The Boy Kings

were in Palo Alto, and this lack of awareness on their part was draining. Here, it was like we were living in a fantasy of perfect wealth, where everyone was the same and everyone was equal, but everyone was defined as young engineers competing for the same crown.

CHAPTER 5
VIDEO NATION
    B y Facebook’s third birthday in February 2007, the site had 15 million users and the company had at least 150 employees. We had bypassed the famous Dunbar’s number that Mark cited often as an archaic, real-world social limit that Facebook had to succeed in making obsolete. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed in a 1992 article that approximately 150 is the maximum number of people that any individual was able to know and keep up with at a given time. So, as the company sailed past 150 employees, our internal society would be a test of how well Facebook can help us manage social contacts and, in Mark’s words, stay connected, despite our growing number.
    On this February afternoon, the sun flooded the third floor of the office, where administrative assistants were rushing hurriedly to prepare for the party. By three o’clock, the room was festoonedwith blue balloons, blue cakes, and kegs. Employees in navy-blue hoodies that said Facebook across the front—the first of our many unofficial company uniforms, which change whenever the designers concoct a new riff on the Facebook logo, were drinking and playing Beirut on tables set up for the occasion. As at all our parties, professional photographers roamed the room taking pictures of employees practicing their most flattering poses—hand on hip, smile wide, like we were the happiest people in the world. And, at parties like this, we were happy, because we got to do what Facebook did best: enacting and documenting a uniform, unspecific glee, a moment with no larger concerns, in which everyone smiles on command, with nothing to fear from the ever-present cameras and their incessant need to document us.
    I had a specific reason for my happiness, beyond Facebook’s birthday and the almost parental relief I felt that the enterprise we had all been working tirelessly on was entering its third year. Whatever this toddler network was, and intended to be, it was going to be huge, I was sure. I was also ecstatic because in four hours I would be taking my first long vacation since I began working at Facebook. I would be boarding a flight to Rio de Janeiro, back to Ipanema and its glorious beaches, and away from all of the digitally prompted smiling and poking and constant virtual coddling. For the past four Spartan months of work, I was completely dedicated to Facebook’s cause, but also saving every penny in order to spend three weeks away. At some atavistic level, I missed a world where everything wasn’t planned for me, where things weren’t always new and gray and clean, where I was forced to be present in the flesh, confronted with situations I couldn’t preview and manage remotely.
    I bought the cheapest ticket to Brazil I could find, a five-hundred-thirty-dollar round-trip ticket on Taca Airlines, on a Southwest-sized 737 that was too small to make the full journey to the southern hemisphere and had to stop in Panama to refuel. As we winged out of SFO and onward toward the tropics that night, the flight became turbulent and children on the plane screamed in Portuguese for hours. I remembered the story Micaela told one night at a Palo Alto bar about when she and Sam were children and flew between Army bases on planes with nothing but seatbelts tethering them to the floor, and that they cheered whenever there was an exciting patch of turbulence and wished for more. While I wasn’t afraid of flying to Brazil by myself, I wasn’t fearless enough to cheer on this roller-coaster ride far above the Amazon. It’s funny how we choose what we are going to be afraid of. I can wander the streets of any city alone, but quiver at the thought of jumping blithely off rainforest waterfalls like the Hopkins surfer boys did on my previous trip to Brazil. It made me think of the computer hackers, who fear nothing when it comes to waging war on other people’s virtual property, but cringe at the idea of exploring unfamiliar urban climes.
    “Why aren’t you going to Brazil with Kate?” Sam asked Thrax, vaguely accusingly, over IM, as I watched. Sam, Thrax, Justin, and Emile were all freaked out that I was going to Brazil alone, without friends or Facebook people (which was basically the same