Authors: Katherine Losse
The Boy Kings (6 page)
It often felt like this at Facebook, like I was the only one who was watching, seeing what was happening not as a privileged participant but as an observer. Dustin, the most critically astute of the Facebook founders, did not fail to notice. A year after I started working there, we were talking at a smoke-filled party somewhere in the Stanford hills when he said to me, matter-of-factly, “You’re going to write a book about us,” as we descended the stairs into a crowded den to watch a band that had just begun to play.
T
hat first winter, to go along with the perks of meals, laundry, and gym memberships that Facebook provided, the company rented a house in Tahoe for employees to use on the weekends. Mark is serious about wanting us to have fun, I thought. The prospect of escaping my queue of Facebook user emails to frolic for a couple of days in the woods sounded ideal, but the three-hour drive to Tahoe and sixty-dollar-per-day ski resort tickets were more than I could afford on my customer support salary. I felt lucky and relieved every month just to make my thousand-dollar rent and my four-hundred-dollar student loan payment. Anything else was a rare, luxurious extra.
But Facebook, maybe more than any other company, was a social scene, and I knew that it would be important to take
part in company social events whenever possible. When Luke, an engineer who had recently quit grad school at Stanford to work at Facebook, invited me and my customer support teammate Maryann to go to the Tahoe house in January with him, Dustin, and Mark, I was excited. It was a good crew, I thought. Luke surfed ocean waves in his spare time in addition to surfing the Internet at work, and was chiller than the typical engineer. He reminded me of someone you might chat with over beers at a beach bonfire while on vacation. Dustin, who, like Luke, was from Florida, was also fun and sociable when he wasn’t sleepless and stressed from his responsibility of making sure that the site stayed up at all hours of the day and night. Maryann was a tall, beautiful woman from Stanford by way of Marin County, San Francisco’s wealthy northern suburb. She had a perfect smile and never seemed to complain, and in this, she was, some of our colleagues remarked longingly, their ideal woman, wholesome and girlish. Maryann would eventually become the literal face of the company: her beatifically smiling picture appears to this day in the sample “Jane Smith” account that is used in Facebook’s new feature announcements. Back then, however, Maryann and I were just among a few token female employees, similarly dressed in jeans, T-shirts, and long ponytails, recently embarked on what would be for both of us a long journey with the company.
After the drive to Tahoe, we threw our things on bunks, then gathered around the table to drink cheap Trader Joe’s wine and listen to music. As the night proceeded and we became steadily more drunk, we played mp3s on someone’s iPod louder and louder, screaming the lyrics to Green Day and
Sublime so loudly that we were essentially doing karaoke, the singers’ voices drowned out. Sensing that this moment called for more entertainment, I donned the bearskin, complete with head, that adorned the banister on the stairs leading to Mark’s and Dustin’s rooms (like all companies, ours functioned according to status hierarchy; the important people got the best rooms while the rest of us slept on bunk beds downstairs). Mark thought this was hilarious and insisted that I continue to wear the bearskin around my shoulders. Luke, who built the wildly successful Facebook Photos product that had launched months before, naturally took pictures all night of our shenanigans to post to Facebook in an album he titled “Opening Night,” so the rest of the company could see how much fun we were having.
In one of the last photos Luke took, Mark is gesturing at me haughtily like an emperor as I stand doubled over in laughter with the bear suit draped over me. It was all innocent fun; everyone was laughing and enjoying themselves, but when I saw the photograph appear in a Facebook album on Monday I was struck by the loaded nature of the image, ripe for interpretation, in which Mark appeared to be commanding an employee, female, to submit. If I were his PR person, I thought, I would tell Luke to take it down. Whether to protect the company, or Mark, or myself, I wasn’t sure. In this take-no-prisoners company, where you were either willing to devote your whole young life to it or not, it was starting to be hard to tell the difference. I felt certain that some gossip writer was going to find the photo and post it in an article about Facebook someday. In fact, the photograph appeared in Gawker four years later, with the caption,
“This one
also
might lead the confused and bewildered to conclude that Mark Zuckerberg got drunk in Lake Tahoe and taunted a co-worker.”
