The Boy Kings

like I had written all of them.
    I was relieved at lunchtime when I could walk out of the office to San Francisco’s long piers, enveloped by a perpetual fog that felt more like Oregon than California. Lunches at the aggressively artisanal cafes in the Ferry Building were too expensive for me, so I bought tacos from the Mexican food trucks that served the downtown’s working class who commuted in, like me, from the East Bay.
    Back in the design office, bored with the endless lines of copy that had all begun to sound the same, I would take to surfing Facebook. With very few features beyond profiles and messaging, Facebook was like a richer, more playful form of email, with the option to post public messages on people’s walls. Since there weren’t many fields, friends’ posts occasionally had a deliberation and clarity that were entrancing, like you were reading little glimpses into the soul of the person—the thing they wanted most deeply to communicate to the world. Facebook was also a quick if not particularly satisfying salve for loneliness: In the Bay I knew no one, but online there were faces I knew, updating their pictures and profiles regularly, making familiar jokes.
    In late July 2005, I had been working as a copywriter for a month when my boss, a micromanaging type with bleached teeth that glowed fluorescent, caught me looking at Facebookand chastised me. I felt indignant, given that in my view she was getting the most compelling descriptions of moisturizing cream that she could ask for from a random Craigslist hire. I even paid attention to alliteration and redundancy in my writing and fact-checked my work to make sure I wasn’t making any overtly untrue claims about the ability of the products to make you more beautiful (and after doing this job I learned never to take any claims on a beauty product label seriously). But, as with many contract jobs, my work went largely unappreciated.
    While I was illicitly perusing Facebook at work a few weeks later I noticed a bulletin on the normally blank homepage that said, “Do you want to work at Facebook? Send us your resume.” That night I emailed my resume to the address listed, not knowing what they were looking for or what a job at Facebook might entail. I felt intrigued by the prospect, though. As new and strange a product as Facebook was, I sensed in it a power, the allure of a new social institution that had no limits and that might never end.

CHAPTER 1
WELCOME TO THE FACEBOOK
    I don’t know why Phil Rochester, who was engineering royalty in the valley and had been installed by venture capitalists to help with scaling up the tiny Facebook team, selected my resume from what must have been many that appeared in his inbox. I suspect that his choosing me had to do with the fact that Johns Hopkins featured prominently on my resume. He was a Vanderbilt alum, and I had learned in Baltimore that upper-crust southern elitism, conscious or not, runs deep. When I left Johns Hopkins, despite all its academic drama, my matriculation there faded immediately into a simple signifier of the elite. This is what an American private university is, not an education so much as a pedigree, a mark of distinction.
    When Rochester called me he was at Costco buying tires,multitasking with his BlackBerry in typical Silicon Valley fashion. He couldn’t be bothered to conduct a proper interview. He assumed, efficiently, that as an English major from an elite school I was capable of answering user-support emails. “Come in Tuesday,” he said. “You can try it for a few days. If you don’t like it, you can leave. It pays twenty dollars an hour. That’s pretty good, right?” he asked. “Uh, okay,” I said. Neither the job nor the pay being offered was very good, but short of learning how to program, I knew couldn’t compete for a real job in Silicon Valley. My only choice, if I was going to try to make my fortune there with all the others, was to find a way to make my lack of technical skill my strength.
    Driving my scuffed white 1994 Camry into Palo Alto for the first time in early September 2005, I noticed instantly how perfectly bland and ordered the town was. The sidewalks off the main street were nearly as clean and prim as at Disneyland, or maybe, more aptly, The Truman Show . I had trouble finding the Facebook office at first (“It’s up the stairs, at Emerson and University,” Rochester had told me) and walked up the wrong set of stairs into a halfway house