The Boy Kings

which we could feel more authentically ourselves, together, like every new model of social organization has attempted to engender since history can remember. However, as I gradually started to ascend the ranks that year, living in its virtual reality, I began to wonder whether to make a love story out of Facebook might be, despite our desire that it be so, impossible.
    In some ways, Facebook’s early years had all the makings of a bright, shimmering tale: an odd assortment of smart and dedicated people thrown together to try and figure out the parameters of a new platform, a better way for people to communicate. I wanted what I assumed everyone wanted: to bring people closer, to share important information faster, and to make everyone feel less alone. And, because most celebrated people at Facebook were, technically, if not intuitively, smart, and we all seemed to believe in the same things—in making something new—I thought it might work. I wanted the world to be better than before. I wanted to help people. If there was a big paycheck waiting for you at the end, I wanted it to be an incidental outcome of the revolutionary work we did together.
    Now, two years in, I wasn’t sure what was really happening with the burgeoning social media craze and its associated new forms of instant, distant interaction. What I was seeing was that social websites were playing upon the biggest open and unsolved wound in our society: the need to be known, the need to be loved. It was unclear if they were meeting this need. This need is so naked, so huge: In a society in which we are wage workers and paying customers more than we are members of a community, we yearn to be understood and loved for who we really are. Wewant people to see us, to care, to need us as we need them, to be there. But, more often than not, in our scattered communities of strip malls and subdivisions, they don’t and they aren’t. We move too much, and even when we are near, we are easily estranged, whether by work or leisure or now, technology, making it ever more possible to communicate without laying eyes on each other.
    As Facebook and the social Internet grew ever bigger, I wondered whether what we were building was fixing our loneliness, or just becoming another addiction, like the social games that would soon begin to be pumped out by Zynga and others, that dull or distract us from deeper feeling. I was not sure if we were enabling love or its illusion.
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    In summer 2007, the launch and overnight success of the Facebook Platform, and the influx of cheap, viral applications it created, wasn’t the only thing that was changing. By this point, the company had grown to almost three hundred employees. Most of these were engineers, in keeping with the site’s philosophy of technical primacy, along with larger and larger numbers of customer-support employees hired to keep up with user growth. In June 2007, I was promoted to a customer-support training and quality manager, which meant that I was responsible for bringing new employees on board and teaching them all the ways of Facebook site administration. My promotion yielded me a raise to a salary that was about half what engineers were making on average, and a shiny new Facebook-purchased BlackBerry, which Andreas brought into my one-on-one meeting and pusheddramatically toward me across the desk, as if bestowing upon me some mystical, valuable gift direct from the king himself. I tried to act appropriately excited about the BlackBerry, but Andreas didn’t know that Sam and I had been making skeptical fun of technologies and their talismanic quality in Silicon Valley for months. Skeptical or not, I would now have my own technology to consult at any moment.
    Being on salary meant that I could be asked to work longer hours, so Andreas began scheduling me to come in on Saturdays to conduct intense training sessions with rookie customer-support representatives. At one of these Saturday morning sessions that summer, I was teaching the reps how to repair a Facebook account problem and I had my laptop projected onto the wall so everyone could see what I was doing on my screen. My instant-message client was on, and Thrax began a conversation, which, as they often tended to do, veered toward the topic of his penis. This was one of his favorite topics, in addition to anything digital, to discuss on Facebook and off with friends and coworkers. I quickly minimized the chat window and, after letting the