Perhaps more interesting than the fact that the photo was taken and posted on Facebook is that it didn’t occur to anyone in the office that there was anything wrong with it, or that the picture revealed something about the culture of Facebook that it shouldn’t. Mark was too busy programming to get to the part of a liberal arts education where you study social inequality. As he wrote on his business card with boyish hubris, “I’m CEO, bitch.” That image was saying that power wasn’t something to be questioned; it was something to collect and brandish. This—not the anarchist ethos I knew from my punk-rock hacker friends—was Facebook’s new world order.
As the months passed, moments like these occurred with unsettling regularity. When a female employee reported being told by a male coworker in the lunch line that her backside looked tasty—“I want to put my teeth in your ass,” was what the coworker said—Mark asked at an All Hands (it was hard to tell whether it was with faux or genuine naiveté), “What does that even mean?” I went to Mark at the open office hour he kept after the meeting and told him that it was unacceptable to blow off sexual harassment in the office. He listened to me, which I appreciated, but understanding of the crux of the matter; that is, that women by virtue of our low rank and small numbers were already in a vulnerable situation in the office, did not seem to register.
Confronting him that day simply had the effect, I think, not of making him more sympathetic to women’s plight at Facebook,
but of making him realize that I was a force he would have to reckon with. Employees weren’t supposed to challenge his power, but when we did we became, paradoxically, the thing we were supposed to be in the action-hero logic of the company: a rule-breaker, a threat, and, therefore, someone of interest to be courted and co-opted.
Mark’s tendency to mock or disregard everything that wasn’t a technical issue triggered a sinking feeling that accompanied the heady glee we all began to feel over the early months and years as the Web site soared higher and higher, gaining more users and more rounds of funding and more celebrity. Sometimes my head spun just thinking about it—the wealth, the power, the eventual fame for all these people, I could see it all happening. This is the American dream, I thought, wide-eyed, for who even believed in the American dream anymore? In grad school we invoked the Horatio Alger myth to discredit any ideological move that was designed to distract the masses by suggesting that anyone could be rich, anyone could succeed. The irony of being a critic of the Horatio Alger myth only to end up in my own Horatio Alger narrative was almost too much.
I was a student of the humanities, including histories of colonialism and revolutions and, despite Mark’s talk in All Hands, I knew that the war that Facebook was waging, if it continued the way it was going, wasn’t exactly revolutionary. The company’s entire human-resources architecture (and, conveniently, Facebook had no actual HR department to correct any of this for a long time) was constructed on the reactionary model of an office from the 1950s, in which men with so-called masculine qualities (being technical, breaking things,
moving fast) were idealized as brilliant and visionary while everyone else (particularly the nontechnical employees on the customer-support team, who were mostly female and sometimes, unlike the white and Asian engineering team, black) were assumed to be duller, incapable of quick and intelligent thought. It was like
Mad Men
but real and happening in the current moment, as if in repudiation of fifty years of social progress.
For example, on Mark’s birthday, in May 2006, I received an email from his administrative assistant telling me that it would be my job that day, along with all the other women in the office, to wear a T-shirt with Mark’s picture on it. Wait, what? I thought,
he’s not my god or my president; I just work here
. The men in the office were told that they would be wearing Adidas sandals that day, also in homage to Mark. The gender coding was clear: women were to declare allegiance to Mark, and men were to become Mark, or to at least dress like him. I decided that this was more than I could stomach and stayed home to play sick that day. I was the only one. The other women in the office, including Mark’s girlfriend, who did not work at Facebook, but had come to the office to celebrate his birthday, happily posed for pictures wearing identical shirts printed with Mark’s picture, like teenage girls at an *NSYNC concert or more disturbingly, like so many polygamous wives in a cult. These pictures also appeared in Gawker years later, making me relieved that I had stayed home so that I wasn’t immortalized forever online in such a strange,
Stepford-Wives-
like pose. I wondered if any of the women had been secretly troubled by the request that they pay homage to Mark or if,
as often seemed the case, everyone was just happy to belong to something.
