The Boy Kings

requests for sex. Jake, Oliver, and I played the police of the virtual college campus, issuing warnings and adjudicating arguments, and were also its tour guides, explaining how poking and tagging and blocking worked to people who were just learning to conceive their social lives in virtual terms.
    “What does poking mean?” was a question asked hundreds of times a day, sometimes by people who really didn’t know and other times by people who relished the sexual frisson of writing to Facebook to ask about “poking” and its many interpretations. We always responded innocently, “It’s just a way to get someone’s attention,” knowing full well the range of childish and sexual connotations in play. Being coy, not admitting the libidinal urges driving so much of the site’s usage, was professionally necessary, a way to differentiate Facebook from the cheap and overtly sexual vibes of MySpace. Being coy was also part of the fun, part of the illusion we as a company were constructing that life on Facebook, unlike in reality, was always safe, easy, playful, free, void of cost or obligation. As Dustin Moskovitz, Mark’s Harvard roommate and Facebook co-founder, said over lunch in the office that fall, with his dry, practical intelligence, “Everything on Facebook is flirty.” He was right. Facebook, likeflirting, was a fun way to present yourself lightly and attractively to the world, with no downside, and no commitment.
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    A few weeks later, just as I was beginning to worry that I would be one of the only women working at Facebook, Maryann and Emma joined the customer support team. They were close friends of Jake and Oliver’s from Stanford, pleasant in appearance, also nontechnical in major, and we got along as well as needed to perform our duties. At night they disappeared to parties full of former Stanford students and the requisite ping-pong balls and beer-laden Beirut (beer pong) tables that were their university’s preferred nighttime sport.
    This particular social clique preferred to discuss parties to more personal or intellectual topics, so we didn’t go beyond casual pleasantries, but that was fitting for our mission of superficially connecting everyone in the world. We had Facebook as a topic of conversation. If we wanted to know more about each other we could visit each other’s profiles and read the details we put there, and if we wanted to get closer than that, we could IM each other privately. From my first day onward, it was like my coworkers and I were connected always, virtually at least, chatting and emailing and posting on each other’s Facebook walls. The first thing Dustin said to me after I had been taught my initial Facebook duties was to get on AIM. “We are on it all the time,” he said, and it was true, for better or worse, we were.
    Since a formal coolness was how our team interacted—smiling nods followed by fast descent into our screens and theemails 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