The Boy Kings

been days since the feature launched,but days in Internet time are like weeks in regular time: Even twenty-four hours is enough to put distance between you and an Internet phenomenon. Harry seemed already to have intuited this—that anything that happens online will pass—as he looked placid at the party, just as he had all week while employees were biting their fingernails and attempting to remain calm. Or, perhaps, he simply didn’t care how users felt about News Feed as much as I and some other employees, judging from the strained, worried looks on their faces all week, did.
    Regardless of our feelings about the new technology we had just unleashed on the world, the traumatic events of the week brought us closer to each other, as a battalion must feel after a skirmish, and we huddled in circles chatting, feeling united against our users mobbing us from across the Internet.
    As the sun set on the lawn, we moved to our seats close to the stage. Our VIP treatment enhanced the de facto sense of entitlement that we, as Facebook employees, were beginning to feel. We felt entitled because we had just built a device—News Feed—that replaced the organic word of mouth and socially networked communities that made bands like Dave Matthews popular. A band’s fame spreads when people discover them and start telling friends, but News Feed now made it possible for people to spread their taste in music instantly by listing favorite bands on their profiles. We knew that there would be much power in this. The only thing more powerful than celebrity is to own the tool that makes it.
    However, the Dave Matthews band was of a previous, pre-digitized time: all guitars and instruments, instead of the electronic music that looped constantly in the office. The music wasreal, and the night felt more palpable and present than anything else since those days in August when we had escaped the virtual unreality of Palo Alto for the authentic unreality of Las Vegas. My heart sang a little at the music, at the way everything felt, at the flick of Thrax’s pale hair on my nose as he talked into my ear. It was nice to feel things, rather than watch text and images scroll by. At one point I looked behind us and saw that Rochester, old-time computer geek and valley billionaire twice over, was dancing.
    On the bus back to the office, Thrax and I sat curled up companionably, holding hands, watching the dark Peninsula sky pass by outside the window, but we stopped short of a kiss. “I can’t have a relationship story show up in News Feed,” he explained, and I filed that away in my groggy, battle-scarred head as a perfect statement to summarize what had happened that week. The narratives Facebook wanted to tell about us already had the upper hand, and News Feed had only launched three days ago.
    • • •
    As the winter came and the engineers were consumed by work, racing to build the next wave of features, I retreated into my own hobbies—writing, painting, taking long walks to Stanford’s Lake Lagunita and back—almost forgetting about technology for a while. I left my computer at the office when I went home, and since the company didn’t give customer-support staff BlackBerrys, at the time the smart phone of choice, I still had an old Samsung flip phone that delivered nothing in the way ofdata. When I was away from the office, I was effectively off the grid, though I was still in the heart of it.
    I watched our lives overlap with technology at an ever-increasing pace, as News Feed quickly grew central to people’s sense of their social worlds and smartphones became everyone’s favorite toy, and grew almost nostalgic for the rough edges and unprogrammed contrasts of Baltimore. The whole city of Baltimore is a patchwork of rich and poor, green and gray, black and white, and I missed it. I worried that I was getting soft in the medium sheltered tones of Palo Alto, where no one seemed aware of how dark or how light and beautiful the outside world can be. In Baltimore, the view of all of it—and the corresponding awareness that the world was full of people with different circumstances and experiences, particularly ones less fortunate than your own—was inescapable. In Palo Alto, there were houses, shops, a few offices, and many computers all talking to one another, each pretty much the same as the other. But I knew that the rest of the world was full of people poorer, darker, and less technologically provided for than the engineers