Authors: Katherine Losse
As if they knew that employees desperately needed a release after our week of doing battle in the social-media trenches, the company obtained tickets for all of us to go to a Dave Matthews concert. I didn’t even like Dave Matthews that much, but it was with relief that I left the office early that Friday to dress for the concert and put accusations of technological “rape” and “betrayal” out of my mind. I picked out one of my old college-style outfits, as if willing myself back on campus studying literature, instead of serving as an accidental private in a social-networking war.
In keeping with the camp-cum-college atmosphere of the company, our party planners always arranged for buses to transport us directly from the office to company parties and back. In a small gesture of resistance, Sam and I would always go to the dive bar across the street (it was divey by Palo Alto standards, at
least, with plain décor, lower prices, and an Erotic Photo Hunt machine that we played often on breaks from work) for a grownup Manhattan, dark with whiskey and bitters, before boarding the bus like so many teenagers headed to prom night. Like everything anyone at the company did, our archaic preference for whiskey over vodka would be immortalized in a Facebook group, called the “Society for Anachronistic Alcohol,” which was created by Harry, a saxophone-playing engineer whom Rochester brought in from his former company. The group name itself became anachronistic, because in two years everyone would be drinking whiskey, thanks to
Mad Men
and the emergent pop culture of vintage masculinity.
Facebook had rented a VIP area for us at Shoreline Amphitheater, Silicon Valley’s concert venue, which sits in a stale-smelling bog across from Google headquarters. This was the first such designation for most of us, and it felt exciting. VIP-ness was something that someone else, more important and with more money, always had, but now we were skipping the lines and walking directly to our own private area, where we could observe regular concertgoers from behind a fence and, in turn, be observed. The whole point of VIP treatment, it seems, is to speak to our universal human desire to feel special, valuable, desired: And to have something that others don’t. When we were VIPs, as Thrax might have put it, it is time for everyone else to be the left-out ones.
In the VIP section, we milled about, talking to each other while drinking wine or beer from the open bar and, mostly, feeling relieved that we were no longer in the throes of the News Feed tumult. It had only been days since the feature launched,
but days in Internet time are like weeks in regular time: Even twenty-four hours is enough to put distance between you and an Internet phenomenon. Harry seemed already to have intuited this—that anything that happens online will pass—as he looked placid at the party, just as he had all week while employees were biting their fingernails and attempting to remain calm. Or, perhaps, he simply didn’t care how users felt about News Feed as much as I and some other employees, judging from the strained, worried looks on their faces all week, did.
Regardless of our feelings about the new technology we had just unleashed on the world, the traumatic events of the week brought us closer to each other, as a battalion must feel after a skirmish, and we huddled in circles chatting, feeling united against our users mobbing us from across the Internet.
As the sun set on the lawn, we moved to our seats close to the stage. Our VIP treatment enhanced the de facto sense of entitlement that we, as Facebook employees, were beginning to feel. We felt entitled because we had just built a device—News Feed—that replaced the organic word of mouth and socially networked communities that made bands like Dave Matthews popular. A band’s fame spreads when people discover them and start telling friends, but News Feed now made it possible for people to spread their taste in music instantly by listing favorite bands on their profiles. We knew that there would be much power in this. The only thing more powerful than celebrity is to own the tool that makes it.
However, the Dave Matthews band was of a previous, pre-digitized time: all guitars and instruments, instead of the electronic music that looped constantly in the office. The music was
real, and the night felt more palpable and present than anything else since those days in August when we had escaped the virtual unreality of Palo Alto for the authentic unreality of Las Vegas. My heart sang a little at the music, at the way everything felt, at the flick of Thrax’s pale hair on my nose as he talked into my ear. It was nice to feel things, rather than watch text and images scroll by. At one point I looked behind us and saw that Rochester, old-time computer geek and valley billionaire twice over, was dancing.
On the bus back to the office, Thrax and I sat curled up companionably, holding hands, watching the dark Peninsula sky pass by outside the window, but we stopped short of a kiss. “I can’t have a relationship story show up in News Feed,” he explained, and I filed that away in my groggy, battle-scarred head as a perfect statement to summarize what had happened that week. The narratives Facebook wanted to tell about us already had the upper hand, and News Feed had only launched three days ago.
• • •
As the winter came and the engineers were consumed by work, racing to build the next wave of features, I retreated into my own hobbies—writing, painting, taking long walks to Stanford’s Lake Lagunita and back—almost forgetting about technology for a while. I left my computer at the office when I went home, and since the company didn’t give customer-support staff BlackBerrys, at the time the smart phone of choice, I still had an old Samsung flip phone that delivered nothing in the way of
data. When I was away from the office, I was effectively off the grid, though I was still in the heart of it.
I watched our lives overlap with technology at an ever-increasing pace, as News Feed quickly grew central to people’s sense of their social worlds and smartphones became everyone’s favorite toy, and grew almost nostalgic for the rough edges and unprogrammed contrasts of Baltimore. The whole city of Baltimore is a patchwork of rich and poor, green and gray, black and white, and I missed it. I worried that I was getting soft in the medium sheltered tones of Palo Alto, where no one seemed aware of how dark or how light and beautiful the outside world can be. In Baltimore, the view of all of it—and the corresponding awareness that the world was full of people with different circumstances and experiences, particularly ones less fortunate than your own—was inescapable. In Palo Alto, there were houses, shops, a few offices, and many computers all talking to one another, each pretty much the same as the other. But I knew that the rest of the world was full of people poorer, darker, and less technologically provided for than the engineers were in Palo Alto, and this lack of awareness on their part was draining. Here, it was like we were living in a fantasy of perfect wealth, where everyone was the same and everyone was equal, but
everyone
was defined as young engineers competing for the same crown.
