The Boy Kings

loan payments first, eat as cheaply as possible, preferably home-cooked meals, buy practical clothing on deep discount at Loehmann’s or Neiman Marcus Last Call. There wasn’t money for much else.
    So, by necessity, instead of, as in Mark’s case, by choice, my room was furnished with just a mattress on the floor and a laptop. It felt almost good to live a spartan existence in the midst of Palo Alto’s sunny plenty, undistracted by anything but our digital mission. There was a masculine, military purity in this lifestyle that wasn’t natural to me but that, like almost anything, I could play at for a while. Next to our project of connecting everyone in the world via what felt like an email system on steroids, enhanced by photographs and auto-fed updates, everything else was expendable, frivolous. And since Mark’s minimalist aesthetic, expressed on his Facebook profile as a wish to “Eliminate desire for all which doesn’t really matter,” coincided with my financial means, I decided I would adopt a minimalist lifestyle, for lack of other options.
    The role model for what it meant to be fully committedto the mission was Dustin, who had been working tirelessly to keep the site up for over two years, never complaining, always on call, always, improbably, keeping his cool (Dustin’s hard work paid off: He is now, famously, the world’s youngest billionaire). I joked with him that he was the Bodie—the hard-working, street-wise young thug on The Wire —of the founders, hoodie up, working around the clock from his desk to secure our digital corners, which, in this case, meant launching new networks, monitoring traffic flow, identifying issues, fixing bugs. “Dustin a soldier,” I said, echoing the voices from The Wire, whose accents I remembered from Baltimore. Dustin, ever modest, didn’t answer, but the dark circles under his eyes some days did. As exhausted as he often looked, I admired his wholehearted dedication and thought that if they would only let me, I would be a soldier, too. I trusted Dustin, because of his dry wit and warm humility, honed no doubt by having worked at a burger stand in high school, more than Mark, whose blankness verging on haughtiness inspired only curiosity in me, so I never doubted that soldiering for the cause of Facebook, if not for Mark himself, was just.
    • • •
    Despite my energy and ambition to help the cause, there was no way to be a true, ’round-the-clock soldier on the customer-support team. We clocked hours on a time sheet and suffered the power trips of our recently hired head of customer support, Andreas. He was an oily, artificially tanned man who had made a career in the insincere world of corporate customer service, whichmade him a surprising hire, given Facebook’s ideals of youthful, modern efficiency. He seemed to have been hired because the powers that be—VCs and executives—wanted a mature adult to manage customer support, rather than the twentysomethings we were (they trusted youthful nontechnical employees much less than youthful engineers). Andreas didn’t understand how Facebook worked or the byzantine site rules that we were charged with enforcing, but that wasn’t really his job: His job was simply to be the person assigned to be in charge of the hourly workers, like Foucault’s baby in the panopticon. His power was simply in the fact that he was there, watching, even if that simply meant playing around on Facebook all day while Jake, Maryann, and I managed the Customer Support Team in practice.
    Andreas hadn’t attended college and seemed threatened by the fact that the team was composed mostly of newly minted Stanford grads. As customer support grew, he began pressuring us to hire the least educated people he could find. One day he asked me to interview someone who hadn’t gone to college, whose resume was heavily misspelled, and whose only previous experience was working at Pizza Hut, and seemed disappointed when the person turned out to be far too unskilled in typing and writing to hire.
    Customer-support employees had the least amount of power in the company, so if we wanted to escape our lowly and maligned position, we had to hack our way through and around Facebook’s hierarchy one way or another. Anyone with a shred of hustle did this. There was a handsome Italian boy on our team who did next to nothing, clocking in hours he never worked, but showed up at the office just enough to smile, dark-eyed andlong-lashed, at Andreas,