The Boy Kings

still not entirely sure what he truly wanted for the world, or what drove him, beyond a fascination with youthful insolence, ever-expanding territory, and control. His voice is a combination of efficient shorthand (no overly big words, no overly long sentences) and imperialist confidence, always gesturing toward the next stage of the product’s growth, depicted as inexorable and unlimited. Things were always being “pushed forward” in Mark-speak, as if he and the company were Atlases simultaneously shouldering and spurring the world’s advancement, moving it forward with their own digital might.
    Just as in the Daft Punk song, in Mark’s rhetoric, Facebook’s work was never over. It wasn’t a Web site or a set of apps, but a platform that grows and grows, adding more users and entities (brands, places, events) and going deeper into our lives, mining that data for the benefit of the platform and, he argues, all of us. Who wouldn’t want to have easy access to everything, every person and place and event around the world? he wanted to know. For a second or more, as long as it takes to log in to our Face-book accounts and survey the world before us, we all say yes . We too want that. Who wouldn’t? As the hackers who devote themselves to pirating know, free data is seductive, enticing. There is always more and better and newer data to obtain, and new and faster ways to acquire it.
    Writing a blog post in Mark’s words, then, would mean formulatingsentences that sounded like they were coming from the master and commander of this global platform, someone who believed in it, and assumed that you believed in it and wanted it too. If I got the job, this would be a fun puzzle, not unlike the programs the boys wrote to obtain the data they wanted: how to think like Mark, how to convince everyone that Facebook is a necessary and inevitable world-changing thing, our world’s only hope for true and permanent connectedness. I knew how to do this in part because, in my more enthused moments, I believed in it too.
    I worked on a sample blog post for Mark, beginning with his standard “Hey Everyone” and proceeding to describe the ways in which some new feature advanced our Facebook-connected future. The work took an evening, punctuated by exasperated moments of typing and erasing and retyping, trying to get the boyish cadence just right: just flat enough to sound like Mark, but still animated enough to be readable, compelling.
    A few days later, Mark asked to meet me in his conference room. It was my first one-on-one with the boss and the first time he had ever given me his full attention, even though at this point I had worked for him for over three years. His conference room was entirely white: white plastic Saarinen table, egg-shaped chairs, white walls, whiteboards. From the glass windows I could see as far as Stanford to the west and the peninsula to the north, like a long corridor of wealth stretching to the horizon, tapering off into clouds.
    Mark closed the door and stood near his whiteboard, dressed in his usual outfit of squarely cut jeans and a hoodie, looking slightly away and off into the distance. Whenever he looked at me directly, which was rare, it was either with blankness or aslight smirk, some acknowledgement that we were in on some joke that he assumed that I, as longtime Facebook employee and member of what felt by now like a virtual family, would get. I wasn’t sure what the joke was, if it even existed, or if our simply being there—in command of a universe—was the joke.
    “How did you know how to write like me?” he asked with disbelief, once I had situated myself at the white table, my arms folded. “When I read this I thought it was something I wrote.” A slight smile appeared on his face, finally. When he smiles, you know he feels comfortable, among bros, like you’re at the fraternity house and someone has said something particularly funny. I have worked hard, I suddenly realized, to hone myself into a proxy bro to these boys: nonchalant, stolid, avoiding the appearance of caring too much about anything, but especially about the wrong things, which are anything too girly or nontechnical or decorative, things that in this world do not scale. All the girls who acted like girls (and who didn’t have social connections to the founders and early engineers) were still stuck down in the lower tiers of the company, largely ignored except when they appeared at company parties or in the