The Boy Kings

Southern college most of us had never heard of. However, he wouldn’t live in obscurity for much longer: Dustin hired him a few weeks later, on the theory that you want to keep your enemies close, especially when they can break your site. So, a few days later, Thrax showed up in the office, wearing the same skinny T-shirt and baggy jeans he had worn on his Facebook profile.
    From the minute he arrived, despite or maybe in part because of his cagey, impudent gaze beneath his long bangs, therewas an almost preternatural aura of celebrity and inevitability about Thrax: The Harvard guys, who had made careers doing everything by the book, had been looking for this boy, long before they knew that this hacker savant from Georgia actually existed. At happy hour on Thrax’s first day in the office, everyone swarmed him, asking questions about the hack and about his strange provenance in a state far from all of our own. A few of the Harvard engineers, perhaps miffed that they would now have to share the spotlight, wondered if Thrax was just a script kiddie, a derogatory term for an unschooled kid who copies code from the Internet rather than composing it himself. From my vantage point in the office, watching, I felt a sense of bemused relief. Things are finally going to get interesting. The Harvard boys have some competition, and Thrax seemed to understand, if nothing else, how to create a mysterious, compelling character out of the bits of the Internet that he mastered with his oddly long, ghostly white fingers.
    Facebook was waiting for Thrax and brethren to arrive because, unlike startups that build computer chips or enterprise software, the network is about two things: personality and stories. People and stories are what keep us coming to the site. Whether out of an instinctive need to keep tabs on our surroundings or as a way of fostering social bonds, it is human nature to want to know what is happening to the people in our circle and, with Facebook, we don’t have to bother to ask them. But, like any novel or film, a story requires characters and drama.
    The Harvard boys couldn’t satisfy this need alone. Their knowledge of the Internet derived from books and computer science coursework, not the trolling, rule-free websites wherekids from the middle of nowhere honed their understanding of Internet warfare and developed well-known online profiles and networks of like-minded hacker friends. One of these friends, Emile, had worked with Thrax remotely (they lived in different states at the time) on the hack and, after Thrax arrived and was a hit at Facebook, the Harvard engineers tracked him down in Louisiana and asked him down to the office. When Emile showed up for his interview, it was the first time that Thrax, along with everyone else, had met him in real life. After some hand-wringing by the Harvard guys about whether any or all of these unschooled hacker boys from the middle of nowhere were just script kiddies, Emile was hired on, too. I liked Emile: Underneath all his trolling and half-shaved, half-long metal haircut, he too, I sensed, had a good heart.
    Indeed, the hacker’s appeal for the valley’s legions of software engineers, business development execs, and money guys is not in what he makes (most hacks are by definition, technically shoddy, because they are executed quickly) but in the fact that you never know what he is going to do, what boundaries he will transgress. Silicon Valley imagines that the hacker’s moves are sylphlike, quick, and made under the cover of night, while rule-abiding citizens, powerless, are asleep. In short, the hacker is sexy, a dangerous, bad-boy version of the plain programmer at work in his cubicle. The hacker’s capacity to surprise—or in Silicon Valley parlance, disrupt —is fetishized in the valley as a source of power and profit for tech companies, Facebook among them, which considers its stated ability to “move fast and break things” a core company value. As Paul Graham, the valley’s revered hacker guru and founder of the prestigious seed-capitalfirm YCombinator, put it while lecturing to valley entrepreneurs at what is called Startup School, “We don’t want people who do what they are told.” Or, as the startup enthusiasts on Graham’s Hacker News board counsel each other, “It is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
    As Facebook matured, the staff came to encompass three distinct types of guys. Skilled, dependable programmers, often