The Boy Kings

and my Brazilian warmth was gone: I conducted myself blank-faced, keeping conversations at work to a cold minimum, saving the information transmission for email, IM, and Facebook. I was back.
    Still, having been away from it, I was more unnerved now by the office’s intense devotion to the screen, so I lay low, finding a shallow substitute for the Brazilian sea by moving to a new apartment building with a pool, still within the mile. I could barely afford it but I felt, after Brazil, that a pool was necessary, as though it could fix things, if only because the splashing water wasn’t safe for technology. The apartment was in a 1920s Mission-style building called the Casa Real whose Craigslist listing promised that it was once the home of the rich and famous of Palo Alto, though at the time it was a poorly maintained, overpriced money factory like all the other apartment complexes in town. The fact that I lived at the Casa Real is an irony that is not lost on me. Real in this case meant “royal,”but in the heart of the city that aims to digitize our lives, I interpreted it differently.
    That spring, I noticed that one of the designers, Ariston, a soccer-playing Duke graduate who was fanatical about movies and talked about wanting to make feature films one day after his Facebook millions were secured, was frequently updating his status on Facebook with the word motion . He was telling us all something, virtually, loudly, but in code. Motion, I found out late one night at the office while talking to Emile and Thrax, was the code name for what would be known as Video, a project that Ariston and Thrax were developing on their own, without Mark’s direction or consent. Typically, in order for a Facebook feature to be developed, it had to be part of the product road-map, which was a six-months-out plan that was overseen and approved by Mark and that determined what products would be built and when and who would work on them. In this case, Thrax and Ariston didn’t care to wait for the roadmap to catch up to them: They wanted Video, and they wanted it as soon as possible, so late at night they sneaked into the screen- and blanket-laden room off the engineering floor and built Video.
    Years later, the building of Video would be described in a Facebook recruiting advertisement as a “brilliant hack” that proved how maverick and self-directed the engineers were. But, in truth, making Facebook Video was not a radical disruption so much as it was, like most of Silicon Valley’s products, an evolution and combination of various existing products, an obvious next step for the company’s suite of technologies. After all, video already existed on YouTube, which was founded by a former Facebook employee who had left a month before I started,and on the streaming video site that Thrax had already built in college. The fact that Facebook later used the story of Video’s maverick origins as a recruiting tool shows how the making of Video was a culturally vital act of rebellion for Facebook; you can’t claim the identity of a hacker company if your engineers aren’t breaking any rules.
    So, while Thrax and Ariston did not invent video, they were compelled to bring it to the company and claim it as Facebook’s own (like all of Facebook’s products, such as Photos, the product was simply and grandly called Video, as if it were the one and only). Their compulsion wasn’t just to disobey orders and build something they weren’t supposed to, but, in the spirit of the company, to strive toward a monopoly. The would-be kings did not come to Facebook to only half digitize the world, to own a record of text and still images. They wanted to own moving images. They wanted to see everything. They wanted to film everything. They wanted no limitation on the documentation and distribution of our lives, or the degree to which they could access the lives of others. And finally, perhaps, they wanted to be stars, by building the technology so that they could make the movies that would make them and everyone around them stars. As if to drive this home, the Facebook Video frame was fashioned in the form of a movie screen: wide and black, as though we were watching ourselves in a theater. If there was anything prescient about this in 2007, it was that the world wasn’t yet in a place where everyone wanted to use technology to make them a star.
    In fact, the idea that building this technology could make you visible to the world like a