The Boy Kings

exhaustion, too tired to continue the party into the early hours of the morning, as many Coachella concertgoers do. There weren’t enough bedrooms for all of us, and Chase’s group had done the work of renting the house, so they got the rooms and Emile, Thrax, Justin, and I slept on blankets on the floor. As we were nodding off to sleep at around two in the morning, Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and early Facebook employee, who had left the company weeks after I got there but was still friends with Chase, knocked at the door with what Chase later told me was a doctor’s bag full of drugs, which everyone politely declined. Standard methods of being bad, like doing drugs, seemed inefficient and superfluous to us. The real drama was in the way we were changing everything, the way the whole world would relate to one another, so fast, without anyone knowing it yet. This, not actual drugs, was what got us high. For the rest of the night, I drifted in and out of sleep on the scratchy Persian rug, my feet occasionally accidentally kicking Justin or Emile, while Chase and Sean talked on and on.
    • • •
    On a hot May afternoon, a few weeks later, I was sitting in the back seat of Thrax’s BMW, waiting for him to emerge from his apartment. Ariston, Thrax, and I were driving to San Francisco to see a band. Thrax finally came out of his building and walked to the car, slowly, because he was, of course, filming. Heopened the car door and settled the camera on Ariston, whose beatifically wide smile stretched an inch wider for the camera. “Heyyy, Thrax,” he said, almost flirtatiously. “Glad you brought that thing,” referring to the camera. “Ha ha, of course, dude, of course,” Thrax replied.
    I noticed that when they were filming they spoke more intimately with one another. Perhaps it was because they were speaking not just to each other but to an audience that must be seduced. Technology was, as always, the alibi. But the camera didn’t really protect them: It picked up every lilt in their voice, every tinge of desire. I suppose we must seduce our viewing audience because nobody came to Facebook to be unknown, uncelebrated, alone. They came to build something that would make them larger versions of themselves that would create fame and propagate it to everyone, everywhere. This was a new fame factory, and we were flirting not just with each other but with fame, with the idea that, someday, if we played our cards right, everyone would be watching.
    Thrax turned the camera on me where I sat in the backseat. I was wearing my favorite terrycloth hoodie, which was almost a piece of armor at that point, a thin form of resistance to our new, constant state of video surveillance. My face was in shadow but my smile is bright, teeth gleaming digitally on the video that will live online forever. I declared to the camera, “Video nation,” because that is what we were going to become. Facebook’s user numbers were mounting quickly that April, reaching 20 million, our international networks were beginning to grow, and video would soon be launched. Thrax laughed with delight. “Video nation,” he concurred, and cut the scene.

CHAPTER 6
THE MIRAGE
    F acebook is a technical company,” Mark began saying with increasing frequency at All Hands meetings in the spring of 2007, as we prepared for a new wave of product launches. It was a mantra that he wanted us all to memorize and repeat as often as possible to anyone who would listen. At first, I wondered what the force of this insistence was: why technical, and not social ? If the product was about people, why was it important to say technical over and over?
    Talking to various engineers about this, I discovered that Mark’s point was to differentiate Facebook from other web companies for purposes of recruiting. “Good engineers will only work at a company that grants privileges to the technical people,” they explained. “They need to know that theirideas and decisions will be considered primary, and not those of marketing or business guys.” The unmentioned competitor in this conversation was MySpace, which, in March 2007, had more than one hundred million users to Facebook’s 20 million but, nevertheless, remained an object of scorn. In the technical world, MySpace was considered a mere shell for spam, a skeleton social network built by an email marketing company rather than an engineering company. Because its parent company, Intermix Media, was based in Los