The Boy Kings

AIM messages we tossed backand forth just to show each other that we are here, online, simultaneously together and apart. In retrospect it seems that this, a tangential state of connection, never total, never lost, always there at midnight when you are bored or lonely and need a slight, subtle reminder that you are loved, was one of the things Facebook was about, and it was our job as employees to embody it. Thrax’s and my insistence on a noncommittal proximity was the perfect manifestation of what we were creating for the whole world: a system devoted to potential connection, a way of being always near but never with the ones you love, a technology of forestalling choice in favor of the endless option, forever.
    At the time, nobody, maybe not even us, quite understood this. One day, as we were driving to a pinball convention in San Jose, the song “Face to Face” by Facebook engineers’ favorite band, Daft Punk, was playing on the radio: “It really didn’t make sense, just to leave this unresolved.” Sam blurted out in pent-up frustration, “This song is about Kate and Thrax! Why doesn’t Kate just go over to Thrax’s house?!” I instantly thought, but didn’t say, “Because that would be too real,” and I meant it—the thought of showing up at Thrax’s house, looking him in the eye, and admitting that in some weird circumstantial way we liked each other seemed impossible. Because, at some point, around that time, in the little society we were constructing out of bits of code, it seemed that privacy—true intimacy—had become too scary.

CHAPTER 4
WITHIN THE MILE
    D o you live within the mile?” employees asked often in the fall of 2006, as if testing each other’s commitment to the company cause. At an All Hands meeting that April, after listing the company’s latest news, such as the $25 million round of funding (at a company valuation of $525 million) that Facebook had recently received from several venture capital firms in the valley, Mark had announced, “We’ve decided to offer a six-hundred-dollar-a-month subsidy to employees who live within a mile of the office.” The company asked engineers to be on call and able to rush to attend to site crashes or other technical crises at any moment. Engineers were issued company BlackBerrys that they kept turned on at all hours, grabbing their phones instantly upon waking to scroll through the night’sengineering-related emails. Customer-support employees were hourly rather than salaried workers and thus could not legally be called on twenty-four hours a day, but we were nonetheless expected to remain alert to any critical emails and available to drop other plans and help with any last-minute testing or crisis response.
    We didn’t have a nonwork life: Life was work and work was life. We did this because we expected that we would be rewarded accordingly—any short-term losses, such as the option to date casually and devote energy to nonwork pastimes, would be more than compensated by long-term gain in the form of stock options we hoped would one day be worth millions of dollars. Facebook, we understood implicitly, was looking for soldiers, not journeymen. But keeping us close to our work and ready to jump into it at any time wasn’t the explicit purpose of that six-hundred-dollar-per-month housing subsidy. “The reason for the subsidy is that I’ve heard statistics saying that people who live within a mile of their workplace are happier, and I want people to be happier,” Mark explained. My immediate feeling in response to his announcement was indeed happiness, and slight surprise; he didn’t usually mention mood-related words like “making people happy” at All Hands meetings, preferring to discuss technical goals like scaling and growth. But my goal for Facebook, when I thought about it, was to make people happier, and so it seemed important that we, its employees, be happy, too.
    However, what we customer-support employees didn’t realize when he made the announcement, was that by “people,” Mark was referring to engineers, as an email that was sent out that evening to clarify the announcement explained. Engineerswere the only ones covered by the subsidy, which struck all the support employees as shocking since we, with our $30,000 a year instead of their $80,000-and-up salaries, most needed it. But this privileging of technical people wasn’t an anomaly. As a young designer explained to me bluntly, “Everyone upstairs is