The Boy Kings (3 page)

“World domination,” my teenaged self answered instinctively. That’s what these devices were made for, I thought: so small and yet so powerful, so capable of linking quickly to and between everything else in the world. I had a sudden fantasy of me, in ponytail and sweatshirt, remotely manipulating the world from a laptop, armed with ideas about how the world should
be and the new ability to distribute them. From the laptop, I could write and distribute information faster than ever before. It was intoxicating to imagine, and Facebook’s sudden, faithful rendering in 2004 of the physical world into the virtual felt the same. What could you do, now that you could see and connect to everyone and everything, instantly?

But what, also, could be diminished by such quick access? In the realm of ideas, it seemed easy: Who wouldn’t want to distribute and discuss ideas widely? However, in the realm of the personal, it seemed more complicated. What was the benefit of doing everything in public? Were there types of information that made sense to distribute person to person and mouth to mouth, rather than digital page to digital page? Is information itself neutral, or do different types of information have different values, different levels of expectation of privacy, different implications for distribution and consumption? Did I
want
or
need
to know, passively and without asking or being told, who went out and what they wore and who hooked up the weekend before? Should all information be shared equally quickly and without regard to my relationship to it? And, finally, and most important, as we ask whenever we begin a new relationship with anything, would this be good for me?

Whether Facebook would be good for me in the long term was an open question, but in the immediate term it was, and rather quickly, to my surprise. It happened while I was perusing Facebook Groups, which I loved for their wealth of humorously delivered anthropological data. Reading them was much like being anthropologist Margaret Mead, but online, sitting on the couch in the comfort of pajamas and slippers. You could skip
from the world of the lacrosse team to that of the small set of black Hopkins students, each with their own concerns and jokes and slang, in a span of seconds.

In this, Facebook Groups seemed more fun and less creepy than reading people’s personal walls, which from the start had a slight, unseemly quality of eavesdropping on semiprivate, out-of-context, easy-to-misinterpret, conversations. The interjection of distant voices on friends’ walls was always vaguely unreadable, unpredictable, illicit. “Let’s play this weekend,” a girl would post on the wall of a guy I knew, suggestively, and it felt weird to read, not because I didn’t think girls liked him but because the utterance didn’t actually reveal anything that was particularly relevant or useful. A girl wants him, I now knew, but I already knew that. Lots of girls did. The technology invited me to speculate about whether he wanted this girl back and whether they would go out and what would happen next, offline, all of which was really, in the end, irrelevant to be speculating on in advance. If two people like each other, they’ll hook up, if not, they won’t. All this noise was just noise, but a very present noise, a noise that we all, now, needed to consume, whether we cared to or not. In those cold November days, with the winter quickly coming on, there wasn’t much else to do but watch and attend, curiously, to this new system that was just beginning, with a vengeance, to bring us online and publish the slightest social vicissitudes of our lives—the fact that someone likes us, the fact that we may be attending an event—to the world, for everyone to wonder about.

One such November day I discovered a group called “We’re going to Brazil and you’re not, bitches,” referring to
a Hopkins-led trip to Brazil that was happening a few weeks later. The group, like most Facebook statements that are about trumpeting some aspect of a person or group’s identity, had no other purpose than to state that this group of students was going to Brazil and everyone else was not, bitches. My first thought was “Why didn’t I know about this trip?” and then I recalled that without a public space outside of classrooms and the stacks, it was nearly impossible for Hopkins to distribute information about extracurricular activities. My second thought was, “I, too, am going on this trip, bitches.” I mean, why not? I had nothing else to do.

I went straight to the campus study abroad office and asked them to put me on the Brazil trip, though it was only weeks away and they’d already processed everyone’s visas and itineraries. Miraculously they did, and two weeks later I was on a flight to Rio de Janeiro, away from the academic dramas of the English department and into another, more vivacious society.

