The Boy Kings

accomplishment after years of struggle and a sense that nothing was ever quite whole. In the previous three weeks, I had finished the Japanese and Italian Facebook, and even gotten a bit of a tan from walking around Rome. What’s not to like? Facebook’s cognitive dissonance was dissolving, for me at least: What they promised to the engineers, I—a woman, a nonengineer, a humanist, a writer—could have, too, and it could be fun. On my Air France flight back to Los Angeles, I thought of nothing but home: palm trees, sundresses, good Mexican food, the southwestern United States. Everything was finally coming together.
    • • •
    Even the fact that Air France lost my luggage on a layover at Charles de Gaulle Airport didn’t ruin my bliss: It was April 24,2008, time for Coachella again, and, as we had been saying on Facebook since 2005, I’m going to Coachella, bitches. In the only outfit I had, an ensemble that I had been wearing for at least thirty-six hours, I jumped into a rented Jeep and drove toward Palm Springs, in love with the desert dust, gritty and real, and the sun, bigger than it ever gets in northern California. The desert was my territory, prickly and warm and endlessly beautiful. Away from the thirty-inch monitors and endless nervous distraction of the Internet, I could live. I sang along to the bouncy Akon songs that played on the radio, more exuberant evidence that I was home in the United States, where our culture is hybrid and poppy, without history, perpetually new.
    Since, as the logic of technology dictates, we must always be upgrading, Thrax had found a new house this year, bigger and grander than last year’s, although there still weren’t enough beds. It was a classic Palm Springs midcentury modern with a tennis court and a hot tub and at least three bedrooms. I hoped that I wouldn’t have to sleep under the coffee table as I had the year before. But, after parking the Jeep in the driveway and entering the house, greeted by a mirrored wet bar already stocked with booze and backed by glass doors looking onto the pool and the desert, I didn’t care anymore. I could sleep outside on the pool chaises if I had to: In the desert, I was home.
    Later, sitting on the pool deck, taking in the huge purplish-blue sky, Thrax asked, sans camera for once, about my flight from Rome, not whether it was a good flight but what class I flew in. “Did you fly business class?”
    “Yep,” I said. “Aw, yeah!” he cawed, “it’s official!” In his eyes, my status at the company had finally been recognized. It was funny but not untrue, Iguess, that flying business class, more than joining engineering, constituted proof that I had arrived. It was one thing for Face-book to ask me to get the site translated, it was another to buy me a nine-thousand-dollar plane ticket to Tokyo and another eight-thousand-dollar ticket to Rome and an eight-thousand-dollar return ticket to Los Angeles. The last month of my life—according to my travel receipts stashed away somewhere in my purse—cost Facebook more than my entire salary the year before. In Silicon Valley, you have to know that you are worth it to them, and money is the language they speak. Companies have valuations, as they are called, but so do employees, in the form of salary and perks and status, minute decisions made each day about where employees will sit and what they can get away with and what team they’ll be on. It’s simply that an employee’s worth is not so explicitly stated by monetary value; it’s all these things together.
    As always, our days at Coachella passed like some kind of American Apparel–sponsored shaman journey that we shared with thirty thousand other people. The goal was to get from the car to the grounds to the sets we wanted to see, all without losing ourselves in the heat and the crowds. When, each night, we managed to find our way out of the trampled fields and to the car and home again we felt as if we had reached an oasis after a trek across the Sahara.
    On Saturday night, we skipped the last headlining band and reached the parking lot early, having learned the year before that you have to have an escape plan. (In 2007 we didn’t have one, so we had to hack our way out of the parking lot by finding a hole in the bushes big enough to drive through.) Our conversation inthe car turned to how hungry we were and the fact that no one had eaten since our late breakfast at a roadside taco stand, so we turned off the