The Boy Kings

finally be obsolete.
    Mark’s reasoning for this move was in line with his general vision of the world and where it was going, as he often put it. “We are pushing the world in the direction of making it a more open and transparent place,” he would say at All Hands meetings,“this is where the world is going and at Facebook we need to lead in that direction.” A guy on the PR team that I worked with sometimes mentioned this change as we stood around drinking beer at happy hour. “I don’t think that I want Facebook or any site to push me to be ‘more open.’ What does that even mean?” he wondered. I agreed that it was an opaque and strange concept. Forcing people to be more open implied that we were all in some way closed, as though there was something wrong in the way we conducted our personal lives. How was it a Web site’s place to say that we needed to reveal more about ourselves publicly? Why couldn’t Facebook just let people share as much as they were comfortable with?
    Most employees I talked with seemed not to be particularly bothered by the company’s decision to forcibly adjust people’s expectations of privacy, preferring instead to focus on the light and almost childlike-sounding goals of sharing and connecting people. “She just doesn’t get it,” a user support manager told me about one employee who was soon to be terminated. “She doesn’t believe in the mission. She thinks that Facebook is for people without any real problems and isn’t actually changing the world. Can you believe that? This afternoon I’m going to have to let her go.”
    I wondered who the heretic employee was. I guessed that she must have been like all of the user support team members: well-educated in the humanities at an Ivy League school, and probably unaware when hired that she had walked into a new kind of technical cult. At any rate, her awareness of issues beyond Facebook was a problem. The company wasn’t paying anyone to be aware of the world beyond the screen. The only questionsyou were supposed to ask or ideas you were supposed to have at work, as a good citizen of the Facebook nation, were about new ways to technologize daily life, new ways to route our lives through the web.
    One afternoon in his office, Mark asked me to detail his thoughts on what he deemed to be “the way the world was going.” “I have a series of blog posts in mind that I’d like you to write, I’d like to you to write a post on each idea, so people can understand what we are trying to do at Facebook,” he explained.
    “Okay,” I said. “Shoot,” taking out my Facebook-branded notepad to jot everything down.
    “These are the topics I’d like you to write about,” Mark said, listing them off. “Revolutions and giving people the power to share; openness as a force in our generation; moving from countries to companies; everyone becoming developers and how we support that; net-native generation of companies; young people building companies; purpose-driven companies; starting Face-book as a small project and big theory.”
    “Uh, okay,” I said, feeling a bit overwhelmed. I was not quite sure what all of this meant to Mark or what I was supposed to do with it. I thought it was interesting that he was still into “revolutions,” as was I, but his list then veered into territory I wasn’t sure about.
    “What does ‘companies over countries’ mean?” I asked, starting with the first one that jumped out at me.
    “It means that the best thing to do now, if you want to change the world, is to start a company. It’s the best model for getting things done and bringing your vision to the world.” He said this with what sounded like an interesting dismissal of theother models of changing the world. I could imagine, like he may have, that countries were archaic, small, confined to one area or charter. On the other hand, companies—in the age of globalization—can be everywhere, total, unregulated by any particular government constitution or an electorate. Companies can go where no single country has gone before. “I think we are moving to a world in which we all become cells in a single organism, where we can communicate automatically and can all work together seamlessly,” he said, by way of explaining the end goal of Facebook’s “big theory.”
    “Okay, I’ll think about these and get to work,” I said. A set of designers were waiting with laptops in hand outside the glass-walled room, so we wound up