The Boy Kings (9 page)

Though we were in California, Thrax’s grocery list read like it was definitely from somewhere else. Bologna, white bread, Miracle Whip. We wandered the overly bright, unkempt deli side of the decaying Safeway for fifteen minutes looking for sale bologna, meaning that it cost ten cents less than the one that wasn’t. Thrax explained that in Georgia he was able to eat for twenty dollars a week just by buying the right bologna. This confused me, because he was earning at least twice what I was, and even I couldn’t imagine that the five or ten cents’ difference mattered. But he was strangely resolute about buying the cheapest sandwich ingredients.

As I followed him around the aisles, I found this to be equal parts cute, as if he were introducing me to his former life as a scrappy, d.i.y. Georgia teenager, and equal parts a sign of the telltale deployment of power that marks the powerful. Driving a used BMW to Safeway to buy the cheapest sandwich ingredients to save the pennies, the constantly weighing pleasure versus cost, was all part of the game, of the calculation required to organize the resources to build the things that would remake the world the way it should be.

Eventually we found the cheapest bologna, bread, and spread. Thrax was incensed that even the budget bologna was at least thirty cents more than it was in Georgia and complained about it all the way to the produce section. Once we were there,
he forgot all about the bologna and started making fun of me for looking for organic fruit. I could see why the idea of organic produce was ridiculous to him; he didn’t eat it, as it was never on sale at whatever Georgia supermarkets he bought his bologna from in college. He couldn’t know that it tasted better than the genetically manipulated fruit sold at Walmart, and so, of course, the whole idea of organic seemed like some kind of Ponzi scheme that only a naive California girl would fall for.

This is the classic position of the nineteen-year-old boy hacker: He thinks that, by having nothing and being from nowhere, he can outsmart everyone and build an empire without anyone taking notice. He thinks everyone is by definition an easy mark, comparatively weak, because he assumes they have it better than him. He thinks he will know, unlike the naive masses, when he’s being taken for a ride. His job—which is also his identity, an identity he chose at around age thirteen when he first began searching the Internet for evidence of how it worked, of how it could be broken—is to find the holes, whether in a website or in someone’s logic, that he can exploit.

That night in the grocery store I could have tried to explain to Thrax, but didn’t, that I bought organic food because it makes me feel better, and that this was my hack: to live as richly as possible with next to nothing, with few reliable career prospects as of yet, in a place that didn’t have as ready and profitable a place for me as it did for him. I invested in what made me feel sharpest, most lithe, most radiant for the long term, because I knew that if I was going to pull off this hack, it was going to take a while. In that sense, perhaps it wasn’t a hack, but then neither would his be. We were both going to use Facebook to get what we
wanted. We loved Facebook—it had already given us information, power—and we knew it would use us, too, so we felt that it was fair. Hackers, like everyone else, have a morality of sorts.

• • •

Most of the men in the office, at twenty-three or twenty-four, were too old and too formally educated to qualify as authentic, self-made hackers, but everyone wanted to imagine himself as one. So, that summer, Mark ensured that the new office—now at 156 University Avenue, after we outgrew the first one—was decorated as a kind of shrine to the boy king. The top floor, which was allocated to nonengineers because it was too sunny to suit the tastes of engineers, was plain and relatively clean, lit by large windows that revealed the perennially blue Palo Alto sky.

The engineering floor below was dim, with blinds drawn, and decorated in cool tones of gray under all the empty drink bottles, shipping boxes, and candy wrappers that collected amid twenty-four-hour coding sessions. Desks were squeezed in like a battalion, from the entrance hallway all the way to the back of the room, where Mark’s desk sat clean and bare, furnished only with his laptop. The other engineers’ desks were piled high with toys and gadgets and screens: At least one thirty-inch monitor and several extra smaller screens just in case (we customer-support reps were each given one twenty-four-inch monitor). A set of TV screens mounted all along one wall displayed graphs depicting various site statistics: egress and active users and the current load on the servers. Occasionally, like in any fraternity house or other place where young men gather, the men on the engineering floor
would play pranks on one another by putting embarrassing photographs of each other on the screens for all to view.

