The Boy Kings

outside the department,” Andreas told me in a performance review that spring, his eyes narrowing, wanting me to be afraid. He was more concerned with maintaining company hierarchy than, as the rest of us were, getting critical work done by any means necessary. It’s possible he didn’t stop to think that the networks abroad needed to be launched in order to build momentum for Facebook’s growth outside the United States. While Andreas didn’t understand this, Dustin did: One night, when I was hanging out with Sam at his desk on the engineering floor, Dustin tacitly encouraged us to launch more networks. “He’s your boy,” Dustin said to me, gesturing to Sam. He knew that the company had lucked out with us: We were doing work without his even having to ask. This, like Thraxmaking Video, was the startup dream: that the product you are making is so compelling that your employees will advance it in their sleep, or at least in the time when they should be sleeping.
    So, I nodded and pretended to listen while my manager chastised me, and then, late at night, continued to launch new networks with Sam anyway. This dissonance between upper and middle management is what happens when you work for a company like Facebook, which is simultaneously about control and the dismantling of control. Facebook wanted to disrupt the market without having its own order disrupted, to perpetually change and break things without allowing its users the same privilege. Internally, it was the same: Engineers were tacitly encouraged to break rules while the rest of the company had to follow them, unless they had some tricks of their own. The people in the company who could get around this paradox were the ones who could social it (the short term for social engineering, or hacking one’s way around something using social means) by breaking the right rules and, above all, remaining popular, and in doing so riding all the inherent corporate contradictions as far as they would take them. Facebook’s work environment, like much of Silicon Valley, and even like the Internet itself, was always about power: about maximizing your own power while conceding as little of it to others as you could.
    • • •
    Maybe as reward for my labor or maybe because he just happened to have an extra ticket, in April 2007 Dustin bestowed a ticket to the Coachella music festival on me. All of my friends at thecompany were going, but at three hundred dollars per ticket plus three days of lodging expenses, sadly, I didn’t have the money to go. So, when Dustin gave me the ticket I felt like Cinderella with the glass slipper: I could go to the ball in the desert. I hadn’t left Palo Alto since my trip to Brazil two months earlier and I was, as always, anxious to leave—light and heat and live music were as essential to me as coding and Python (the preferred programming language in the valley) were to my coworkers.
    As the sun was going down over Palo Alto, Justin, Emile, and Thrax picked me up in Justin’s Honda (later, everyone drove Audis, but no one had that kind of money yet, so mostly we drove practical Japanese sedans) at my apartment for the long drive to Coachella. We always did everything at night, since everything in the valley was cooler and more vital in the dark, and driving was no exception. We would be in the car for six hours, traveling past garlic-scented Gilroy and onward to the flat dreariness of the I-5 and, finally, outward to Palm Springs. I assumed that we would sit and talk and listen to music like my friends and I always did on the drives to Los Angeles from Phoenix, but this was a different time and a different kind of road trip. As we drove into the darkness of the I-5, computers and gadgets started to come out of custom-made Facebook messenger bags and were turned on.
    While I was resting against the headrest in the backseat, trying to sleep, I saw the telltale glow through my eyelids of the laptop screen bobbing in front of me. “Noooo, not again, not here,” I thought. I understood the constant presence of photos and video at parties but in the car? While I was sleeping? “Kate’s going to hate me forever,” Thrax said to the screen, turning it onme, “Talk.” The video camera on his MacBook Pro was recording my nap, which was now over. It was my job to perform. So, I talked about nothing into the camera, addressing Jamie, who was sitting at home watching us on Facebook from his sandbox. Sandboxes were testing areas that