Boy Kings
= "The Boy Kings is a memoir of Silicon Valley from 2005-2010, narrating the rise of social media and the ways it changed the world".
URL = http://theboykings.com/
Profile
Joanna Biggs:
"Katherine Losse, Facebook employee #51 (the company now numbers 4619), would probably count as one of Sandberg’s lean-backs for having quit her job as CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s corporate ghost-writer. The ease of Sandberg’s ascent does something light-headed to her feminism, just as Losse’s experience of being an English major in a company built around the late nights, taste for over-salty junk food and pretensions to world domination of a group of computer nerds does something lumpen to hers. Sandberg and Losse don’t see the world around them as millennial: ‘These things did not happen in 1951. They happened in 2011,’ Sandberg says of T-shirts with slogans like ‘Pretty like Mommy’. ‘You were like Peggy on Mad Men,’ a friend tells Losse the day she leaves the social network, comparing her to the secretary turned copywriter in an imaginary 1950s ad agency.
Losse joined Facebook’s user support team when she got fed up with her job writing labels for cucumber facewash. She was only the second woman to join the company, so on her first day the email address kate@facebook.com was still available. As Facebook’s ur-Kate, she was ‘queen of a world in which every other Kate would be derived from my archetype’. While she wrote answers to users’ questions (‘What does “poking” mean?’), she surveyed the kingdom. Fridges were filled with every type of fizzy drink; ‘stylised women with large breasts bursting from small tops’ were drawn on the walls; engineers whose working day began at 7 p.m. played with gadgets while lounging on human-sized bean bags. But these chillaxing engineers, led by Zuckerberg, were the ones who could bring the site back up with a few hours of frantic coding, and everyone else, considered ‘duller, incapable of quick and intelligent thought’, was there to serve the thing they had created and, therefore, them. ‘Everyone upstairs is dumb,’ they would say when Facebook moved into a bigger building and the engineers got their own floor.
The division of labour seemed mid-century to Losse, who saw that the way to get on was to be one of the boys. She came up with the idea of renting a pool house where they could play Beer Pong (the object is to land a ping-pong ball in a glass of beer that your opponent has to down) while listening to their favourite robot electronica, Daft Punk, in the sunny downtime between coding sessions and answering emails. On the weekly trips they made to Fry’s Electronics – they didn’t want to miss the arrival of a new component – she would occupy herself marvelling at the Wild West theme of the Palo Alto branch. One Sunday morning she found a statue of a gun-toting Annie Oakley with her knee up on a bale of Linux manuals. Though her salary was a great deal lower than those of the boy engineers she hung out with, they would give her a weekend pass for the Coachella music festival or a plane ticket to Vegas, where they would video and photograph themselves shooing away pretty girls and update their Facebook profiles in real time. They had created the News Feed feature in their own image, as ‘a boyishly cold, digitally perfected ego’, so they knew which ‘stories’ their algorithms wanted. Losse adopted a wry, weary postmodern tone and began posting crude horizontal hearts (<3) on every story. Even this, which Losse understands as a quiet protest, showed she understood them, and she was put on an engineer-level salary to manage the translation of the site into French and Spanish and German and Japanese and Italian. Facebook really was conquering the world.
Losse gets closer still to Facebook’s vision when she is appointed Zuckerberg’s voice on earth. The first email she ghosted announced her appointment (‘It’s a good story,’ Zuckerberg said). She was good at it: ‘This pretty much sounds exactly like what I would write,’ he comments, but ‘I never use a comma before a conjunction.’ One afternoon Zuckerberg asked her to start work on a series of longer posts setting out his thinking on where Facebook was headed. The topics were ‘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 Facebook as a small project and big theory’. When she asked what he meant by companies over countries, he said ‘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.’ Private companies don’t need to worry about getting elected or breaking laws like old-fashioned, unwieldy nation states do. Facebook’s unencumbered, efficient, agile, hackerish style is to make everything seem ‘easy’ – and when you need, in one of Zuckerberg’s favourite phrases, to ‘move fast and break things’, you just shrug. You just shrug when you change the site’s privacy settings overnight to capture lucrative personal information and make Facebook’s IPO one of the biggest in Silicon Valley. Losse didn’t write the posts accidentally on purpose. A few months later she sold her equity and moved to Marfa, Texas, where the coverage is so bad you can’t even check Facebook on your phone.
The ur-Kate was at Facebook long enough to see the arrival of its real queen, or perhaps its queen mother. Zuckerberg introduces her at one of their company-wide Friday meetings; Losse remembers him commenting that Sandberg had ‘really good skin’ and announcing that ‘everyone should have a crush on Sheryl.’ Sandberg endeared herself to Facebook’s women as well as its men. ‘Tell me everything,’ she said to Losse, and when she’d heard everything, got the colleague who kept suggesting a threesome discreetly demoted. Sandberg’s desk is neat and expensive gifts keep arriving – Louboutin shoes, Frette candles. It wasn’t just that she was story-worthy enough to deflect attention from Zuckerberg (the 2010 movie The Social Network was in development when Sandberg arrived in 2008): she runs the company in such a way that questions are ‘already answered’ and ‘efficiency is assumed.’ (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n07/joanna-biggs/tell-me-everything)
Interview
Frequently Asked Questions about The Boy Kings
Q: Why did you write this book?
A: The years 2005-2010, during which social media exploded, transformed human experience. We all began living our lives largely online, through our devices, broadcasting to a vast audience of people distant from us, yet virtually connected. I wrote to reflect on this: how this change felt and what it may mean.
Q: Is this book funny, though? I only like to read things that are funny.
A: Yes, it’s funny. It’s a dark comedy of sorts.
Q: What is misunderstood about this book?
A: This is not a book about Mark Zuckerberg; it is about social technology and its impact on the world. And while The Boy Kings narrates Facebook's rise, the main character in the book is power itself. Wherever you see a power struggle, something interesting is happening: people are competing to determine the future and what it looks like.
Q: Why is everyone always talking about Facebook?
A: Facebook has made itself central to many people's lives. Millions of people route their personal data and relationships through the site, giving the company the ability to shape the world in deep ways as our lives become increasingly virtual: determining how we connect to the world, what we learn about it, what we see and don’t. The Boy Kings explains how Facebook came to have the power to shape the world.
Q: Why is Thrax a star of this book and not Mark? I thought Facebook was about Mark.
A: Facebook is about Mark’s wishes and product vision. The character of Thrax is a metaphor for the type of hacker valorized by Silicon Valley in the late 2000s. At the dawn of the social media age, the hacker needed to be a character as well as a coder, because social media is essentially about broadcasting oneself to the world.
Q: It seems like you never get really emotional in the book, even though you are describing all these complicated situations. Why?
A: One of the things the book is about is the way in which social media asks us to create characters for digital consumption. Occasionally at work I felt upset or anxious, but generally I had to stay calm and "in character" in order to stay focused on the goal of figuring out how the story of Facebook was unfolding and what would happen next. And just as when you are using Facebook you watch patiently as information scrolls by, in real life I found myself watching as events happened, thinking about how it all fit together.
Q: Why did you write a book about your time at Facebook instead of sharing your experience on Facebook?
A: Social media is one way of sharing experiences. Books are another good way to share experiences and analysis, when you want to go deeper.
Q: What are you doing now?
A: I am writing a play with my friend Ashley, in which each character in the play embodies a different mode of connection and connectivity issues. I travel a lot and spend time with friends. I am sort of in <3 with everything right now." (http://theboykings.com/faqs/)