The Boy Kings

KATE LOSSE WAS A GRAD SCHOOL REFUGEE WHEN she joined Facebook as employee #51 in 2005. Hired to answer user questions such as “What is a poke?” and “Why can’t I access my ex-girlfriend’s profile?” her early days at the company were characterized by a sense of camaraderie, promise, and ambition: Here was a group of scrappy young upstarts on a mission to rock Silicon Valley and change the world.
    Over time, this sense of mission became so intense that working for Facebook felt like more than just a job; it implied a wholehearted dedication to “the cause.” Employees were incentivized to live within one mile of the office, summers were spent carousing at the company pool house, and female employees were told to wear T-shirts with founder Mark Zuckerberg’s profile picture on his birthday. Losse started to wonder what this new medium meant for real-life relationships: Would Facebook improve our social interactions? Or would we all just adapt our behavior to the habits and rules of these brilliant but socially awkward Internet savants who have become today’s youngest power players? Increasingly skeptical, Losse graduated from customer service to the internationalization team—tasked with rolling out Facebook to the rest of the world—finally landing a seat right outside Zuckerberg’s office as his personal ghostwriter, the voice of the boy king.
    This book takes us for the first time into the heart of this fast-growing information empire, inviting us to high-level meetings with Zuckerberg; lifting the veil on long nights of relentless hacking and trolling; taking us behind the scenes of raucous company parties; and introducing us to the personalities, values, and secret ambitions of the floppy-haired boy wonders who are redefining the way we live, love, and work. By revealing here what’s really driving both the business and the culture of the social network, Losse answers the biggest question of all: What kind of world is Facebook trying to build, and is it the world we want to live in?

KATHERINE LOSSE was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and holds a master’s degree in English from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Marfa, Texas.
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To <3

“Shall I project a world?”
—Thomas Pynchon

INTRODUCTION
    A t the sputtering beginning of this new century we were all, perpetually, waiting for something to happen. After the sudden, unexpectedly fiery morning of 9/11, we developed a new, nonspecific vigilance: a demand to know that some critical event, somewhere, was occurring, however distant. Most things that the cable news reported on after 9/11 seemed irrelevant: a toothless bomb scare here, a prop-plane crash there. We clung to televised surveillance because it was the one thing we could count on: distant wars and threats. To assist our indiscriminate monitoring, cable news created a news ticker that ran underneath the newscast to assure us hourly that yes, somewhere, something terrible had occurred. And, perhaps, because war, unlike understanding and diplomacy, seemed clear and defined, our president started a war, but that didn’t work; so he started another war, and that didn’t work either. Suddenly, nothing was really working.
    I spent the early 2000s nursing a nervous anxiety that reflected the nation’s, fed by a general sense of foreboding and by outsized ambition and aimless anticipation—the impulse