The floor wasn’t all young men: By the summer of 2006, three women held product manager positions in engineering. All had been friends with at least one of the early engineers before they were hired. To become a product manager, it seemed, you had to be vetted as much for your ability to get along with the guys as for your product management skills, so no women were ever hired cold into this role. The PMs were a welcome, necessary presence on the floor, providing a warmer reception when customer-support employees occasionally went down to the E-floor, as the engineering floor was called, to discuss preparations for upcoming Facebook features. The men were friendly on an individual basis, too, but the overall atmosphere of the engineering floor tended toward the tense and aggressive. One of the Harvard guys was always jokingly threatening other engineers that he would punch them in the face if they displeased him, until even the most combative engineers had had enough of his violent banter and asked him to cut it out. Regardless, humor around the office usually had a warring, masculine bent, which came from the top: “Domination,” Mark was always saying, joking in a way that was also, you knew, serious.

There were also often moments of levity during the workday in those early months. One afternoon, as we sat on the third floor answering emails, Maryann got an IM from the floor below that said that we needed to come downstairs quickly to see something. “What’s happening,” I wondered, as we got up from our desks and walked down to E. The boys—nineteen-year-old designer Justin, who had been recently convinced to drop out of
college and come to work at Facebook, Thrax, and anyone else with hair that was long enough to flip out of his face at the end of a faux runway—were in the midst of doing a fashion walkoff, starting at one end of the office and walking like runway models to the other side as engineers and customer-support team members cheered them on. They pretended to flip blazers over their shoulders like so many
GQ
models.

At the far end of the engineering floor were two small rooms that served as the war rooms, where engineers could work intensely together on developing new products. To the left was Mark’s office, a spare white room straight out of a mafia interrogation scene. The room to the right was where the boys would hide out and sometimes build things they weren’t supposed to: It was piled with screens and blankets, as if they were living and sleeping inside the screen. Large letters spelling “Lockdown” hung on the door, declaring a state of product emergency even when there wasn’t one. The engineers seemed to like the idea of a perpetual lockdown because, on such occasions, they were expected to spend all their time in the office, focused fully on the mission. Between the rooms was a couch piled with more blankets, oddly cozy and comfortable, from which one could survey the whole floor. When I walked the gantlet of desks to get to the end of the office, which I had to do occasionally when I came down from the top floor for meetings, I was relieved to get to the couch, away from the prying eyes following me and to a place where I could turn my gaze on them. In its architecture, both virtual and physical, Facebook was like one big battle to retain control of the gaze.

The mere fact that we worked in an office presented a structural
issue to overcome: Real hackers don’t work in offices. They work at home, in their parents’ basements, or anywhere but an established work environment. After the move to the new office, Thrax told me about a time in college when he and a friend drove to New York City to visit their Internet forum friends and ran low on cash. In order to afford the gas to drive back to Georgia, he pulled over to the side of the road, his friend took out his laptop, found an open wifi signal, and hacked into the AAA Web site to get a discount for gas in order to get them home. Hacking, like any other rogue American pursuit, abhors the corporate in favor of the casual or even slightly illicit, which is why Mark hired graffiti artist David Choe to paint the walls of Facebook offices with scheming figures holding their fists high.

To make sure the engineering floor felt as playful and casual as possible, it was decorated with toys of all kinds: scooters, deejay equipment, Lego sets, puzzles. Every once in a while, Dustin would order a particularly interesting and expensive toy online to entertain the engineers and have it delivered to the office. One day that summer, a lifelike dinosaur that somehow grows arrived in the mail. Everyone cooed over the new robot pet and took photos of it to upload to Facebook. Another day, a king’s crown—replete with fake jewels and red velvet—materialized, and the boys took turns trying it on. It settled, finally, on Thrax, who by virtue of his age and unschooled pedigree was the true boy king. The crown eventually became the prototype for one of the first virtual gifts that Facebook would sell, and naturally the gifts’ first buyers were the engineers, who took turns buying each other virtual crowns to post on each other’s walls.