• • •

“You two are so California,” our trip leader said one night in an outdoor bar in Brazil about me and a boy from Malibu wearing fluorescent sunglasses. He was a true California surfer kid, with a permanent tan and ocean-colored green eyes, and, in conversation, we discovered that we both dreamed idly of revolutions we wanted to play a part in someday. While the students from the East Coast gossiped about who had hooked up the night before, we talked about South American revolutionary movements that no one else on the trip had even heard of. This
prompted them to perk up and listen. In the status hierarchy of the trip, we were California, and California was cool, and therefore revolutions were cool. “American culture starts in southern California and moves east,” I always told people on the East Coast who wanted to know why I knew about something they didn’t. This was before culture moved at lightning speed through the Internet, spreading from one coast to the other in minutes. I’m not sure now how anyone lays claim to cool anymore.

I wasn’t actually from California, but people often made that mistake. I dressed with a casual beachiness and spoke with a slight Valley girl lilt that I never tried to lose. It was a hallmark that said (I hoped) that I didn’t take myself too seriously. It took too much time to explain to people that before the real estate boom of the 2000s and its influx of midwesterners looking for a warm-weather McMansion, my home state of Arizona was like a bedroom community of San Diego, like southern California without the beach.

Being so close, and yet still a half-day’s drive away from us, California was exciting, exotic, a dream of American perfection that we could actually touch. When school was out, my best friend Dana and I would drive the long desert highway to San Diego, entertaining ourselves by searching for the Hotel California, which legend said existed somewhere on the highway. “Is that it?” one of us would ask, upon seeing a white building silhouetted against the sky. “I don’t know,” the other would say, and we would drive on, searching. I think that we almost prayed that we would never find it, so that we could keep searching, forever.

When I returned to Hopkins I began the semester-long transition from my life as a graduate student to whatever would come next, which I didn’t know yet. All I knew was that I had to leave the decaying east and find my way back west, to the place I belonged and where I had to believe, if only to ward off depression at my failed grad school career, that dreams still came true.

To this day, when I say “California,” I usually mean the beach cities of the south, replete with surfers and sunshine, not the quasi-cosmopolitan north. Northern California is somewhere else, a California that was familiar to me in 2005 only from the Joan Didion essays that I devoured in my late teens, in search of life advice. “Q: In what way does the Holy Land resemble the Sacramento Valley? A: In the type and diversity of its agricultural products.” Didion repeats, like her own accidental childhood mantra, and this always stuck in my head, a perfectly meaningless set of lines to someone who had never been to Sacramento, but suggestive of abundant riches tucked away somewhere north of Santa Barbara. It is perhaps because of this quote, and that I was broke, that I decided to move to northern California.

I ended up in Berkeley, which, with its large student population, was all I could afford. It was close enough to Silicon Valley, where I knew the money was, and was a much cheaper place to live than Palo Alto, where a one-bedroom apartment couldn’t be had for less than $2000 a month. Through Craigslist, the 2005 unemployed person’s best friend, I found an apartment near the university and a temporary job as a copywriter at a design firm in San Francisco. My job was to write copy for a line of skin-care products that were being manufactured as a house
brand for Target. My initial enthusiasm quickly submerged by tedium, I wrote descriptions of cucumber-scented lotions and cleansers that I had never actually used. There were only so many ways to describe a face wash—invigorating, refreshing, cooling—and by the end of the month I felt like I had written all of them.

I was relieved at lunchtime when I could walk out of the office to San Francisco’s long piers, enveloped by a perpetual fog that felt more like Oregon than California. Lunches at the aggressively artisanal cafes in the Ferry Building were too expensive for me, so I bought tacos from the Mexican food trucks that served the downtown’s working class who commuted in, like me, from the East Bay.

