Authors: Katherine Losse
Despite the financial limits of my life, I didn’t feel like I was missing out. On adulthood, yes, but then, if I had been chasing the trappings of adulthood I wouldn’t have been at Facebook. Adulthood meant commitments, mortgages, marriage. In the
youth-fixated world of Silicon Valley, where VCs fought over the teenage boys that they wanted to hire or invest in, all of that seemed almost unimaginable, beyond reach. For one thing, the only way to afford a mortgage in the valley is to have already made your millions, and, for another, there were no men there. There were many kinds of boys, yes, but in the course of my day-to-day existence I couldn’t say that anyone I interacted with, of any age, really seemed like a mature, sophisticated man. With the exception of the gray-haired Rochester, who hailed from an earlier period in the valley that seemed to be less about youthful, social glitz and more about the nuts and bolts of building software (Rochester joked about how after working at Facebook he began to wear more fashionable clothing), the oldest men there, in their thirties and forties, seemed as disinterested in anything except business victory as anyone else.
The older men in the office could be as unbridled in their wide-ranging desires for sex and attention as the younger ones. One of the few married engineers on the team was known by his female colleagues (after he had made several unwelcome propositions to them) to invite lower-ranking women at the company to have threesomes with his wife, all while trolling and starting bullying flame wars on online forums. (“Pics or it didn’t happen,” he retorted like any teenage Internet troll when someone sent an email to the company’s social list saying that women wearing nursing bras had assembled outside the office to protest Facebook’s ban on breastfeeding photos.) Like any sexual predator, he groomed people by sending them emails with innocuous, friendly banter, gradually moving in to make a sexual proposition. When I received an email from him calling me “my lady”
and asking me to lunch, I quit responding to any but his most professional emails.
• • •
Within the mile, I rarely socialized with anyone who wasn’t a Facebook employee. Among colleagues, we already had a scene, filled with rapt faces waiting to consume our activities and personalities both online and in the office. We also knew too much about Facebook—what features would be released and what shocking transformations of the social world would be attempted next—to let down our guard around other people, especially in the valley. It was impossible to meet anyone new at a bar or coffee shop in Palo Alto or San Francisco without the conversation turning to Facebook as soon as I mentioned where I worked. It was becoming a national obsession, and even nonemployees could, and would, talk about it for hours, as if they worked there, too. Everyone wanted to know what we were doing and what would happen next. So, given the choice between having to answer endless questions that I couldn’t really answer (like what features we were going to launch or whether I could read people’s messages, to which the answer was an unsayable
yes
), or staying inside our social bubble, it was easier simply not to hang out with anyone outside Facebook.
Until everyone in the world was using Facebook, anything else felt like a distraction. The unspoken goal was clear: to bring everyone on board the social network and make their lives as clean and technically efficient as our own in Palo Alto. We were so convinced that Facebook was something everyone should
have that when the product team created an experimental feature called
dark profiles
in fall 2006, nobody even flinched. This product created hidden profiles for people who were not yet Facebook users but whose photographs had been tagged on the site. It reminds me now of the way members of the Mormon church convert dead people, following the logic that if they had known about Mormonism when they were alive, they would have been believers. Facebook was our religion and we believed everyone should be a member, even if they hadn’t consented yet.
At the time, the fact that these profiles were called
dark
gave me slight pause. Chase, a perpetually grinning senior project manager by way of Stanford, who was in charge of keeping engineers on task, explained the project further at one of our weekly product meetings, where he explained the latest developments to the customer support team. Chase was slight in stature but carried himself something like an athletic coach, always carrying and consulting a clipboard with notes and product schedules. He had a quick, musical way of speaking that made any announcement he made sound perfectly reasonable. “You see, Mark always had this idea for a kind of Wikipedia for people, or what he called a ‘dark Facebook,’ where each person would have a wall and people could write anything about them on it. That was actually what he was going to make first at Harvard. But he realized that people wouldn’t use something that didn’t allow them to erase bad things people said about them, so he made Facebook instead.” Thus, the product they had now built was a kind of compromise. People would still be added to the network whether they wanted to be or not, but at least now, should they decide to activate a Facebook account, they would have a chance
to control their profiles. In a way, I had to admit that it was a bit of genius: We were using every technical means at our disposal to create a database of all the people in the world. It was the kind of information that every organization that wanted to expand its membership, including the Mormon church, would wish that they had.
While I don’t think anyone came to work at Facebook precisely to have
super access,
as we called our ability to view anything and anyone on the site, regardless of the user’s privacy settings, once we had that power, no one wanted to lose it. The whole product, in a sense, was a means of obtaining knowledge about other people, and as Facebook employees we had a leg up on everyone else. Another employee in engineering, a designer, was blunt about his personal motives for working at Facebook. “I built this to find you,” said a quote he inserted as an
Easter egg
(a programming term for an intentional hidden message in a Web site or video game) on the search page. The designer’s words perfectly captured the intent that drives much of people’s Internet usage: to search for partners, whether sexual or romantic, in the easiest and quickest way possible.
Social network usage statistics indicate that men and women have different online viewing habits: Two-thirds of the photos viewed on social networks, Harvard researcher Mikolaj Piskorski found, are of women. “Men prefer looking at women they don’t know, followed by looking at women they do know. And women prefer looking at other women they know.” Consumption of men’s photos is proportionally the smallest segment of viewing behavior, suggesting that women are less interested in consuming men’s photos than heterosexual men are interested
in viewing photos of women they’ve never met. In the end, no matter how much we tried, we couldn’t use technology to produce love. Because love, unlike technology and its uses, requires commitment to one, instead of the broadcast and consumption of many bits of distant, digital content. Love doesn’t scale.
