The Boy Kings

looked at our profile, which revealed fascinating insights. For one, my female friends studied my profile more often and for longer periods of time than my male friends, which suggests a digital version of theold dictum that women dress for each other, not for men. With access to every piece of data that existed on the system, working at Facebook was like playing the game from the hacker’s side, despite the fact that I wasn’t a hacker: The users gave us data freely and we consumed it, delighting in the new facts that came in by the hour.
    As exhausting as answering emails for eight hours a day could get, there was something rich and fertile about Face-book as both company and product that was seductive, enticing. This is something that could go on forever, I thought, not like a business but like a family, like royalty, like the Dallas oil scene of Silicon Valley, crowning its own kings and queens and generating its own society. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?
    On Friday afternoons we got together for All Hands meetings. I looked forward to them because they were the one time we discussed things as a company, and the only meetings when everyone at the company was included. Mark would stand somewhere in the office, his posture unusually straight for someone dressed casually in a joke T-shirt (around this time he preferred one that said “I love Sloths”) and sandals. Everyone would gather round, sitting on desks with flip-flops dangling or on the floor with legs crossed, watching and listening while Mark discussed the week’s business: deals made, products launched, technical issues experienced and resolved. Occasionally, Matt Cohler, a Yale guy with a VC background, would chime in on financial things or Dustin would comment on site growth and health and any major down time that week. Everyone watched in rapt attention, smiling, as there was much to smile about: We had somuch to do, together, and the All Hands were where we got our motivation for the next week and months.
    As we worked steadily in October 2005 to prepare for the launch of the Facebook Photos feature, where users would finally be able to upload photo albums to their profiles (prior to the launch of Photos, the only photo a user could post was their profile photo), Mark referred to all of us in an All Hands meeting as a “Facebook family,” and even though most of us had just met, the kinship was palpable. It also would be profitable for us to get along; if we liked and cared for each other, it would be easier to accomplish the high goals Mark was setting out for us: more Facebook networks, more Facebook features, an ever-faster flow of information.
    I liked to listen to Mark’s discussion of the product philosophy and goals at these meetings, which were to me the most fascinating part of the job: what were we trying to do, with this fledgling Internet identity registration system? “I just want to create information flow,” he said in his still nearly adolescent voice, lips pursed forward as if jumping to the next word, and everyone would nod, all cogitating in their own way about what this meant. Mark’s idea of information flow, though vague, was also too vague to be disagreed with, and even if we came up with counter-instances to a model of pure information efficiency (for example, I wondered, do I want my Social Security number to flow freely?), we knew that we weren’t supposed to disagree. Mark was our leader, for better or worse. When the meetings ended he would say either “domination” or “revolution,” with a joking flourish of a fist, and everyone would laugh, nervously, but with a warm and almost chilling excitement. It was like wewere being given a charter, by a boy younger than most of us, to take over the world and get paid to do it.
    • • •
    Aside from the general questions that I started to ponder, questions such as what were we were doing, and what did it all mean, and that I kept to myself, there was one area of our work in Customer Support that required us to have philosophical discussion and debate. Facebook, like the Internet in general, made it so easy for people to post and gain visibility for content that people with extreme and often unpopular views went wild on the new platform, creating groups devoted to whatever cause they espoused. Most of these groups were devoted to bullying of some kind, from petty harassment of a classmate to hatred of a marginalized group.
    In the Customer Support