night, for once, we weren’t on the Internet. I got blankets for Liakos and put him to bed on the living-room couch, leaving Thrax and me to sit cross-legged on my bed, talking. The Internet was missing, shut out of the action on my closed laptop that lay unused on the floor of my bedroom. “Welp. Miss u,” I imagined the Internet saying to us from deep within some data center somewhere, perplexed as to why it had not been made master of ceremonies, router of all human affection and friendship. Thrax was there, and we were moving perilously close, almost to the point of kissing. Something had gotten into us to
bring us to the brink of a physical consummation of our long affection. Perhaps it was the Fleetwood Mac, whispering to us from the free-and-easy seventies, fueled by real drugs instead of digital ones. “Players only love you when they’re playing,” Stevie sings in “Dreams,” and I think that the song could be updated for the Internet age to read “Players only love you when you’re playing.”

“We should sleep in tomorrow,” Thrax said. It was Tuesday, but neither of us had to be at work until we felt like it, which in his case could be as late as seven at night or never. Maybe it was the Fernet or the fact that in San Francisco we were far away from Facebook, but I felt bolder than usual, like I might finally be able to break the fourth wall, that barrier of virtual reality that we had built. Social media instead of television was our new fourth wall, and any true connection in the world we built required you to shatter the screen once and for all. “Okay,” I said, snuggling out of my jeans.

Thrax leaned in to kiss me, and I almost laughed that this was actually happening, but it was. We were indeed breaking the fourth wall, as if the iPhone’s tempered Corning glass was shattering everywhere, all over my bed, against Steve Jobs’s and all the other tech titans’ wishes that it stay unbreakable. Then, the siren of the virtual began to sing me back to its safe, contained shores. “I don’t want to have sex,” I declared.

“We don’t have to have sex,” he said, sounding mostly relieved. We were agreed, as always, that we didn’t want to have sex. Sex with each other was too real. Horribly, chillingly real. Because from sex—the true, physical, total interlacing of bodies—you cannot go back to the virtual. The virtual was what our fortunes
depended on. And, as figureheads of Facebook, we had to preserve the distance that the company depended on. For, if everyone were connected with the ones they loved, they—we—wouldn’t need Facebook and its distant promise of love always somewhere around the corner. Real intimacy is the third rail of a publicity-driven, virtual society. We must avoid it at all costs. Thrax and I had always known this instinctively. Our unerring sense of control was what helped us win the game and take our seats next to Mark.

Something had to be done, though. Our odd, enduring affection was still there, always available to be picked up and left when it was convenient, like secondhand news. But I wanted—I needed—to try to kill it. I felt a sudden urge to destroy this—the tension, the war, the endless battle to be loved and liked—once and for all. If I could kill it, maybe I could check out and leave it all behind. And, so, I took charge.

The perpetual competition in our working and social lives reminded me of a line from a James Baldwin novel that seemed to illuminate all of this, this war for status, “Love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up,” he wrote. Maybe for the boys, being loved was a war, a battle we wage on social media now, instead of in real life. And, maybe, whenever they tire of this game, love will have to be a growing up, something they’ll have to find somewhere else, offline, away from the screen. So, in the unmonitored darkness of that night I decided it was okay, at least momentarily, to submit, and Thrax did too.

“Just don’t update your status about this,” I warned, eventually falling back onto my pillow.

“Hold on, I was just getting out my phone,” he said, trolling.

“Not funny,” I retorted, but we both laughed. It was funny.
Everything was. We were making a fortune out of broadcasting our own selves and interests to the world, and we didn’t even have to go to work if we didn’t want to. To punctuate this, my alarm clock began to chime errantly and we burst into more laughter. Who needs an alarm when you don’t have to go to the office and when all this is over, you may never need to work again? The world was ours.

Or was it? When we did go back to work, the office and the computer screen and the crowds of virtual friends would be waiting to consume us, turning us again into totems of whatever it was they desired. For our distant audience, we always had to remain cool, in control. It was only for as long as the night held and we stayed asleep, spooned together like silver from the same set, that we could be unconscious of whatever the world was asking us to be for them. Perhaps in this world of digital surveillance and judgment, deep sleep was the only time when we were free. Maybe this was why, throughout the long climb to the top of Mark’s virtual world, where winning everyone’s adulation was our job, we always crawled into bed in the middle of the night, longing not for sex, but for some human presence that existed, silent and breathing, away from the screen.

CHAPTER 9
THE KING STAYS THE KING

I
n July 2009, Mark was in Peru on vacation, contemplating whether I should join him on his press tour around Brazil. He knew nothing about Brazil and knew from my status updates that I did, so he listened to me when I told him how to wrest Brazil from Google’s Orkut social network. Orkut had grown quickly in Brazil in 2006, unlike in other countries that approached online social networking more cautiously, because Brazilians took instantly and naturally to social networking of all kinds. I told Mark that, because Brazil’s culture responds to personal contact, they might take Facebook more seriously if he paid them a visit in person.

“Mark is debating whether you should be flown out to Brazil for the press tour,” his admin told me in the office that afternoon,
only days before the tour began. I continued eating forkfuls of lemon tart from my lunch plate. He would want me to be there, I thought to myself. This was just Mark’s way of keeping me on edge and letting me know that he was in control. If it was an important decision he would have made it earlier, and quickly. “Okay,” I said to her, “whatever he wants.”

When I landed in São Paulo after the long flight, I was surprised to see a security detail made up of brawny ex-military men waiting to escort me to the hotel in a bulletproof van. The security detail loaded me and my luggage into the van and told me on the ride into the city about their earlier stints guarding Dick Cheney in Iraq. One had even served as Britney Spears’s private security guard, and I asked him to tell me everything he knew about her. “She is really very nice,” he said, “she always made sure the whole crew was fed, and would sometimes even buy us hamburgers.” I was happy to hear that Britney Spears was nice.

