The Boy Kings

began calling smartphones “technologies,” refusing to differentiate between all the different versions like the Bold, the Pearl, and the Curve, that were being released as fast as RIM (and, very soon, Apple, with its iPhone, which first went on sale in late June 2007) could make them. “Use your technology,” we would say when we needed to call someone or get driving directions. Soon some of the other engineers were calling their phones “technologies,” too, either not realizing or not caring that we were gently mocking their and the company’s obsessions.
    While I made no secret of the fact that I found technologyto be as silly as it sometimes could be useful, I knew that I was still expendable, especially in the age of the technical company and the purge. My thoughts about Sam’s conversation about the upcoming Vegas trip with Jamie, which I kept to myself, had to do with the Harvard guys’ paradoxical cluelessness about the very things that they claimed to know most about: money and power. Their success in life, achieved in their teens or earlier, blinded them, I suppose. They assumed everyone had the same chances in life, the same easy path to wealth, where knowing just a little more about gadgetry than everyone else went a very long way.
    Despite the fact that I was the poorest guest invited to the birthday party (everyone else was an engineer) by millions of dollars, I agreed to buy a two-hundred-dollar, round-trip Southwest ticket to Las Vegas for one day of partying. I figured that I’d just drink cocktails beforehand at the hotel instead of throwing hundreds of dollars at bottle service. Not going to Vegas for Thrax’s birthday wasn’t really an option. I was the only girl who was considered one of the boys. They needed me there, a female presence, an anchor around which they could keep oriented and keep things from spinning wildly out of balance. I felt like we were always in danger of that, as if with a little nudge, the entire enterprise, social and business, could veer out of control, fast. We had too much power, and very few checks on that power.
    One day, at around this time, one of the Harvard guys posted a screenshot in News Feed of a new application that he, Thrax, and Emile were developing. It was not an official Facebook application. It was intended to be released as a platform application, meaning that users could add the application to their profiles ifthey wanted to, but that they didn’t have to. I could see from the screenshot that the application was called “Judgebook,” and that its purpose was for Facebook users to rate female users on their appearance. The screenshot showed two women’s Facebook profile pictures, set side by side, with a space for the viewer to input a score for each. The tagline of the app was, “ Judgebook.com : never judge a {face}book by her cover,” which hardly made any sense, but the photos side by side made clear what the words couldn’t: This was a way for men on Facebook to explicitly judge women’s looks and assign them a score. For what? I thought, but then I remembered that Mark’s Facemash application, which predated Facebook as his first popular Harvard site, was based on the same concept. The difference was that to make Facemash Mark had to steal students’ photographs from the Harvard servers (for which he was famously disciplined by the university administration), but in Judgebook’s case, the photos were already there on Facebook, submitted by users themselves.
    In another screenshot in the same album, the Harvard engineer posted a screenshot of the domain names he had purchased to host the application: Judgebook.com and Prettyorwitty.com . It was like Mark’s comment at the barbecue about having to choose between a girl who looks like a model or is smart, all over again, only in web application form. You could either be pretty or you could be witty and, in either case, you would definitely be judged and scored and rated. It was at moments like these that I realized it was the great and twisted genius of Facebook for anyone who was interested in rating things constantly, as Mark and the engineers who made these types of applications seemed to love doing. Facebook made it possible for men to have endlessphotographs of women available for judging, and women simply by being on Facebook became fodder for the judging, like so many swimsuit models at a Miss America pageant. Because, with Judgebook, like all Facebook platform