The Boy Kings

compartmentalized just like in the American institutions we had wanted to leave behind.
    • • •
    Fortunately, my job kept me traveling for the rest of the year, bringing me back to Palo Alto only long enough to get lonelyagain before I could pack for some new and exciting destination. I was in Dublin for work on September 29, 2008, when the stock market crashed, and I spent the night in a bar at the Four Seasons Hotel, reading news of the crash on my laptop as piano music tinkled in the background. While checking Facebook, I received an invitation to a group created by a designer called “Party like it’s 1929,” that bore the description “If we’re going down, might as well go down in style.”
    That night, I also received an email that Dustin had sent to the engineering team announcing that he would soon be leaving Facebook to, as everyone always said when they left, pursue new things. Noooooooo, I broke immediately into a silent wail, my eyes tearing up, not quite realizing until that moment how much I had depended on Dustin to be the company’s witty, practical, human counterpart to Mark. “Daddy Dustin,” Sam and I had sometimes jokingly called him, since we all sensed that Dustin was the one most likely to listen to us if we had a problem, or needed to talk to someone in power. I ended the night by writing a Facebook message to Dustin to express my gratitude to him simply for having been there, though I had never called on him directly, then went to sleep in my hotel room as the lights of Dublin twinkled coldly in the night.
    Whenever I landed in some city, fresh from business class and flush with my Facebook expense account, I had the precious experience of being anonymous, free, unlinked to a hierarchy that I didn’t control. I started to revel in that freedom, purchased ironically by a site that would like to remove anonymity from everything. “In the future, when you check in to a hotel it will know what music you want to play and who your friends are,based on your Facebook profile,” I used to tell people in my prior job as platform product marketing manager, to tout the possibilities of the platform and its promise that we could have our friends and our likes with us, at least virtually, all the time. But, in truth, I was almost happier escaping to places where no one knew me.
    Several times, when I was not scheduled to make a business trip, I made the one-hour hop to Las Vegas for the night and checked into a hotel, in love with the glittering anonymity the city affords, the sense that no one on the Strip knows who anyone else is: There are too many people and too many nooks and crannies in all the casinos for anyone but the casinos’ eyes in the sky to keep track of. Real friendship and intimacy are beautiful and necessary, I knew, but I was starting to wonder exactly who my friends were. Were they all the people on my profile, or was there some finer specification, and what was it? It was hard to tell anymore.
    Back in the office, friends were an elastic, untroubled term. Many of the people on my Facebook profile were coworkers I interacted with on the site only, but, to most, there seemed to be no discrepancy in this. In the logic of our business, to comment on a friend’s post was better than speaking to them, because everyone saw it. Everyone wanted to see everything. This was all justified under the company’s corporate buzzword, transparency, though no one seemed to know exactly what it meant. The fact that it was hard to define led Mark to begin a discussion on the company’s internal discussion page asking everyone to submit ideas for what transparency was. We discussed the word for days, and all that was decided was that no one knew. For some, likeMark, who posted in the thread with everyone else, the word transparency seemed to have the ring of enforced integrity, as if in a transparent world there could be no lies, no hidden information, and that nothing bad could happen because everyone knew everything about everyone. I was not so sure. Having occupied a powerless role at Facebook, I was conscious of the way in which power affects behavior. The engineers acted; the support team and users were acted upon. This disparity was why, sometimes, revolutions had to happen, or at least percolate, anonymously and in secret.
    The simplest definition of transparency that I figured applied to the context of Facebook was a sheer technical one, using technology to broadcast whatever