Back in the design office, bored with the endless lines of copy that had all begun to sound the same, I would take to surfing Facebook. With very few features beyond profiles and messaging, Facebook was like a richer, more playful form of email, with the option to post public messages on people’s walls. Since there weren’t many fields, friends’ posts occasionally had a deliberation and clarity that were entrancing, like you were reading little glimpses into the soul of the person—the thing they wanted most deeply to communicate to the world. Facebook was also a quick if not particularly satisfying salve for loneliness: In the Bay I knew no one, but online there were faces I knew, updating their pictures and profiles regularly, making familiar jokes.

In late July 2005, I had been working as a copywriter for a month when my boss, a micromanaging type with bleached teeth that glowed fluorescent, caught me looking at Facebook
and chastised me. I felt indignant, given that in my view she was getting the most compelling descriptions of moisturizing cream that she could ask for from a random Craigslist hire. I even paid attention to alliteration and redundancy in my writing and fact-checked my work to make sure I wasn’t making any overtly untrue claims about the ability of the products to make you more beautiful (and after doing this job I learned never to take any claims on a beauty product label seriously). But, as with many contract jobs, my work went largely unappreciated.

While I was illicitly perusing Facebook at work a few weeks later I noticed a bulletin on the normally blank homepage that said, “Do you want to work at Facebook? Send us your resume.” That night I emailed my resume to the address listed, not knowing what they were looking for or what a job at Facebook might entail. I felt intrigued by the prospect, though. As new and strange a product as Facebook was, I sensed in it a power, the allure of a new social institution that had no limits and that might never end.

CHAPTER 1
WELCOME TO THE FACEBOOK

I
don’t know why Phil Rochester, who was engineering royalty in the valley and had been installed by venture capitalists to help with scaling up the tiny Facebook team, selected my resume from what must have been many that appeared in his inbox. I suspect that his choosing me had to do with the fact that Johns Hopkins featured prominently on my resume. He was a Vanderbilt alum, and I had learned in Baltimore that upper-crust southern elitism, conscious or not, runs deep. When I left Johns Hopkins, despite all its academic drama, my matriculation there faded immediately into a simple signifier of the elite. This is what an American private university is, not an education so much as a pedigree, a mark of distinction.

When Rochester called me he was at Costco buying tires,
multitasking with his BlackBerry in typical Silicon Valley fashion. He couldn’t be bothered to conduct a proper interview. He assumed, efficiently, that as an English major from an elite school I was capable of answering user-support emails. “Come in Tuesday,” he said. “You can try it for a few days. If you don’t like it, you can leave. It pays twenty dollars an hour. That’s pretty good, right?” he asked. “Uh, okay,” I said. Neither the job nor the pay being offered was very good, but short of learning how to program, I knew couldn’t compete for a real job in Silicon Valley. My only choice, if I was going to try to make my fortune there with all the others, was to find a way to make my lack of technical skill my strength.

Driving my scuffed white 1994 Camry into Palo Alto for the first time in early September 2005, I noticed instantly how perfectly bland and ordered the town was. The sidewalks off the main street were nearly as clean and prim as at Disneyland, or maybe, more aptly,
The Truman Show
. I had trouble finding the Facebook office at first (“It’s up the stairs, at Emerson and University,” Rochester had told me) and walked up the wrong set of stairs into a halfway house that operated in an old motel left over from the city’s preboom days. That encounter with seediness would be my last in Palo Alto (the halfway house closed soon after and is now most likely a startup office).

“I don’t even know what a quail looks like. . . . Facebook is hiring” was scrawled in chalk on a sandwich board at the foot of the stairs of the building next door, as if this was someone’s boardwalk pizza parlor hiring for summer employees. I didn’t know why they were talking about quails (I never did quite understand the reverence for quails or the fact that they showed
up everywhere, on custom Facebook T-shirts and office whiteboards, except that this was a private club and like any club it needed in-jokes), but the sign’s irreverence was a relief: I might fit in here, I thought, in a way that I never had done in the humorless atmosphere of graduate school, which regarded all jokes as a suspect diversion from criticism.