Looking like you are playing, even when you are working, was a key part of the aesthetic, a way for Facebook to differentiate itself from the companies it wants to divert young employees from and a way to make everything seem, always, like a game. In the ideology of the new Silicon Valley, work was for the owned. Play was for the owners. There was a fundamental capitalism at work: While they abhorred the idea of being a wage slave, the young men of Silicon Valley were not trying to tear down the capitalist system. They were trying to become its new masters.

• • •

Without anything academic to study in Palo Alto, I kept myself entertained by studying people. By day, I studied the profiles of the people whose Facebook accounts I had to log in to and fix or investigate. I developed a taxonomy of all the different types of college users. There were surprisingly few types: the fraternity kids, the artsy alternative kids, the middle-of-the-road boys and girls who play soccer and study political science. My favorite profiles, more often than not, were those of black students, who tended to use Facebook more socially and conversationally than white students. It reminded me of a difference I had observed in Baltimore between the anxious, solitary white grad students and friendlier, more talkative local Baltimoreans, making me wonder if black culture, or maybe just southern culture, placed more emphasis on community and conversation, whereas white culture was focused more on the idea of every man for him or herself.

Around this period, we discovered a bug that affected the inboxes of people with over five hundred messages. They would
suddenly see a so-called ghost message hovering in their inbox. As soon as someone wrote in to report the bug, I knew that, most likely, they were black. White people, I discovered by reading people’s messages and walls, tended to lurk and judge more than they communicated, so their accounts rarely generated that bug. It was almost as if the system itself was designed for lurking instead of direct communication and broke under any different mode of use.

By night, in Menlo Park, I studied the engineers as they came over to the pool house to grill, swim, and socialize. They were always a little anxious and awkward, working to remain calm and in control in situations where their programs weren’t at hand to do that for them. When all else failed, we could always talk about the site, because it consumed our days, transacting almost all of our activities and experiences. It seemed like we wrote on each other’s walls as much as we saw each other in person. And also, we each had a life-changing financial interest in making the site as addictive and ubiquitous as possible.

It felt somehow life-affirming to be away from the computer, to see people in person instead of reading their intensely crafted profiles on Facebook. I had already started to wonder whether the fact that I was more comfortable offline than on, unlike the engineers, would mean that I would have to be the bearer of the human—the one who feels where others couldn’t or wouldn’t.

I kept a running tally in my head of the things and activities in the summer house that seemed human and normal, looking for reassuring evidence that, despite Facebook’s fascination with the cool, technical mediation of our lives we were just warm, social animals after all. I used what I knew of life from Baltimore
as my gauge. Baltimore is maybe the least technically advanced, most tragically human place in America. Kids in Baltimore didn’t hack or have computers; hacking for them meant hanging wires from window to window to poach electricity from the house across the way. I kept Baltimore’s poverty in mind as the baseline against which all this Silicon Valley technology and all the real-life fantasy it enables could be measured.

On weekends, the house’s dining room table was converted to a Beirut (beer pong) table for parties, and I counted this as a positive: Beirut was clearly active, social, real. At Hopkins we played it in dirty row-house fraternity basements that were the privileged mirror of the dirty row houses that the poor squatted in only streets away. I gave the Beirut table extra points for being a little messy, a little loud, a little burly (involving cheap beer rather than smooth, pricey liquor), and because laptops weren’t safe there amid the flying ping-pong balls and splashing beer. Anything that got engineers off their computers must be healthy.

People brought instruments to the house and played them, and this too seemed like a reassuring sign. Mark had a guitar and on occasion he played Green Day songs while we all sang. Pictures of these sing-alongs also made their way to Gawker three years later, but the bloggers didn’t find the video on Facebook of us singing “Wonderwall” and its rousing chorus of “Mayyyybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves meeeeeeeee.” I sang extra loud on the chorus, perhaps aware of the lyrics’ special resonance. Watching the video again on Facebook today, I noticed that we seemed much happier here than in later videos, brimming with energies that have long since been focused and contained.
I suppose that that summer, nothing was certain; it all could have turned out to be an odd camp that we attended and then disbanded, instead of an early moment of youthful alacrity in a company’s inexorable rise to power.