The Boy Kings

graduates, with graduates from a few other private colleges mixed in. He showed me a group called “If this group reaches 100,000 people my girlfriend will have a threesome.” We clicked over to the profile of the group’s creator and he looked real enough, with a profile photo and friends and flirtatious wall posts from girls, standardstuff for a college guy on Facebook. The group he created was growing at an absurdly fast rate, with friends seeing that another friend joined the group and joining it as well. Most of the people joining were guys.
    I wondered vaguely if his girlfriend was okay with having their sex life plastered all over Facebook, but I thought it possible that she might be. American college women, after all, are known to kiss each other at parties for male attention, so this group was kind of like the virtual version of that, except that her boyfriend was the one running the show. Just another day at Facebook with another set of peculiarly Facebook problems, like discerning whether someone really wants to have a threesome, or if they are simply, in grand advertising tradition, selling sex to get publicity. It turned out, after we monitored it for a while, that this Facebook group was the first purposely designed as a viral marketing scheme—once the group had 100,000 members, its creator used it to promote a new music Web site. This scheme worked because, while what Facebook was offering users was a connection to their friends, what it offers marketers is the greatest viral distribution mechanism yet invented. In real life, you had to talk to someone to tell them you liked something: Here you could simply click a button, “join group,” and Face-book would tell everyone you know.
    Some college kids in the group saw that Facebook employees had joined it to monitor them, and started asking us questions on the group wall. They wanted to know what it was like to be us, employees of the site they spent all their free time on. Thrax, naturally, was glad to trumpet our riches for them: “This bacon-wrapped shrimp tastes delicious, doesn’t it, Kate?” he posted onthe group’s wall, and then a few minutes later, “I’m going to come up to your floor for another piece of steak.” The college students visibly salivated in their comments after Thrax’s posts. I felt a tinge of guilt, recalling my mother saying, “You should never brag,” but that sentiment seemed archaic, out of place.
    The new product that we had been testing all summer and that would launch soon that fall, the News Feed, would become the most efficient way yet of distributing evidence of one’s good fortune—pictures of how much fun you were having or some new thing you had bought—to all your friends. So, as we monitored the group, I could imagine the students’ envy as they regarded us, these extravagant Silicon Valley clowns eating catered meats while supporting the site they used to flirt and procrastinate. In truth, the shrimp wasn’t that tasty—in the early days, the caterer always overcooked and oversalted everything for the tastes of boys used to fast food—but the people watching us didn’t know that. On Facebook it all sounded, and was, impossibly rich, like we were having the time of our lives and, sometimes, I think we were.
    Living within the mile meant you were all-in, willing to compromise all other aspects of your life in order to remain fully available to Facebook. Some employees still chose to live in San Francisco, which gave them the option of spending time with non-Facebook employees, but that seemed like a suspect choice to those of us within the mile, whose lives revolved around the company.
    While I had begun my job at Facebook with a wait-and-see, month-by-month attitude, the increasing fun and excitement encouraged me to deepen my personal investment in thecompany. Now that the summer house was coming to an end, I decided to go all-in and move within the mile.
    I found a room in a rambling, tree-shaded house full of Stanford graduate students that felt a bit like an army barracks for academics, with thin carpet and nothing in the way of luxuries. The shower, to my unhappiness, was shared by five people. At eight hundred dollars, it wasn’t cheap, but after taxes, the subsidy made it a bearable three hundred dollars per month. By this time, I was getting used to the unreal economics of Palo Alto, and my time in Baltimore had made me an expert at hacking my way through poverty: Pay rent and