The Boy Kings (5 page)

Since a formal coolness was how our team interacted—smiling nods followed by fast descent into our screens and the
emails and Facebook pages contained therein—users were my most emotionally expressive correspondents that fall. Thousands of emails flooded our system each day asking us for everything from just letting them in because they didn’t have a college email address to solving their messiest social problems, asking if we could delete a regretted message before someone read it or let them see the account of someone who had blocked them. The angst that flowed through onto my screen was overwhelming, sometimes. I felt a bit like the advice columnist Dear Abby for a digital age, counseling people on various online social minefields and talking them down from ledges. Facebook made it so easy to say things that people said things they regretted, and as I read the distraught emails I started to feel an apprehension. What happens to society when you promise people they can have whatever they want: instant contact, hundreds of photographs of people you barely know, endless digital validation? Real life has limits, but the Internet, where everything seems free for the taking, has none. What will this do to our relationships, I wondered, or even more intimately, our souls?

For us, as administrators, everything on Facebook really was there for the seeing, as we were not subjected to the privacy barriers that existed for regular users. Our tools displayed everything that happened on the network: last logins, location of login, and deleted posts. We even had an internal tool, called appropriately, Facebook Stalker, that showed who had looked at our profile, which revealed fascinating insights. For one, my female friends studied my profile more often and for longer periods of time than my male friends, which suggests a digital version of the
old dictum that women dress for each other, not for men. With access to every piece of data that existed on the system, working at Facebook was like playing the game from the hacker’s side, despite the fact that I wasn’t a hacker: The users gave us data freely and we consumed it, delighting in the new facts that came in by the hour.

As exhausting as answering emails for eight hours a day could get, there was something rich and fertile about Face-book as both company and product that was seductive, enticing. This is something that could go on forever, I thought, not like a business but like a family, like royalty, like the Dallas oil scene of Silicon Valley, crowning its own kings and queens and generating its own society. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

On Friday afternoons we got together for All Hands meetings. I looked forward to them because they were the one time we discussed things as a company, and the only meetings when everyone at the company was included. Mark would stand somewhere in the office, his posture unusually straight for someone dressed casually in a joke T-shirt (around this time he preferred one that said “I love Sloths”) and sandals. Everyone would gather round, sitting on desks with flip-flops dangling or on the floor with legs crossed, watching and listening while Mark discussed the week’s business: deals made, products launched, technical issues experienced and resolved. Occasionally, Matt Cohler, a Yale guy with a VC background, would chime in on financial things or Dustin would comment on site growth and health and any major down time that week. Everyone watched in rapt attention, smiling, as there was much to smile about: We had so
much to do, together, and the All Hands were where we got our motivation for the next week and months.

As we worked steadily in October 2005 to prepare for the launch of the Facebook Photos feature, where users would finally be able to upload photo albums to their profiles (prior to the launch of Photos, the only photo a user could post was their profile photo), Mark referred to all of us in an All Hands meeting as a “Facebook family,” and even though most of us had just met, the kinship was palpable. It also would be profitable for us to get along; if we liked and cared for each other, it would be easier to accomplish the high goals Mark was setting out for us: more Facebook networks, more Facebook features, an ever-faster flow of information.

I liked to listen to Mark’s discussion of the product philosophy and goals at these meetings, which were to me the most fascinating part of the job: what were we trying to do, with this fledgling Internet identity registration system? “I just want to create information flow,” he said in his still nearly adolescent voice, lips pursed forward as if jumping to the next word, and everyone would nod, all cogitating in their own way about what this meant. Mark’s idea of information flow, though vague, was also too vague to be disagreed with, and even if we came up with counter-instances to a model of pure information efficiency (for example, I wondered, do I want my Social Security number to flow freely?), we knew that we weren’t supposed to disagree. Mark was our leader, for better or worse. When the meetings ended he would say either “domination” or “revolution,” with a joking flourish of a fist, and everyone would laugh, nervously, but with a warm and almost chilling excitement. It was like we
were being given a charter, by a boy younger than most of us, to take over the world and get paid to do it.

• • •

Aside from the general questions that I started to ponder, questions such as what were we were doing, and what did it all mean, and that I kept to myself, there was one area of our work in Customer Support that required us to have philosophical discussion and debate. Facebook, like the Internet in general, made it so easy for people to post and gain visibility for content that people with extreme and often unpopular views went wild on the new platform, creating groups devoted to whatever cause they espoused. Most of these groups were devoted to bullying of some kind, from petty harassment of a classmate to hatred of a marginalized group.

In the Customer Support Team’s daily discussions of what behavior would be permitted on Facebook, we decided that any attack on an individual person would be against our Terms of Service, since we had no interest in or ability to track down the validity of any bullying claims. How were we to know why some woman on campus was being called “a slut” or “whore”—the common bullying claims made against female Facebook users—and why would we care to investigate such invidious claims? Further, individuals were the core users of the service, so to allow for the bullying of individuals would hurt the product’s growth, and for us, growth was paramount. People had to have a basic sense of safety while using Facebook if they were going to use it at all.

Attacks on groups of people were harder to interpret and
police, since it was difficult to tell when something was hate speech, free speech, a political disagreement or some combination thereof. (Was the group “I hate people who wear Crocs” hate speech? We had to consider it, along with the more serious hate groups aimed at blacks and gays.) Many Facebook groups made it easy for us to decide: They posted pictures of dead and gored bodies and were covered in swastikas and death threats. In the odd logic of our work, it was almost a relief to see blatant death threats because they meant that we didn’t have to comb the group looking for indications of the creator’s intent (people on the Internet are rarely subtle in their hatred). Thus, after long discussion we decided that if a group contained any threat of violence against a person or persons, it would be removed. One aspect of our jobs, then, became scanning group descriptions for evidence of death threats, and searching for pictures of dead people. This was the dark side of the social network, the opposite of the party photos with smiling college kids and their plastic cups of beer, and we saw it every day.

