The Boy Kings

version of the word “Salvador,” after my favorite city in Brazil, with a dollar sign instead of an “S.” Maybe this technology will save us from something (loneliness, alienation, boredom—I wasn’t sure), I thought, and if it doesn’t, maybe it will at least save me, by making me some money and relieving me from the fate of having to start over from scratch, somewhere else, again. I was tired of starting over.
    Launching my email program and seeing that “[email protected]” was my address was a heady feeling, like starting anew country in which I was the only Kate there, queen of a world in which every other Kate would be derived from my archetype. Facebook still had fewer than 5 million users, but I was sitting at the top of what would become a very large virtual land mass. Facebook’s name alone gave me gut confidence in the site: It was a real-life term that represented the website’s function exactly. In choosing this name, Mark had announced his intention not to create some type of Internet fad but to replicate a real world need for a basic human directory. Internet fads come and go, but directories—like phone books before everyone went mobile—satisfy the basic human need to find and stay in contact with people.
    Jake, Oliver, and I huddled around the conference table with our laptops and some Cokes from the fridge, which Rochester had showed us proudly was stacked full with every caffeinated soda we could desire. The lights in the conference room were turned off, as Rochester assumed that, like the engineers, we would want the room to be as dark as possible. I always liked working in darkness; it made things feel more exciting, less like an office and more like we were peering out at the world on our screens from inside a cave. Jake introduced us to the janky application through which users’ emails to Facebook flowed. Once we learned how the software worked, Jake taught us, without batting an eyelid, the master password by which we could log in as any Facebook user and access all their messages and data. “You can’t write it down,” he said, and so we committed it to memory, just the first of many secrets and customs we would learn as we became indoctrinated into our new lives as Internet social administrators.
    I experienced a brief moment of stunned disbelief: They just hand over the password with no background check to make sure I am not a crazed stalker? I kept checking Jake’s face to see if he would test or caution me in any way about how and how not to use the password, but he didn’t. I worried I would be like a bull stepping into the proverbial china shop: What if I accidentally perform the data equivalent of knocking something over, accidentally changing someone’s password or forgetting to log out of their account, posting on their profile when I meant to post on mine? As surprising as it was, in a way, it was also reassuring, a vote of confidence in me as I stepped into a vast sea of personal data.
    Security measures would later be implemented that made it impossible for anyone to use the master password without authenticating themselves as an employee, and a year after that, the password would disappear entirely in favor of other, more secure forms of logging in to repair accounts. But, at the beginning, there was only one password, and like all the boys in the office, I now had the keys to the kingdom. The dummy account we logged into to administer each school network, equipped with a pixelated photo of Mark wearing an Oxford button-down and a slight smirk, was called “The Creator,” and it did feel a bit like being a kind of omnipotent, all-seeing god.
    After an hour’s instruction from Jake, we were set loose on the emails flowing in from colleges across the United States. They ranged from the briefest request for a password to long expositions on the social phenomenon that was Facebook and the way it had already changed social interaction on campuses for better or for worse, depending on the author’s viewpoint.The most glowing fan letters to Facebook betrayed the author’s new sense of power while using this technology: even the shyest person could now glean information and participate virtually in social worlds that formerly seemed restricted or off limits.
    There were also complaints about the usual stalker types familiar from the rest of the Internet, voraciously devouring images of women, seeking the most flesh-baring photographs, and spamming women with