The Boy Kings

punctuated by sun, and sun only on certain streets. For all the extremes of climate and class—you are as likely to be chased down the street by a bum demanding change as jostled on the sidewalk by a tech multimillionaire focused on his iPhone—San Francisco retains an aura of cool authenticity, the muscle memory of having been once a gritty gold-rush city, packed with drunken miners and the women who tended to their needs. Thus, people flock there from all around the Bay Area on weekends to soak up some remnant of a hearty, physical past, made edible in the form of rustic breads at Tartine, and whiskeys neat at the many bars along Mission or Valencia Street. Whatever San Francisco lacks in leftover grit, it can afford to invent in the form of endless dives (some truly old, some decorated to seem so), handcrafted cups of coffee that take five minutes to brew, and high-end restaurants decorated to look like 1800s homestead kitchens. However stylized, San Francisco is the unpolished flip side to Silicon Valley’s perfect grid.
    In contrast to the hardscrabble aesthetic emerging in the Mission, Facebook remained insistent on its high-tech fantasy of a perfected, digital life, where everything was always new and inefficiency was always being outmoded. “Harder better faster stronger,” Daft Punk’s robot vocals still looped in the office and at company parties, perennially picturing a cleaner, faster world. But Facebook’s rapid growth, at 700 employees and 150 million users, strained at its uniform ideals. New offices full of Face-book lawyers, advertising managers, and User Operations (as the customer support staff were now called, in recognition of thefact that the department served users rather than paying customers) employees sprouted up around Palo Alto, staffed with people of all types, though the engineering office remained as concentrated with young men as ever. The company did its part to maintain a young aesthetic across the departments by issuing branded American Apparel T-shirts and sweatshirts. Other companies in Palo Alto issued their own branded clothing, making for humorous scenes where, say, a team of ten Palantir (another Peter Thiel–funded startup, this one devoted to developing software for military intelligence) engineers in company-branded track jackets faced off at a crosswalk against a team of engineers in the same jackets that said Facebook on the front.
    By 2009, the once cool and spacious engineering floors, where boys could ripstik around freely at top speed, were growing crowded with desks, toys, and new engineers who were being hired as fast as they could be found. As the din in the office rose I kept my headphones on and my eyes glued to my screen, monitoring the translation process, my inbox, and my Facebook feed, in which boys took turns noting the failings of some new piece of technology or posting photos of the new devices they picked up that week at Fry’s Electronics.
    On Mondays, the albums full of party photos from the weekend would begin their march down the News Feed. Photo albums posted by Facebook employees had more so-called weight in my News Feed because they usually contained other Facebook employees, and the News Feed algorithm assumes that if many of your Facebook friends have done something, you want to know about it. The combined algorithmic weight of friends tagged in Facebook employee party photos and thesheer number of photos that they posted turned my News Feed into an endless panorama of coworkers socializing, perpetually frozen in smiles with drinks held to their chests. Their photos increased in visibility for the next few days of the week as fellow employees liked and commented on them. The people whose photos were liked most rose further in the rankings so that, the next week, I was more likely to see their pictures, whether or not I ever hung out with them. News Feed was, to my bemusement as a Heathers fan, like the algorithmic version of the Heathers in the cafeteria, taking note of whose popularity was rising and falling and making sure that everyone was apprised of the popular people’s movements.
    My monitor pulsed with a steady flow of emails and task notifications, some urgent, some not so much. An enduring argument on the engineering social email list about the best way to optimize the temperature on the engineering floors would include exchanges like, “We should vote on what temperature everyone wants it to be,” and the reply, “No, then