The Boy Kings

night, at two in the morning, as people gathered with their beers around Thrax’s electric piano, I asked him to play “Hotel California.” For once, he didn’t know the words, so I had to sing them. The boys in the office preferred Daft Punk and the song “Robot Rock” as an anthem, speaking excitedly and without irony of wanting to become robots one day. That made me wonder: Why? What’s the pull of being a robot? I imagined that being a robot sounded as unnatural to me as my obsession with Hotel California must have seemed to them. No one ever asked about the Hotel California record on the mantel or why I’d put it there. The record, like all of this, and like the viral memes we would be in the business of distributing, seemed to have just happened, part of an odd conglomeration of things and peoplethat have convened here, now, to be grouped together for a while, only to later disperse.
    “The site broke,” someone yelled from the den after Thrax’s off-key version of “Hotel California” had trailed off. The boys happily retreated to their laptops to log in and start fixing bugs. They always brought their MacBook Pros with them to parties, and they seemed happy to have an excuse to have their familiar screens in front of them, networked to the system and to distant friends on instant message. When the evening would take its usual, inevitable turn and morph into a laptop party (you could always count on something breaking back then—breaking and bringing the site back up at two in the morning was part of the glory), I would just shrug and go outside to the pool, alone. It wouldn’t be my way to confront the boys about their antisocial-seeming commitment to technology, at least at first. In those early years, my stance toward the company and the new world we were creating remained anthropological and cautiously optimistic. I had some notion that a writer doesn’t intervene in her subject until she feels she understands it. That summer, there were still a lot of unknowns to be reckoned with.
    When the house wasn’t swarmed by engineers and their laptops, it was cool, open, empty, mine. I liked to pad around the carpeted rooms, reflecting mostly on the fact that I was happy to be here, now. I was entranced by the deep stillness of Menlo Park, the light, fir-scented breeze that entered through the open windows at nightfall, the way the cool darkness seemed to aid both looking back and looking forward. I felt lucky to have the rich privilege of starting my life anew, withfifty or so smart people, in very fertile circumstances, though the payoff we were working for wouldn’t manifest itself for a while. For now, the stillness—the absence of the sirens of Baltimore, the cool peace, the warm sense of limitless potential and profit—was enough.

CHAPTER 3
PIRATES OF THE RIVIERA
    You run, I con. A tiger don’t change its stripes.—thrax96
    Huh?—k8che
    That’s from Lost. I think I’m going to put that on my Facebook business card.—thrax96
    w hen I first began working at Facebook and Dustin said, “Get on AIM, we’re on it all the time,” he wasn’t joking. Most conversations in the office, from the driest work-related exchange to the most overt flirtation, happened on AIM. At times, this led to confusion—an engineering manager might send you an AIM asking you to go get coffee during work hours but it would be unclear whether this was for professional or personal reasons. At that moment he could be interested in befriending you, just as later he might be arranging your promotion. When you were online, with your Adium (our preferred AIM client) status set to available, it was open season in terms of what you might get in the way of messages: Because we were sitting at different desks and often in different rooms,separated and protected by technology, anything could happen and often did.
    “Can you introduce me to that Japanese girl you are working with?” was one AIM message I received from an older database engineer who was known to exclusively date Japanese women. Having read Edward Said’s Orientalism, like any liberal arts student, it was hard for me not to find this somewhat suspect. “Not right now, we’re working,” I thought, but simply pretended I didn’t get the message. AIM, like the social Internet generally, was more about your desires than it was about social graces. Any messages you didn’t want to answer, you could just pretend not to have seen it on your screen.