The Boy Kings

applications, women did not have to consent to have their photographs used by the application. The application would alight upon your data and feed it into its database whether you wanted to be judged or not.
    Sometimes, that year, I got a sick feeling in my stomach that I didn’t want this world in which we are all ranked virtually, by virtual strangers, on the basis of popularity and appearance. Even worse, I felt like I might not have a choice in the matter. I didn’t want it to be like this: I wanted us to make things better, not worse, for humanity and, especially, for women. I thought that more information would be helpful, not realizing that information as defined by these engineers was not value free. There were different kinds of information that we could be exchanging and receiving but, instead, we were learning about how pretty people were and whether people liked them, and how much. The world the boys were building was as weighted against the less powerful as much as the analog one they seemed to want to disrupt and leave behind.
    • • •
    On a flat, dry Friday in July I boarded a Southwest flight to Las Vegas for Thrax’s birthday, happy as always to escape Palo Alto, if only for one night. I didn’t care that I was about to spend my last five hundred dollars for what was basically a bachelor party without the wedding. I had been teetering financially for so longthat this kind of budgetary risk just seemed normal. Besides, the cult of money and power that we belonged to was only getting deeper and bigger. I may have only had five hundred dollars in the bank, but there was an iceberg of money building under us all in the form of the stock options that we were all vesting month by month. The stock options still had very little value, as there was no public market for them yet, but, by May 2007, the site had grown past 24 million users, had 40 billion page views per month, and was already the sixth-most-trafficked site in the United States. As Facebook’s potential to IPO became steadily more secure, though we knew it would be years off, it felt a little like we were all fronts for something else, faces of some future that hadn’t yet been realized.
    The year before, when Thrax and Sam and I had played at being high rollers at the dinner table at the Palms, it all felt adorable and twee, a grand lark, like we were Silicon Valley’s version of starlets about to get discovered. Now I wasn’t sure; things were more serious, less playful, heavier than before. Facebook was growing steadily bigger, but my doubts about the new digital world we were all beginning to live in were growing too. But, regardless of how I felt about the big picture, I had been at Face-book long enough, almost two years, that I knew I too had to win, regardless of what it cost.
    A man sitting next to me on the plane took my mind off my brooding by buying me a gin and tonic from the always cheerful Southwest flight attendants, whose jokes on the PA system became bawdier the closer we got to Las Vegas. We toasted to the fact that in an hour we’d land at McCarran Airport, the gateway for so many unrepentant sinners longing for release into Las Vegas’sbacchanalian excess. As we sipped our drinks and watched the red desert pass by underneath us, he told me about his job at a company in San Jose, which manufactured the security keys that we used to authenticate ourselves when we administered Facebook. In a way, we were in the same business: His job was to authenticate my employee identity, and my job was to authenticate his social identity. In the Internet’s turn from anarchy to being a proxy version of real life, authentication was becoming big business.
    The plane landed and we were released into the temple of tackiness that is the mirrored McCarran airport and the city it serves. The first blast of heat on leaving the terminal was liberating, soaking into my skin with an intensity that both awakened and calmed me. In the taxi line, I ran into a business development guy from Facebook whose movie-star good looks were widely considered to be the reason that he was hired, perhaps in addition to his Stanford MBA and whatever actual smarts he had. He was also there for the party, so we shared a cab to the Mirage Hotel and Casino. While he checked us in at the hotel desk, I stood on the busy carpet and watched enormous fish swim in the floor-to-ceiling tanks that line the lobby. As the fish watched me from the water I was not sure