The Boy Kings

tagged photos of them that appear on Facebook after parties.
    “I don’t know, I guess I’ve just spent a long time listening to you speak.”
    “Okay, well, you’ve got the role,” he announced. Facebook tended to refer to jobs, especially the loftier and more outward-facing ones, as “roles.”
    “Cool,” I replied, “I’m excited.” I was. My interest in internationalization had been waning since we had finished translating Facebook into nearly every language. By that point, myjob had segued into managing the maintenance of the translated Facebook sites, which was a more bureaucratic function than the original translation process had been. Writing for Mark, on the other hand, appealed to a stronger passion of mine: writing in English. It might be the funniest thing I had ever done, and the weirdest job I’d ever have. It seemed almost perfect that I, fascinated by the dark sides of Facebook, would become the shadow Mark Zuckerberg, there to explain what he couldn’t or wouldn’t.
    Mark took out the sample blog post I had written and made a few stylistic notes on it with a pen. “This pretty much sounds exactly like what I would write,” he said. “Except for one important thing. I never use a comma before a conjunction,” he said, crossing out all the Oxford commas I had inserted as a matter of habit.
    “Okay, no Oxford commas,” I said. I could already see why he wouldn’t like them: Oxford commas weren’t efficient. His style aimed towards the quick, modern, streamlined. I reminded myself also not to use two spaces after a period.
    “Have you seen The West Wing ?” he asked.
    “Some episodes, yeah, but I’ve never watched the whole thing,” I explained.
    “I want you to watch it,” he said.
    “Okay,” I agreed. Of course, The Wire was the show that I believed best reflected how things really work, at Facebook and anywhere else. But, where I saw the struggle, the war on the streets that wasn’t polished and clean and was waged by people who weren’t in power, Mark saw the presidency and some new virtual Oval Office of his own making, as white and spotless as his fifth floor conference room.
    I wondered sometimes if the very fact that I saw things in ways he didn’t was what had gotten me that far. Because, for all their rabid data consumption, there was a lot the engineers didn’t know. That was partly why Mark made Facebook, and why the boys of the valley were so busy turning our lives into data, as if by doing so, their algorithms could tell them something that their eyes and hearts couldn’t. As Thrax announced triumphantly at his desk one day, “I just wrote an algorithm to tell me who I am closest to!” He went on to show a set of scores that, according to his algorithm’s calculations, revealed how close he was to all his Facebook friends.
    • • •
    Two weeks later, my job in internationalization wrapped up and, in my new role as Mark’s writer, I was moved to a desk near the door to his conference room. As soon as I had set up my new desk, Mark asked me to step into his office.
    “I want you to write an email to the company in my voice announcing that you’ve moved into this position,” he explained.
    “Okay,” I said. “Is there anything in particular that you want me to mention?” I asked.
    “I think just tell the positions you’ve had and what you’re going to be working on,” he replied. “It’s a good story,” he added with a grin.
    “Yes, it is,” I thought, and smiled back. This was the inexorability of Facebook, the desire it seemed to have ever since the launch of News Feed, the desire to turn everything into a story.Now, as I suppose we all always were on Facebook, I was the story.
    Sam stopped by my new desk as I was writing the announcement to ask what I was doing there, and I told him I was going to be writing for Mark. Even Sam, who usually approached everything with deadpan irony, seemed surprised at this almost pitch-perfect, sitcom-like outcome, in which the odd literary one becomes the new power player. He recovered quickly and we laughed together as always, then he jumped on a ripstik and skated off, leaving me to my email-writing.
    “Hey Everyone—” I began. “I wanted to congratulate everyone on the fact that we reached 150 million users last week. This is an important milestone and reaching it shows how well we are doing at executing on our mission of making the world more open and connected. We’re really just at the