The Boy Kings

possible to hurt people faster, more efficiently, with less cost to themselves. It removes any sense of direct responsibility for our behavior, for how what we do makes others feel. With Facebook, you can act and be seen acting without ever having to look anyone who is watching you in the eye, or look at them at all.
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    In a tense All Hands meeting a day after the News Feed launch, Mark, responding to employee fears that we had badly alienated users to the point of fleeing the site, predicted that the controversy would settle. Four days later, it became clear that he was right. To mollify users and perhaps also anxious employees, executives, and VCs, Mark consented to the addition of privacy controls that allowed users control over what profile updates could appear in a News Feed story.
    But, in this, as in future cases, the users got over it. They had to; they had no choice, and we knew it. The only competitor of Facebook in 2006 was MySpace, and MySpace didn’t even count,with its hard-to-read, glittery fonts, wildly decorated pages, and absence of technical advancement. When people asked us, “How are you going to beat MySpace?” we acted as if we didn’t even hear the question, looking off into the distance in the manner of Mark, who was asked to answer this question often by press and investors. “They are doing something different,” he would say, and, by that, it sounded like he meant, “They don’t even matter to us.” MySpace’s focus on individual self-expression in a clunky, technically primitive interface was not where the Internet was going, in Mark’s parlance. The Internet was heading in the direction of replicating not just individual identities but the relationships between individuals—or maybe, ambitiously, the entire social world as such—and Facebook was already doing that better and more comprehensively than any other service.
    As if they knew that employees desperately needed a release after our week of doing battle in the social-media trenches, the company obtained tickets for all of us to go to a Dave Matthews concert. I didn’t even like Dave Matthews that much, but it was with relief that I left the office early that Friday to dress for the concert and put accusations of technological “rape” and “betrayal” out of my mind. I picked out one of my old college-style outfits, as if willing myself back on campus studying literature, instead of serving as an accidental private in a social-networking war.
    In keeping with the camp-cum-college atmosphere of the company, our party planners always arranged for buses to transport us directly from the office to company parties and back. In a small gesture of resistance, Sam and I would always go to the dive bar across the street (it was divey by Palo Alto standards, atleast, with plain décor, lower prices, and an Erotic Photo Hunt machine that we played often on breaks from work) for a grownup Manhattan, dark with whiskey and bitters, before boarding the bus like so many teenagers headed to prom night. Like everything anyone at the company did, our archaic preference for whiskey over vodka would be immortalized in a Facebook group, called the “Society for Anachronistic Alcohol,” which was created by Harry, a saxophone-playing engineer whom Rochester brought in from his former company. The group name itself became anachronistic, because in two years everyone would be drinking whiskey, thanks to Mad Men and the emergent pop culture of vintage masculinity.
    Facebook had rented a VIP area for us at Shoreline Amphitheater, Silicon Valley’s concert venue, which sits in a stale-smelling bog across from Google headquarters. This was the first such designation for most of us, and it felt exciting. VIP-ness was something that someone else, more important and with more money, always had, but now we were skipping the lines and walking directly to our own private area, where we could observe regular concertgoers from behind a fence and, in turn, be observed. The whole point of VIP treatment, it seems, is to speak to our universal human desire to feel special, valuable, desired: And to have something that others don’t. When we were VIPs, as Thrax might have put it, it is time for everyone else to be the left-out ones.
    In the VIP section, we milled about, talking to each other while drinking wine or beer from the open bar and, mostly, feeling relieved that we were no longer in the throes of the News Feed tumult. It had only