The Boy Kings

as I left the office in the late afternoon just as he was waking up and arriving at work. When he was there, he received a steady stream of engineers coming to pay their respects, to trade jokes, and to ask him to play video games or go out that weekend. The constant visitors trekking through the center of the office—executives, celebrities, endless young men in hoodies—were another reason that accomplishing any actual work was nearly impossible. We mostly just sent instant messages and read Facebook and trafficked in lulz. When Kai came by one day looking for Mark and Sheryl and they weren’t there, I said in character, “They’re gone, I got rid of them,” like a demonic child, and he said, “Good,” and we laughed. Always be trolling.
    Behind our pod were circles of desks, beginning with Mark’s preferred engineers, like William, a skinny Stanford grad with longish curls whom all the boys claimed to have man crushes on, due to his immaculate code. Behind him was a set of newly graduated, mostly white engineers from Stanford and Harvard who were emerging to take the places of the now departed engineers who formed the first fraternity class at Facebook. Behind them in rows were many Asian and South Asian faces workingon infrastructure, mostly people I had never met, many of whom spoke to each other in languages other than English. Some of them worked so far back in the building that their desks sat in windowless rooms, invisible and far from the endless games of ripstiking and chess that went on in the center of the floor. I was thankful for their work because, without them, nothing would ever get built or fixed. The Ivy League engineers, who formed the All-American window dressing of the company, were too busy making Facebook feel like what it originally was: a youthful, half-hacker and half–Ivy League enterprise, populated with smooth white faces, native and familiar.
    One aspect of my job was to post updates to Mark’s Face-book fan page, which, like writing his blog posts, was a fun puzzle, an impersonation challenge. I took pictures in the office and from the travel albums on his personal Facebook page and constructed spare captions in his voice, sticking to his main themes of information flow and changing the world. Cool-sounding posts about world travel and company news were easy to write: No one can argue with a photograph of a beautiful mountain or an historic site. But, when it came to posting to my own profile, the answer to the question of what to say and how to say it was increasingly unclear. I wanted to be authentic. I wanted to say something real. Facebook tells us to share “What’s on your mind?” so it should have been easy, shouldn’t it, to just say what I feel? But the prompt, and the system of liking and ranking that it feeds, always gave me pause. I was not sure whether the idea of sharing was that easy.
    Facebook employees tended to post about their good fortunes and their increasingly glamorous lives at the company.They also acted as Facebook’s constant cheerleaders, posting news articles about the company, photos of employees at work, and celebrating the latest user growth numbers and feature launches. They believed, or seemed to, that the smallest, luckiest details of our lives were of utmost importance to share with the world, despite the fact that, since the stock crash in 2008, the global economy was slipping further into insolvency. To read their posts about fine dining, new cars, and luxury vacations, few employees seemed very concerned or aware of the deepening financial crisis. There was only one exception to this rule of sharing: No one ever posted anything critical of the company on Facebook. It would be like committing treason, to question the thing that fed us, both with food and attention and with a continuous drip of information. Facebook wanted us, like all of its users, to depend on it.
    As 2009 progressed, I learned, both offhand and in closed rooms, that there were those who shared my skepticism about our goal of transforming the world into a virtual theater of ourselves. All that spring and summer, a team of product engineers worked on a remodel of Facebook’s privacy settings that, unlike previous models, made certain information, like one’s profile photo and friend list, public. This meant that absolute privacy from strangers on Facebook, which was the thing that I first originally loved about the site, as compared to sites like MySpace, would