The Boy Kings

the result would be suboptimal for at least half the office.” The arguments on email could go on for hours, circling around the logic of what was essentially subjective: room temperature. Subjectivity in general tended to drive engineers crazy: They wanted there to be one answer, one solution, one optimization that worked for everything. As often happens online, these threads devolved into an argument about the communication form itself: “Stop switching the headers on the subject lines,” one engineer would command icily, “it ruins the threading in my inbox.” “Stop sending so many emails to e-social, you’re ruining my productivity,” another would say. “No way, e-social is sacred,” someone elsemight claim. “You’re supposed to be able to send anything you want there. If we lose e-social, we lose our culture.” In a pattern common to online communities, the social list began as a dream of easy, fraternal companionship, followed by a rising, fractious concern that the quality of its community was being lost.
    Just as in earlier days, users fretted constantly that Facebook was becoming MySpace; as we grew, we fretted constantly that we were becoming not-Facebook. By 2009, everything that happened at work seemed to prompt the feeling that, in Facebook’s perpetual nostalgia for its own early culture, we were losing our utopia. It was starting to always be the “end of an era,” as the boys commented often and nostalgically when looking at old photos of themselves in the office: The boys were growing older despite themselves; the office was growing bigger despite Mark’s desire that it stay small and focused. “Smaller companies are always better,” he would say in All Hands meetings that year to explain hiring plans and why, even though we were growing quickly, he wanted to avoid uncontrolled hiring. Size was the enemy of swiftness, and swiftness: “Moving fast and breaking things”—was the company value that Mark repeated most often. (The others, like “be bold” and “be open,” were less punchy and required more effort to explain.) As the engineering team grew into the hundreds, the product teams were refashioned on the model of little startups, with their own war rooms, so that they could feel like small companies despite being part of the larger group.
    Despite all these attempts to remain small in feeling if not in reality, in meetings, almost daily, someone would say, “I am worried that we are losing our culture,” and everyone would look around helpless, as if they didn’t know what to do, or how tosave the precious essence that they felt slipping from their grasp. Sitting on a meeting room couch, listening once again to this exchange, I recalled my Hopkins advisor saying, “You are what you do. If you don’t do it anymore, how can it be your culture?” He was making a point about cultural identities in America and our constant fear of losing them, even when we don’t practice them anymore. I came to realize it was the identity of a nineteen-year-old boy, forever youthful and reckless, unmonitored and unstoppable, that the boys were so anxious about losing. They were worried, perhaps, about growing up. Facebook culture, by another name, then, might be a fear of adulthood, a desire to put off commitment, responsibility, and the difficult work of relating in real life and in real terms, forever. But how do you save your youth? How do you stay nineteen forever?
    • • •
    In December 2008, I was tapped again to do a job that didn’t exist before and didn’t have a name. “We are looking for someone to write for Mark,” Facebook’s Communications Director Elliot Schrage, a public policy lawyer turned PR executive who came to Facebook from Google, told me. “We’re going to send out the job opening to the company so anyone can apply, but I think you would be great for it.” Lols, I thought, slipping into the emoticon talk that had begun to move off my screen and into my speech. I was, after all, the only writer there, or at least the only writer who had been at Facebook long enough to justify entrée into Mark’s exclusive inner circle. In the past year, Mark’s circle of confidants had thinned as his originalcofounders, like Dustin, cashed out in the billions, and it had to be restocked.
    This shouldn’t be hard, I thought. I had been listening to Mark speak about product launches for three years, and I knew all his rhetorical tics and gestures, even if I was