The Boy Kings

dumb,” referring to the floor above the engineering lair at the 156 University office where customer support, administrators, and salespeople sat. My impulse was first to laugh at his ridiculous, blithe dismissiveness, until I realized that it wasn’t very funny. The way that things were going, these guys might actually rule the world some day. And, being that I was nontechnical and, also, I believed, not dumb, I wasn’t sure what this preference for engineers over anyone with a different type of skill set would mean for me.
    The fact that support employees were not, in Mark’s view, “people” at the company sparked a revolution. Surely, what we couldn’t contribute to the company in technical skill, we contributed in social skill and compassion for users. “We thought we were all in this together,” we complained among ourselves, and then in emails to executives, like Chris Kelly, Facebook’s general counsel, who occupied the rare position of being both nontechnical and also somewhat important, due to his law degree and political connections to Washington. The few executives, like Chris, who understood the cost to company spirit of leaving customer-support employees out, eventually sided with us. In an announcement that Mark made just slightly apologetically at the next All Hands, the subsidy was extended to everyone. After that, almost everyone, if they hadn’t already, moved within a mile of the office. It was, in retrospect, the only timeemployees mounted significant internal resistance to a decision Mark had made.
    With everyone living nearby and our rent subsidized and food catered and even our clothes washed for free by Facebook’s designated laundry service (which would also develop film, shine shoes, and mend purses if you simply dropped them off in the laundry bag every week with your clothes), we now had the makings of a self-sustaining compound from which we might never have to leave: If not a fully fledged compound, at least the perfect cast of characters and lifestyle to richly populate the pages of Facebook for our and others’ entertainment. Bringing us nearer to work, in small apartments instead of gathered around a pool, was a necessary move by the company: The summer house, though only three miles away from the office, was a bit too far, a bit too fun, a bit too much of an escape from our burgeoning digital reality. There, people gathered and talked and played in real life. This next phase of the company’s growth would be about making our Hotel California a virtual rather than actual reality, and this would require an absolute commitment to cause and digital country: this is where we would make the Facebook nation real.
    • • •
    “Are you still having fun?” Mark would ask me over the course of that year. I sometimes wondered for a second, out of curiosity, what he would say if I said no . He didn’t speak to me much around the office except to ask this question, as if he was silently and casually monitoring the mood of nontechnical employees,wanting to check in briefly about whether we were having fun or not. I suspect he knew that if we were having fun, we would keep going, even if we weren’t particularly important or well paid. So I always said yes, to which he always answered, “Good,” and then wandered off, eyes downcast to his BlackBerry. I think he asked me if I was having fun because, on balance, I was. The whole Facebook enterprise was too strange and sudden and golden, rich with potential, not to be fascinating. How wouldn’t such a wealth of ambition, boyish antics, and global potential be fun? No matter how broke and in debt I was because of my student loan, I was now indexed to an intensely wealthy venture-capital apparatus that could save us all from ever struggling with money or recognition again.
    While resetting users’ passwords and explaining how to resolve browser cache issues wasn’t particularly exciting, odd and novel forms of Facebook usage occurred frequently that were fun to figure out. “I can’t tell if this group is real or not,” another customer support rep said to me from across the desk where we were all jumbled together on the third floor of the 156 University building, as the office was getting crowded with new employees. Since the previous fall, when I started, the Customer Support Team had grown from the original five people (Jake, Oliver, Maryann, Emma, and me) to over twenty employees, many of whom were Stanford humanities