• • •
My customer-support teammates, like Maryann, were always cheerful and pleasant, but having been friends since their freshman year, they were naturally much closer to one another than they were to me. Maryann and Jake soon seemed to be dating, though, being cagey as Facebook employees often were, they didn’t make it Facebook official for years (they would eventually, like many of our colleagues, become engaged). I wondered if I would ever have my own clique at the company. It seemed important: people to post on your wall, to invite you to events, to pose with you in photographs at company parties.
In January 2006, a new engineer showed up. We struck up a conversation at happy hour that, to my delight and surprise, veered away from the usual topics of Facebook administrative duties and programming issues. “In my interview, Luke told me I could work on studying gender dynamics on Facebook by looking at the data sets,” Sam said, “and that’s one of my main interests, so I decided to come to work here.” (Once hired, he was assigned to product development rather than, as had been advertised, to research.) He wore an old, tattered D.A.R.E T-shirt from the 1990s, baggy, unpretentious jeans like a skateboarder, had alert eyes and an impish smile. In other words, he was exactly the type of guy I was friends with—a little indie, cute, not obsessed with polish—but also, openly gay. This was unusual at Facebook and, I realized as we chattered on about
topics of great interest to both of us, like gender studies and the futility of grad school (he had been contemplating grad school prior to being offered the Facebook job), a welcome development. By the end of the night, after most customer support team members had gone home and Mark and a few engineers were still staring at their screens in the back of the office, Sam and I were trading quotes from the movie
Heathers
. “Lunchtime poll,” one of us said, and we both delivered the line from the movie in unison. “Aliens land on the earth and say they are going to blow it up in three days. But the same day you get a call from Publishers Clearing House saying you’ve won five million dollars. What do you do?” we recited with mock
Heathers
-like haughtiness that dissolved in laughter. That night when I left the office, for the first time since setting foot there, I felt elated, like everything was going to be okay, because I finally had a real friend at Facebook.
Sam and I weren’t the only ones obsessed with movies. Mark and Dustin kept quoting from their favorite action flicks, like
Top Gun,
on the footers of pages of the site, such as “Too close for missiles, I’m switching to guns.” This wasn’t just a job or a website or even a social network, the quotes seemed to be saying that it was war, and it needed to feel and look like one, complete with battles waged and won, soldiers bloodied and triumphant, camaraderie formed, just like in the movies.
Perhaps this really was what Mark was thinking. He seemed not so much to be on a mission for programmers, but for heroes, protagonists, leading men. That spring, Mark brought in five engineers from Harvard who became known as the Microsoft Five, after the old-guard software company in Seattle where some had previously worked. The Microsoft Five sounded like some kind
of cowboy band who rides into town and shoots up a saloon in a Western.
As the Silicon Valley legend goes, the Five received their Facebook job offers while at a party. Their first reaction, allegedly, was to reject the offer. They assumed that the upstart Face-book couldn’t pay them enough or treat them as seriously as they were accustomed to being treated. The Five’s initial disinterest gave Facebook the drive to wage one of the first of many oedipal raids on an older company’s talent, in which Mark could prove that despite the company’s youth and scrappiness it could win the brawl for status. It seemed sometimes that, to Mark, battling a bigger competitor was almost as exciting as winning the war, as I would see again when, three years later, we turned our attention to the valley’s biggest behemoth, Google.
Once the Five had been convinced to come to Palo Alto, they immediately wore, without flinching, the new label
star programmer,
not just a coder but a personality, a social leader, a celebrity center around which the valley’s attention can swirl. Jamie, who, unlike the other four, came from Amazon but was included in the Five, was the clear prize for this new celebrity model of Silicon Valley; he was tall, dark blond, handsome, and of very old money. He looked like a gentleman in the nineteenth-century portraits that hung on the wall in my seminar room at Hopkins. The other four guys weren’t as portrait-perfect as Jamie; they looked less like movie stars and unlike him, had not been the presidents of painfully elite Harvard final clubs, replete with invitation-only parties and secret rituals. However, in the race for status that Facebook was mounting, they had enough: They were from Harvard and they were programmers, which
made them the valley’s version of good old boys. The Microsoft Five quickly established themselves as a new, explicit kind of fraternity: They called themselves Tau Phi Beta, or TFB for The Facebook Fraternity, complete with Greek letters, custom T-shirts, and weekly keg parties at the house they rented together.
