The Boy Kings

new network was live, I would log in as “The Creator,” the name of our omnipotent test account, to survey our new territory and poke around at the profiles of people joining it. Sometimes, when we logged in, we would update The Creator’s status in words that we imagined the god of Facebook might post. One night I saw that The Creator’s status had been set to “conquering,” and I mentioned it to Thrax over IM. “Is The Creator’s status still set to ‘conquering’?” Thrax, who had posted the status, asked. “The Creator’s status is always set to conquering,” I answered. “Ha ha,” he typed back.
    Becoming a fully fledged member of the engineering team that winter felt, as I long dreamed of doing, like going from being slave to being conqueror. Suddenly, I could arrive at work on my own time, as long as I was working late into the night, because it was assumed that I, like all the engineers, was upholding and advancing a whole new world, even if sometimes we were just sitting around in the office eating snacks and playing games. In engineering, getting to work late was cool, even necessary. It meant, in the ideology of the lone and maverick hacker, that you weren’t beholden to authority, and that you might have been up late coding something brilliant and life-changing and disruptive (even if you were just trolling Facebook or watching porn).Being in engineering wasn’t an escape from the game so much as the ultimate playground.
    The new engineering office we moved to in January 2008 seemed designed to physically reflect that we were hovering atop the world, manipulating it digitally from above. It occupied the top two floors of a 1960s style office building in downtown Palo Alto. The floors had been stripped and customized to the tastes of Facebook engineers. The floors were a hard bamboo, the better for ripstiking on, and the walls were a stark white accented by primary colors of blue and red. (Apparently, Facebook’s original graffiti artist, David Choe, wasn’t available to paint before we moved in.) The desks were arranged around the perimeter of the floor so that a de facto racetrack looped in a long, unbroken oval around the office. There was almost always someone ripstiking on the track, making for a constant sound of wheels on wood and the regular, rhythmic appearance of nearly identical-looking guys in hoodies rolling past my workspace; it was almost like working in the middle of an eighties roller rink, without the big roller skates and even bigger hair.
    The kitchens occupied a large section of each floor, but they were intended for snacking, not cooking (the only cooking device was a microwave). The walls of each kitchen were stacked with bins of every conceivable candy bar and cereal. None of the food seemed like food to me; it was all cased in plastic and preserved to eternity by chemicals that I couldn’t spell, so I made tea instead and snacked on treats from the Japanese pastry shop down the street. I eventually asked if we could receive weekly deliveries of fresh fruit and gourmet cheese and of course, now that I was a product manager, my wish was granted. The engineersdidn’t always eat the fruit and it would often go bad, but I was relieved that the fruit—something organic—was there. It was the only organic matter in an office piled high with every kind of digital device anyone could think of to buy. (Some were provided free: A cabinet on each floor contained every possible technology, from adapters to storage disks to high-end headphones, that we might need to use in our work.) As I watched the delivery men cart crates full of pears and grapes into the office, I felt like I was trolling the boys with fruit, as if in delayed response to Thrax for making fun of me for looking for organic produce in Safeway.
    Amidst all the troll wars and ripstik races that went on in engineering, there was still real work to do. Our task on the internationalization team was to get the site interface translated into as many languages as possible, as quickly as possible. We began the translation process with an idea for an application (which, like most Silicon Valley ideas, was a transmogrification of existing concepts, one of which was the news discussion site Reddit’s voting apparatus) through which users could translate bits of text (called strings, in engineering parlance) on the site into their language. The application fed strings to users and they entered the translation in a