The Boy Kings

weren’t supposed to: It was piled with screens and blankets, as if they were living and sleeping inside the screen. Large letters spelling “Lockdown” hung on the door, declaring a state of product emergency even when there wasn’t one. The engineers seemed to like the idea of a perpetual lockdown because, on such occasions, they were expected to spend all their time in the office, focused fully on the mission. Between the rooms was a couch piled with more blankets, oddly cozy and comfortable, from which one could survey the whole floor. When I walked the gantlet of desks to get to the end of the office, which I had to do occasionally when I came down from the top floor for meetings, I was relieved to get to the couch, away from the prying eyes following me and to a place where I could turn my gaze on them. In its architecture, both virtual and physical, Facebook was like one big battle to retain control of the gaze.
    The mere fact that we worked in an office presented a structuralissue to overcome: Real hackers don’t work in offices. They work at home, in their parents’ basements, or anywhere but an established work environment. After the move to the new office, Thrax told me about a time in college when he and a friend drove to New York City to visit their Internet forum friends and ran low on cash. In order to afford the gas to drive back to Georgia, he pulled over to the side of the road, his friend took out his laptop, found an open wifi signal, and hacked into the AAA Web site to get a discount for gas in order to get them home. Hacking, like any other rogue American pursuit, abhors the corporate in favor of the casual or even slightly illicit, which is why Mark hired graffiti artist David Choe to paint the walls of Facebook offices with scheming figures holding their fists high.
    To make sure the engineering floor felt as playful and casual as possible, it was decorated with toys of all kinds: scooters, deejay equipment, Lego sets, puzzles. Every once in a while, Dustin would order a particularly interesting and expensive toy online to entertain the engineers and have it delivered to the office. One day that summer, a lifelike dinosaur that somehow grows arrived in the mail. Everyone cooed over the new robot pet and took photos of it to upload to Facebook. Another day, a king’s crown—replete with fake jewels and red velvet—materialized, and the boys took turns trying it on. It settled, finally, on Thrax, who by virtue of his age and unschooled pedigree was the true boy king. The crown eventually became the prototype for one of the first virtual gifts that Facebook would sell, and naturally the gifts’ first buyers were the engineers, who took turns buying each other virtual crowns to post on each other’s walls.
    Looking like you are playing, even when you are working, was a key part of the aesthetic, a way for Facebook to differentiate itself from the companies it wants to divert young employees from and a way to make everything seem, always, like a game. In the ideology of the new Silicon Valley, work was for the owned. Play was for the owners. There was a fundamental capitalism at work: While they abhorred the idea of being a wage slave, the young men of Silicon Valley were not trying to tear down the capitalist system. They were trying to become its new masters.
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    Without anything academic to study in Palo Alto, I kept myself entertained by studying people. By day, I studied the profiles of the people whose Facebook accounts I had to log in to and fix or investigate. I developed a taxonomy of all the different types of college users. There were surprisingly few types: the fraternity kids, the artsy alternative kids, the middle-of-the-road boys and girls who play soccer and study political science. My favorite profiles, more often than not, were those of black students, who tended to use Facebook more socially and conversationally than white students. It reminded me of a difference I had observed in Baltimore between the anxious, solitary white grad students and friendlier, more talkative local Baltimoreans, making me wonder if black culture, or maybe just southern culture, placed more emphasis on community and conversation, whereas white culture was focused more on the idea of every man for him or herself.
    Around this period, we discovered a bug that affected the inboxes of people with over five hundred messages. They wouldsuddenly see a so-called ghost message hovering in