At the time, however, the knowledge and the power and the wealth we were developing would be too intoxicating for us to care about something as unquantifiable as an intimate feeling. We were all, I think, lonely on some level, but the answer wasn’t to find love and another life away from Facebook: The answer was to work harder, scale faster, and get bigger, and love would be waiting for us somewhere at the end. Everyone wanted to be king, first, myself included. The rest could follow.
• • •
On September 5, 2006, after we had been testing it all summer, Facebook finally released its first and perhaps, to date, most controversial new product: News Feed. Before News Feed, Facebook had been a comparatively discreet book of profiles, maintained and updated individually by each profile owner. News Feed introduced a new homepage where any and all updates to a friend’s profile might appear as a broadcast story, with a headline and accompanying photographs. Your friends’ activities on Facebook were now news, and your homepage was a kind of social newspaper.
However controversial, the News Feed was new, and whatever is new or new-seeming (because most so-called innovations in Silicon Valley are combinations of other products and ideas)
must be built, launched, and used by as many people as can be convinced to use it. So, News Feed was launched to all users, in one fell swoop. I stayed up until midnight the night before the launch, lying on my bed in my bare room, to watch as the product was pushed out. Back then, we always pushed at midnight, since that was when traffic was lowest and all engineers were awake. One minute the homepage was blank, boring, harmless, safe. The next minute it was full of stories, of what someone was doing now, of a new friendship made, of a relationship ended. The automated literature of our lives had begun.
If my early response to the product that summer was one of unease, users reacted with an entirely different magnitude of distress. The day we launched News Feed felt, without exaggeration, like a minor Vietnam, complete with helicopters and reporters circling the office to videotape the protesters who threatened to appear in our courtyard. I arrived at the office feeling jittery and gun-shy, having lain awake all night wondering what the reaction would be when college students on the East Coast woke up to find that their lives had been serialized overnight.
Email after email of the thousands we received that day told graphically of the betrayal and evisceration the users felt. Phrases like “I feel violated,” and “You’ve ruined my life” were common, and the emails were long and passionate, filled with all the personal details and drama that they felt Facebook had exposed without warning. “I just broke up with my girlfriend yesterday and thanks to your ‘News Feed’ everyone on campus saw a story about it this morning! How would you like it if people started publishing stories about your life without telling you?” one user howled.
I did nothing all day but sit at my desk reading the agonized emails and responding to them with a stock, impassive answer along these lines: “This information was already available to your friends on Facebook; we’re just delivering it more efficiently.” Sometimes, I modified the stock response with an acknowledgment of the user’s story and feelings, just to sound a bit more human, like I cared, which I did, because at some basic, human level, I sympathized with their feelings. If I hadn’t known the News Feed was coming, I would have been shocked and upset, too.
As the day progressed and the email continued to flood in, I started to feel brutalized myself: The pain, anger, confusion, and shock expressed by the users was real, even if the product itself meant no harm. By midnight, there were still thousands of emails in the queue, and it became clear that we were never going to get through them all. As always, there was a technical solution: With the click of a button, Jake blasted the stock News Feed response email to everyone who had written in that day, whether their query had to do with News Feed or not. I left the office and wandered home down Palo Alto’s empty Hamilton Street, bleary-eyed and emotionally battered, looking forward to losing consciousness in sleep.
I suppose that the users’ shock at News Feed stemmed, in addition to the feeling of being suddenly exposed, from a sense that, overnight, without warning, their online presences had gone from static profiles to live-updating digital characters, put in narrative form for others’ enjoyment. Were they ready to be characters dancing perpetually in the virtual courtyard of Face-book’s Hotel California for our friends’ entertainment? Whether or not they were ready, it had happened.
This was always the case with social-media technology: It meant no harm, but that did not mean that it would not cause it. This is how technology is pure, and this is why people love it so much. Ascribing intentionality or an emotional impact to a piece of technology or what it does is impossible, and the product that is built mediates between the intentions of its creators and its users. Technology is the perfect alibi. Facebook doesn’t hurt people: People hurt people. This is true. But just as Facebook makes it possible to do things faster, more efficiently, more cheaply, it makes it possible to hurt people faster, more efficiently, with less cost to themselves. It removes any sense of direct responsibility for our behavior, for how what we do makes others feel. With Facebook, you can act and be seen acting without ever having to look anyone who is watching you in the eye, or look at them at all.
• • •
In a tense All Hands meeting a day after the News Feed launch, Mark, responding to employee fears that we had badly alienated users to the point of fleeing the site, predicted that the controversy would settle. Four days later, it became clear that he was right. To mollify users and perhaps also anxious employees, executives, and VCs, Mark consented to the addition of privacy controls that allowed users control over what profile updates could appear in a News Feed story.
But, in this, as in future cases, the users got over it. They had to; they had no choice, and we knew it. The only competitor of Facebook in 2006 was MySpace, and MySpace didn’t even count,
with its hard-to-read, glittery fonts, wildly decorated pages, and absence of technical advancement. When people asked us, “How are you going to beat MySpace?” we acted as if we didn’t even hear the question, looking off into the distance in the manner of Mark, who was asked to answer this question often by press and investors. “They are doing something different,” he would say, and, by that, it sounded like he meant, “They don’t even matter to us.” MySpace’s focus on individual self-expression in a clunky, technically primitive interface was not where the Internet was going, in Mark’s parlance. The Internet was heading in the direction of replicating not just individual identities but the relationships between individuals—or maybe, ambitiously, the entire social world as such—and Facebook was already doing that better and more comprehensively than any other service.