The Boy Kings

convert dead people, following the logic that if they had known about Mormonism when they were alive, they would have been believers. Facebook was our religion and we believed everyone should be a member, even if they hadn’t consented yet.
    At the time, the fact that these profiles were called dark gave me slight pause. Chase, a perpetually grinning senior project manager by way of Stanford, who was in charge of keeping engineers on task, explained the project further at one of our weekly product meetings, where he explained the latest developments to the customer support team. Chase was slight in stature but carried himself something like an athletic coach, always carrying and consulting a clipboard with notes and product schedules. He had a quick, musical way of speaking that made any announcement he made sound perfectly reasonable. “You see, Mark always had this idea for a kind of Wikipedia for people, or what he called a ‘dark Facebook,’ where each person would have a wall and people could write anything about them on it. That was actually what he was going to make first at Harvard. But he realized that people wouldn’t use something that didn’t allow them to erase bad things people said about them, so he made Facebook instead.” Thus, the product they had now built was a kind of compromise. People would still be added to the network whether they wanted to be or not, but at least now, should they decide to activate a Facebook account, they would have a chanceto control their profiles. In a way, I had to admit that it was a bit of genius: We were using every technical means at our disposal to create a database of all the people in the world. It was the kind of information that every organization that wanted to expand its membership, including the Mormon church, would wish that they had.
    While I don’t think anyone came to work at Facebook precisely to have super access, as we called our ability to view anything and anyone on the site, regardless of the user’s privacy settings, once we had that power, no one wanted to lose it. The whole product, in a sense, was a means of obtaining knowledge about other people, and as Facebook employees we had a leg up on everyone else. Another employee in engineering, a designer, was blunt about his personal motives for working at Facebook. “I built this to find you,” said a quote he inserted as an Easter egg (a programming term for an intentional hidden message in a Web site or video game) on the search page. The designer’s words perfectly captured the intent that drives much of people’s Internet usage: to search for partners, whether sexual or romantic, in the easiest and quickest way possible.
    Social network usage statistics indicate that men and women have different online viewing habits: Two-thirds of the photos viewed on social networks, Harvard researcher Mikolaj Piskorski found, are of women. “Men prefer looking at women they don’t know, followed by looking at women they do know. And women prefer looking at other women they know.” Consumption of men’s photos is proportionally the smallest segment of viewing behavior, suggesting that women are less interested in consuming men’s photos than heterosexual men are interestedin viewing photos of women they’ve never met. In the end, no matter how much we tried, we couldn’t use technology to produce love. Because love, unlike technology and its uses, requires commitment to one, instead of the broadcast and consumption of many bits of distant, digital content. Love doesn’t scale.
    At the time, however, the knowledge and the power and the wealth we were developing would be too intoxicating for us to care about something as unquantifiable as an intimate feeling. We were all, I think, lonely on some level, but the answer wasn’t to find love and another life away from Facebook: The answer was to work harder, scale faster, and get bigger, and love would be waiting for us somewhere at the end. Everyone wanted to be king, first, myself included. The rest could follow.
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    On September 5, 2006, after we had been testing it all summer, Facebook finally released its first and perhaps, to date, most controversial new product: News Feed. Before News Feed, Facebook had been a comparatively discreet book of profiles, maintained and updated individually by each profile owner. News Feed introduced a new homepage where any and all updates to a friend’s profile might appear as a broadcast story,