The Boy Kings

with a headline and accompanying photographs. Your friends’ activities on Facebook were now news, and your homepage was a kind of social newspaper.
    However controversial, the News Feed was new, and whatever is new or new-seeming (because most so-called innovations in Silicon Valley are combinations of other products and ideas)must be built, launched, and used by as many people as can be convinced to use it. So, News Feed was launched to all users, in one fell swoop. I stayed up until midnight the night before the launch, lying on my bed in my bare room, to watch as the product was pushed out. Back then, we always pushed at midnight, since that was when traffic was lowest and all engineers were awake. One minute the homepage was blank, boring, harmless, safe. The next minute it was full of stories, of what someone was doing now, of a new friendship made, of a relationship ended. The automated literature of our lives had begun.
    If my early response to the product that summer was one of unease, users reacted with an entirely different magnitude of distress. The day we launched News Feed felt, without exaggeration, like a minor Vietnam, complete with helicopters and reporters circling the office to videotape the protesters who threatened to appear in our courtyard. I arrived at the office feeling jittery and gun-shy, having lain awake all night wondering what the reaction would be when college students on the East Coast woke up to find that their lives had been serialized overnight.
    Email after email of the thousands we received that day told graphically of the betrayal and evisceration the users felt. Phrases like “I feel violated,” and “You’ve ruined my life” were common, and the emails were long and passionate, filled with all the personal details and drama that they felt Facebook had exposed without warning. “I just broke up with my girlfriend yesterday and thanks to your ‘News Feed’ everyone on campus saw a story about it this morning! How would you like it if people started publishing stories about your life without telling you?” one user howled.
    I did nothing all day but sit at my desk reading the agonized emails and responding to them with a stock, impassive answer along these lines: “This information was already available to your friends on Facebook; we’re just delivering it more efficiently.” Sometimes, I modified the stock response with an acknowledgment of the user’s story and feelings, just to sound a bit more human, like I cared, which I did, because at some basic, human level, I sympathized with their feelings. If I hadn’t known the News Feed was coming, I would have been shocked and upset, too.
    As the day progressed and the email continued to flood in, I started to feel brutalized myself: The pain, anger, confusion, and shock expressed by the users was real, even if the product itself meant no harm. By midnight, there were still thousands of emails in the queue, and it became clear that we were never going to get through them all. As always, there was a technical solution: With the click of a button, Jake blasted the stock News Feed response email to everyone who had written in that day, whether their query had to do with News Feed or not. I left the office and wandered home down Palo Alto’s empty Hamilton Street, bleary-eyed and emotionally battered, looking forward to losing consciousness in sleep.
    I suppose that the users’ shock at News Feed stemmed, in addition to the feeling of being suddenly exposed, from a sense that, overnight, without warning, their online presences had gone from static profiles to live-updating digital characters, put in narrative form for others’ enjoyment. Were they ready to be characters dancing perpetually in the virtual courtyard of Face-book’s Hotel California for our friends’ entertainment? Whether or not they were ready, it had happened.
    This was always the case with social-media technology: It meant no harm, but that did not mean that it would not cause it. This is how technology is pure, and this is why people love it so much. Ascribing intentionality or an emotional impact to a piece of technology or what it does is impossible, and the product that is built mediates between the intentions of its creators and its users. Technology is the perfect alibi. Facebook doesn’t hurt people: People hurt people. This is true. But just as Facebook makes it possible to do things faster, more efficiently, more cheaply, it makes it