The Boy Kings

America, waiting until our boy emperor decided it was our turn to be king. This sense that we were part of a developing royal court was bizarre, and I think accounted for the mirth everyone often felt around that time. In pictures from this period, tagged for posterity, we are almost always laughing, our faces contorted as if we can’t believe our absurd good fortune. Mark never took part in these games, preferring to sit at his desk in the deep corner of the office, face illuminated by the glow of the screen. He was playing a bigger game.
    Despite the financial limits of my life, I didn’t feel like I was missing out. On adulthood, yes, but then, if I had been chasing the trappings of adulthood I wouldn’t have been at Facebook. Adulthood meant commitments, mortgages, marriage. In theyouth-fixated world of Silicon Valley, where VCs fought over the teenage boys that they wanted to hire or invest in, all of that seemed almost unimaginable, beyond reach. For one thing, the only way to afford a mortgage in the valley is to have already made your millions, and, for another, there were no men there. There were many kinds of boys, yes, but in the course of my day-to-day existence I couldn’t say that anyone I interacted with, of any age, really seemed like a mature, sophisticated man. With the exception of the gray-haired Rochester, who hailed from an earlier period in the valley that seemed to be less about youthful, social glitz and more about the nuts and bolts of building software (Rochester joked about how after working at Facebook he began to wear more fashionable clothing), the oldest men there, in their thirties and forties, seemed as disinterested in anything except business victory as anyone else.
    The older men in the office could be as unbridled in their wide-ranging desires for sex and attention as the younger ones. One of the few married engineers on the team was known by his female colleagues (after he had made several unwelcome propositions to them) to invite lower-ranking women at the company to have threesomes with his wife, all while trolling and starting bullying flame wars on online forums. (“Pics or it didn’t happen,” he retorted like any teenage Internet troll when someone sent an email to the company’s social list saying that women wearing nursing bras had assembled outside the office to protest Facebook’s ban on breastfeeding photos.) Like any sexual predator, he groomed people by sending them emails with innocuous, friendly banter, gradually moving in to make a sexual proposition. When I received an email from him calling me “my lady”and asking me to lunch, I quit responding to any but his most professional emails.
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    Within the mile, I rarely socialized with anyone who wasn’t a Facebook employee. Among colleagues, we already had a scene, filled with rapt faces waiting to consume our activities and personalities both online and in the office. We also knew too much about Facebook—what features would be released and what shocking transformations of the social world would be attempted next—to let down our guard around other people, especially in the valley. It was impossible to meet anyone new at a bar or coffee shop in Palo Alto or San Francisco without the conversation turning to Facebook as soon as I mentioned where I worked. It was becoming a national obsession, and even nonemployees could, and would, talk about it for hours, as if they worked there, too. Everyone wanted to know what we were doing and what would happen next. So, given the choice between having to answer endless questions that I couldn’t really answer (like what features we were going to launch or whether I could read people’s messages, to which the answer was an unsayable yes ), or staying inside our social bubble, it was easier simply not to hang out with anyone outside Facebook.
    Until everyone in the world was using Facebook, anything else felt like a distraction. The unspoken goal was clear: to bring everyone on board the social network and make their lives as clean and technically efficient as our own in Palo Alto. We were so convinced that Facebook was something everyone shouldhave that when the product team created an experimental feature called dark profiles in fall 2006, nobody even flinched. This product created hidden profiles for people who were not yet Facebook users but whose photographs had been tagged on the site. It reminds me now of the way members of the Mormon church