The Boy Kings

celebrity, or even turn you into a celebrity, didn’t really occur to me then. In 2007, Facebook stillseemed as though it was gaining value precisely by being private, by showing you what you would have seen anyway offline: the intimate lives of people you were already intimate with, private moments that you had participated in. Mass fame seemed like the confused pursuit of actors in another medium: reality television. At the time, the only people I was connected to on Face-book were people that I knew and with whom I shared real-life social experiences. I couldn’t fathom yet why you would want everyone, even people you’ve never really known, to know you.
    To me, Facebook Video was just another gadget to play with, but a little gratuitous at that point, technology for technology’s sake. The test videos Thrax uploaded overnight as he built the product seemed to make this point over and over: They were scenes from an empty, dark office, scenes of faces flickering at the camera, saying nothing, fiddling with their floppy hair. Nothing happened in them and I wondered what impulse caused him to click record. Why this moment and not the one five minutes later? I always wondered that when I saw that a new video had been posted.
    The lack of action or purpose in the test videos perfectly represented the motivation behind these projects: to technologize everything, just to say that we did. The televising and digitization of private life was the new colonialism: without any continents left to explore and own, private life had become the last frontier. “Television Rules the Nation,” a hidden quote that Thrax and Ariston inserted in the header of the Facebook Video page, was visible only to those who knew to highlight it with their cursors. When everyone would be using Facebook, the technologists would have captured life itself, all the momentsin our lives that used to be belong only to the people who lived them. To own not the physical map of the world but the map of human life was, I began to think, the goal.
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    As a woman and a customer support employee I was expected, for the most part, to follow the engineers’ leads, because we were a technical company and this implied that what we were doing required technical skills. The trouble was that I also embodied Facebook’s ethos of rebellion all too well, and there was no role available, at the time, for a woman who broke the rules. I did my job and accomplished my goals, but beyond that I didn’t feel compelled to fall in line. I knew that if I simply did everything I was told, I would not be of any interest to Mark, who preferred employees who were slightly dangerous, like the cyberpunk characters in the 1990s movie Hackers that he and many other engineers referenced often. I decided I would develop my own project, off the grid, and in a nontechnical capacity.
    While Thrax was building Motion/Video, Sam and I stayed up late some nights to prepare and launch Facebook networks in other countries. First, I would have to gather all the metadata about university networks abroad (like the names of schools, their locations, and their web domains, which we would use to authenticate students as legitimate members of their school’s Facebook network). Then, Sam would run a script he had written that would build the networks and check for any issues before declaring them live and ready for registrations. Once the networks had been launched on a given night, usually aroundmidnight or one o’clock in the morning, we would toast to our new territories. On the Watch Page, a page Dustin developed that allowed us to see how many Facebook users were registered in any given Facebook network, we would observe as users instantly began signing up for the new networks we had created. Next to the name of each network, a count depicting its number of users would steadily mount upward, first in the single digits, then growing into the hundreds. If we were doing really well, it could reach into the thousands overnight.
    Building new networks abroad was fun and independently motivated, a very Facebook thing to do in the company’s developing corporate mythos of the self-starting employee, and good for the site’s growth. As such, our work was to be rewarded. However, as in any corporate hierarchy, any time people went around the rules at Facebook, it unsettled middle management. “You are doing an excellent job in customer support, but I’ve noticed that you are working