One afternoon, as I sat on the couch in the office reading emails, a user at a school in the Midwest wrote in to report a group that was devoted to gay bashing. Upon investigating the group I found that it indeed violated the Facebook terms of “no death threats,” as the words “kill gays” were all over the page. With a click of a button in my administrative tool, the group was deleted. I also wrote an email to let the offending group creator know that his hate speech wouldn’t be tolerated. This commenced a long correspondence between me and this unfortunate soul in the heartland who insisted, virulently, upon his right to say anything he chose about gays. He also baited
me by creating new groups with increasingly violent slogans and images of beheaded bodies, which I continued to delete, responding as calmly as I could. Finally, just as I was fearing that this stalemate would go on forever, I happened to glance at his password, which in the early days was displayed next to a user’s name in our admin tool. “Ilovejason,” it said. Pitying him more than feeling angry, I wrote back and told him that this case was closed and if he created one more hate group I would disable his Facebook account forever. He stopped writing after that.

Between the alternately dull and dramatic emails from users, the highlight of the work week was Friday afternoon happy hour, when at around five o’clock, our caterer would wheel a table laden with snacks, wine, and beer directly into the grid of desks where we sat. Engineers would emerge from behind their screens for a few minutes to grab a beer and return as quickly as possible to their screens. Customer support employees, who were hourly rather than salaried workers, would continue to dash off emails to users, sometimes with a beer in hand, before clocking out and grabbing another beer and gathering on the gray, modern mass-market couches in an alcove near the office entrance to talk.

By six or seven o’clock, after a few beers, people grew chattier, engineers and admins and customer support reps mingled, and we began to get to know one another in person. It felt like that early moment in any social circle when you’re not sure what will happen: Who will be friends with whom, what cliques will form, who will be most popular? It all still felt protean, unformed, like the first months of freshman year. All that was clear was that Mark was in charge, supported by a small group of deputies from Harvard and Yale—Dustin, Matt—and it was up
to the rest of us to figure out what our roles would be and where we would fit.

Mark rarely drank or socialized at the happy hours with the rest of us. Occasionally I heard stories, sometimes from Mark himself, about parties and high jinks at the house in Palo Alto that he had lived in with Dustin and a few other engineers the year before—something about a drunken flight on a zip line and another story about blown circuitry in the middle of a beer-fueled coding session. There were whispers that they used Face-book to stalk Stanford girls and invite them to parties, but that made them no different than most guys on the network. But, by fall 2005, when I started working there, Mark’s demeanor in the office, if it had ever been particularly relaxed, was already developing into that of the intent executive preoccupied with larger things than company happy hours, despite the fact that he wore shorts and T-shirts and often padded around the office barefoot.

The most relaxed I ever saw Mark was when my dad, a math professor, came to visit the office one happy hour that fall. Suddenly every engineer in the office, including a suddenly smiling and talkative Mark, gathered around my dad to talk about calculus and graphs. I hadn’t even told anyone that my dad taught math; it was like they sensed a kindred, elder spirit, someone who understood with them that graphs were the most beautiful and inspiring things in the world. Mark was so at ease and unassuming in that conversation that when I asked my dad as we left the office, “What did you think of Mark?” he answered, “Which one was Mark?” I had the thought then, as we walked to dinner at the Italian place down the street, that it was my dad, and not me, who should be working at Facebook: Unlike me,
he would instantly fit in, and everyone could talk about graphs happily ever after. But my dad didn’t need a job, and I did, so my dad flew back to Phoenix and I stayed in Silicon Valley with the engineers and the graphs.

In the small office of twenty engineers and a smattering of support reps and admins who were rapidly becoming friends, Mark’s presence tended to be more aloof than the others. He walked with his chest puffed out, Napoleon-style, his curly hair jumping forward from his forehead as if to announce him in advance. My general sense of camaraderie with most of the engineers, with whom I had exchanged at least a few words around the kitchen fridge or over a beer at happy hour, felt cooler in relation to Mark. Someone has to be the boss, and no one likes the boss (do they?) and so it seemed natural that I felt nothing more than a slight wariness around him, born of his Silicon Valley status as an anointed boy wonder. He seemed more of a necessary evil. I was almost relieved that he was so distant, so preoccupied—like a father you know won’t be overly concerned about what you were up to.

• • •

Three weeks after I started working there, Facebook celebrated its five-millionth user by throwing a party in a dimly lit space below a swank new restaurant in San Francisco. It was the first and last company party I attended that was made up mostly of people—adults—who didn’t work there. (As we grew bigger, we turned inward, populating parties mainly with Facebook employees, until it felt like we were our own island.) The five-millionth-user
party was attended mostly by venture capitalists, curious or invested in this new, already buzzing upstart of a company. The name Peter Thiel, PayPal’s infamous founder and billionaire, was on everyone’s lips, but I couldn’t identify him because all the men at the party looked like a version of him: dirty blond, excessively fit, with drinks held casually against their unbuttoned blazers as they discussed investment business and tried hard to impress one another. My customer support teammates and I stuck mostly to ourselves in the corner, having nothing to offer the investors, watching while they swarmed over the mussy-haired engineers standing around clutching barely touched drinks.

As I sat on a couch watching all this in my cocktail dress, holding a melting gin and tonic, I wondered at the VCs’ obvious predilection for boys who looked like younger versions of themselves. I could see that as a woman I would automatically appear alien in this context. An engineer came by to take photographs and I posed, smiling, with my female teammates. One always had to smile and appear happy for Facebook. The photographer moved on to another group and I went back to musing.