The Boy Kings

She enunciated precisely, so as to make every thought seem like a decision, like the matter was always closed and the conversation had always already reached its resolution. It was comforting to imagine the world as it sounded in Sheryl’s voice: a world where every question is already answered, where efficiency is assumed, where we all, like her, are on the path toward or have already made it to the executive suite.
    The floor around Sheryl’s desk was piled with the endless gifts that she received from business contacts in lofty positionsat Fortune 500 companies. People sent her Louboutin heels and Frette candles the diameter of dinner plates, which she unpacked while on speakerphone with some CEO or another. Sometimes, she passed them over the desk to me offhandedly, just trying to get rid of them, but usually they just sat in piles under the desk until someone cleared them away, to be replaced by new, just as superfluous, luxury gifts. Mark’s desk was similarly surrounded by boxes and gifts, but they were more boyish: a sports jersey signed by a soccer star, some video game that hadn’t been released yet. I didn’t have any presents (other than Sheryl’s cast-offs), but I had a front-row view of the business lives of the extremely rich and powerful, whom I now knew spend much of their days managing the world’s desire to be close to them.
    • • •
    Once again, six months after the move to the new office, Thrax and I were thrown together. I was informed by Chase, who came by to tell me, with the same smirk he always had when trying to get us to hook up, that Thrax was moving in to my pod. “Oh,” I replied coolly, but thought to myself, “Lol, of course.” Sometimes, Facebook was like the world’s most well-funded preschool, as if we were all sitting around playing with our Matchbox cars and singing “So and so and so and so sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.” We even had ants on a log at snack time sometimes, which was funny enough to me to capture in a photo and post on Facebook. Thrax’s new job was to be Mark’s technical advisor, where I was Mark’s writing advisor.
    These were recent roles that Mark had invented, jobs thatwere not so much about doing things as being something, some version of Facebook that he wanted us all to personify. It felt as if the company’s drive to convert us all into characters for the world’s consumption was part of what was leading to the creation of these new roles. While Mark delighted in Facebook’s ability to create infinite stories and characters, he didn’t want to be the only character associated with the network. He wanted company in his position as the leader of our new social media enterprise. I felt sympathetic and almost protective of him in this impulse, as I privately always had: It must be hard to be a figure that everyone expects to represent an entire paradigm shift, a new and virtual way of being. Mark, with his preternatural, abstract focus on data and systems, needed charismatic, likeable people to share in this burden. Also, perhaps, I wondered if Thrax and I had by some accident of personality personified Mark’s idea of what Facebook culture was: sarcastic sponges soaking up and performing all the American culture we could find. And, most important for Mark, we shared an impish delight in conquering.
    Thrax arrived in the late afternoon, as usual, and piled his new desk with games, digital components that I couldn’t identify, and books. The books were a comically academic touch for someone meant to serve as the face of education’s new irrelevance to success. “Hey,” he said, grinning, and I returned, “Hey,” as the administrative assistants watched. I felt a sudden urge to turn to my screen and resort to IM to communicate, rather than sitting here and chatting as though we were colleagues working at real desk jobs, which I wasn’t sure was accurate, sandwiched as I was between Sheryl’s piles of luxury gifts and Thrax’s electronic toys.Mark’s office sat adjacent to our pod, with its secret back room (for especially important meetings, because the front room of his office had a glass window onto the hallway that made meetings transparent) hidden behind a wallpapered door and a single table illuminated by a Mad Men –style modern lamp, receiving a constant stream of celebrities and tech luminaries and wealthy Russians in silk suits.
    As at the summer house years before, Thrax’s and my schedules rarely overlapped,