The men in the detail turned serious only when we passed through a tunnel. “I hate tunnels,” one growled tensely. “Why?” I asked. “Everything bad happens in tunnels,” he said. “We learned that in Iraq. They can block you in on both sides and do anything they want to you in the middle,” he explained. He only began to relax again when we emerged safely on the tunnel’s other side. “Everything bad happens in tunnels,” I thought, reflecting on the past four years, Facebook’s single-minded race to domination, and every strange, churlish thing that happened that I just had to shake off, because I was trapped in the middle and had to get through to the other side.

I like these security guys, I thought. It seemed healthy to be hanging out with people who had fought in real wars.

At the hotel, where an entire floor was reserved for Mark and his entourage, a member of the detail handed me a small pin to wear on my shirt. “This is in case there is an incident. We need to know who is one of ours so we can get you out of the place as soon as possible. No offense if we can’t identify all the straps by face. The pin is more reliable.”

“What are straps?” I asked, confused by all the security speak.

“You are the straps,” they explained. “Mark is the package. He’s number one, he’s the guy we have to protect at all costs. Everyone else is the straps, because you’re the hangers on. You’re only important because he is, but we can’t have you falling into the wrong hands.” Lol, I thought. That was a good description of my entire job. I was only important because he is.

My room was all white, full of curved tropical modern furniture and a white marble bath with a round portal onto the São Paulo skyline. It felt, fittingly, like being in a room-sized white iPhone. I was glad that it all looked so modern, for Mark’s sake. Whenever I mentioned my passion for Brazil to Americans they tended to think it is a lawless, third-world country where they will be kidnapped immediately. In reality, while violence does occur in some places, the country is rich and powerful, and Mark had to know this if Facebook was going to work at winning the country over.

We ate dinner that night at a high-end barbecue place, lush and very Brazilian, with open breezes and a beautiful tropical tree growing directly from the floor of the restaurant. I resumed a conversation that Mark and I had been having earlier about the fact that I thought it was unconscionable that we were not going to Rio on this trip. “I know São Paulo is the business capital,”
I said, “but Rio is the heart of Brazilian culture. Everyone knows this in Brazil, even the Paulistas who think that all people in Rio do is party and go to the beach all day. We cannot
not
go to Rio!” I was impassioned about this because my Portuguese professor at Johns Hopkins was a Carioca, or native of Rio de Janeiro, and the first thing she told us in class was that she was going to make us all Cariocas. My sudden vehemence about the Rio issue was proof that she had been successful. Even Mark seemed willing to be convinced. “Hmm, I’ll think about it,” he said, and actually seemed to be considering it. Well this is a first, I thought, that I could convince Mark to change his mind about anything.

I ordered us a round of caipiroskas, a national drink made of vodka mixed with fruit and sugar. Mark could barely drink his and called me crazy for drinking mine so easily. I shuddered to think what he would have thought of the nights in Brazil in 2005 when our Hopkins student group danced samba until morning, fueled by caipirinhas and the local beer. Some of us even did lines of coke in the bathroom. Mark would have passed out on sight. He hated drugs. I was told that he’d go pale at just the thought of them. At Facebook, we all knew never to even mention the word drugs near him. I made a mental note not to tell him that he was “the package,” and that package means drugs in Baltimore slang.

However, there was no danger here of bumping into any drugs, samba clubs, or favelas: For the next few days, we were all business, visiting television studios and meeting with journalists on the rooftop restaurant at the hotel. One of these journalists, who, like a true, casual Carioca, wore a shirt printed with palm
trees, said just as I had that we could
not
not go to Rio! Mark turned to me and said, “Whoa, you were right about this.”

At one point, on a trip to the MTV Brasil studios across town, we had to stop in a park so that Mark could take an important, secret phone call. As he paced back and forth on the sidewalk, his security detail fanned out across the park, pretending to be strangers out for a walk. “They are like his ‘muscle,’” I realized, as usual, entertaining myself by thinking of analogies to
The Wire
. Mark talked on the phone while his muscle tensely watched all the park’s corners. The scene looked exactly like Stringer Bell taking calls in abandoned lots of Baltimore. Maybe, I thought, sitting in the van waiting for Mark to finish, he got to be Stringer after all: obsessed with business and winning, and perhaps not the one with the most heart, like Avon, but the one who got to the top.

The following day, we were sitting at lunch on the roof of the hotel with the skyline of São Paulo stretching as far as we could see when Mark declared imperially, as he gazed at the view, “We’re going to write a book about Facebook together someday.” That sounds fun, I thought, but then my mind reeled with questions. What would that book even be like? The book I would write about Facebook would be so different from the one Mark would write. It was weird that he assumed I thought the same way he did. My face must have betrayed my doubts and questions, because Mark looked at me with his typical coy smirk, and said, more directly than usual, “I don’t know if I trust you.”

You shouldn’t, I thought, giving him a half-innocent look. But Mark’s idea had planted a new one in my head. I could leave to write my own book, I thought. And after so many years of biting
my tongue and speaking on behalf of Facebook, it would be a relief to finally speak and write as myself. After all, as
The Wire
teaches, you should never trust anyone, in business, at least. Keep your hackers close. Mark, who preferred to hire hackers, knew that. And at that moment, I felt almost, for a second, close to him, as if in the mutual ground of breaking into something—him, the business of registering the identities of everyone in the world, me, the company culture he had built—we had finally found a common bond.