B
y Facebook’s third birthday in February 2007, the site had 15 million users and the company had at least 150 employees. We had bypassed the famous Dunbar’s number that Mark cited often as an archaic, real-world social limit that Facebook had to succeed in making obsolete. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed in a 1992 article that approximately 150 is the maximum number of people that any individual was able to know and keep up with at a given time. So, as the company sailed past 150 employees, our internal society would be a test of how well Facebook can help us manage social contacts and, in Mark’s words, stay connected, despite our growing number.
On this February afternoon, the sun flooded the third floor of the office, where administrative assistants were rushing hurriedly to prepare for the party. By three o’clock, the room was festooned
with blue balloons, blue cakes, and kegs. Employees in navy-blue hoodies that said
Facebook
across the front—the first of our many unofficial company uniforms, which change whenever the designers concoct a new riff on the Facebook logo, were drinking and playing Beirut on tables set up for the occasion. As at all our parties, professional photographers roamed the room taking pictures of employees practicing their most flattering poses—hand on hip, smile wide, like we were the happiest people in the world. And, at parties like this, we were happy, because we got to do what Facebook did best: enacting and documenting a uniform, unspecific glee, a moment with no larger concerns, in which everyone smiles on command, with nothing to fear from the ever-present cameras and their incessant need to document us.
I had a specific reason for my happiness, beyond Facebook’s birthday and the almost parental relief I felt that the enterprise we had all been working tirelessly on was entering its third year. Whatever this toddler network was, and intended to be, it was going to be huge, I was sure. I was also ecstatic because in four hours I would be taking my first long vacation since I began working at Facebook. I would be boarding a flight to Rio de Janeiro, back to Ipanema and its glorious beaches, and away from all of the digitally prompted smiling and poking and constant virtual coddling. For the past four Spartan months of work, I was completely dedicated to Facebook’s cause, but also saving every penny in order to spend three weeks away. At some atavistic level, I missed a world where everything wasn’t planned for me, where things weren’t always new and gray and clean, where I was forced to be present in the flesh, confronted with situations I couldn’t preview and manage remotely.
I bought the cheapest ticket to Brazil I could find, a five-hundred-thirty-dollar round-trip ticket on Taca Airlines, on a Southwest-sized 737 that was too small to make the full journey to the southern hemisphere and had to stop in Panama to refuel. As we winged out of SFO and onward toward the tropics that night, the flight became turbulent and children on the plane screamed in Portuguese for hours. I remembered the story Micaela told one night at a Palo Alto bar about when she and Sam were children and flew between Army bases on planes with nothing but seatbelts tethering them to the floor, and that they cheered whenever there was an exciting patch of turbulence and wished for more. While I wasn’t afraid of flying to Brazil by myself, I wasn’t fearless enough to cheer on this roller-coaster ride far above the Amazon. It’s funny how we choose what we are going to be afraid of. I can wander the streets of any city alone, but quiver at the thought of jumping blithely off rainforest waterfalls like the Hopkins surfer boys did on my previous trip to Brazil. It made me think of the computer hackers, who fear nothing when it comes to waging war on other people’s virtual property, but cringe at the idea of exploring unfamiliar urban climes.
“Why aren’t you going to Brazil with Kate?” Sam asked Thrax, vaguely accusingly, over IM, as I watched. Sam, Thrax, Justin, and Emile were all freaked out that I was going to Brazil alone, without friends or Facebook people (which was basically the same thing), but didn’t want to betray they cared by actually saying so. “I don’t have the balls,” Thrax answered ruefully. I could see him picturing kidnappings and beheadings, as if all of Rio de Janeiro were like the deadly, warring
City of God
. Just the thought of a suburban American hacker suddenly immersed in
Rio’s cacophonies of carnival music and street dancing seemed almost impossible, as if the sensory overload would instantly overwhelm the circuitry of someone used to sitting alone in the dark, behind a screen. I realized this was why I was going back to Brazil, because despite the fact that I had found friendship and fun at Facebook, there was another side of me—one that loved discussing romance languages rather than programming them—that felt neglected and in need of sun. If no one from work wanted to go with me, it was fine. It was time for me to go on an adventure of my own, and for them to be the left-out ones.
Landing in Rio de Janeiro after the long flight over the tropics was almost more of a relief than it was two years earlier. At the time, I was running from the ascetic world of academia; now I was running from an intense focus on administering a growing digital world. Comfortingly, Rio de Janeiro was unchanged, awash in golden light and lightly dressed bodies and the constant sound of samba. After checking in at the fifteen-dollar-per-night hostel on Rio’s hostel row, I ran directly to my beloved Ipanema beach, where the sands were alive with light and the play of bodies. People tossed soccer balls back and forth and played in the surf as hawkers called out, “Agua de coco, cerveja,” almost as though they were singing. There was too much to look at to focus on anything in particular, so I just took in the colors and the way it all felt: soft sand, the green of palms, the whitest light. Without a second thought, I lost track of time and the accumulated anxiety of living in a world where I was expected to be focused on a screen and be virtually available all the time.
I hung out on the beach during the day and ventured out
into the samba clubs at night with new friends made on the stoop of the hostel, all visiting from somewhere, all going somewhere else next. It made me realize that, socially, the
now
of travelling, which consists of whoever is there, in whatever place you’ve all happened to end up at the same time, is more natural for me to inhabit than the
now
of the Internet, a disembodied world which includes everyone, everywhere, all somewhere else, behind some other screen.
Some nights later, I was in the southern Brazilian beach town of Florianopolis, and my local hostel crew ventured to an outdoor reggae bar on a sea of sand dunes. While waiting for the band to start, a few of us walked far up into the dunes until we could see nothing but sand and sky in every direction. Someone tried to take a picture, but the moonlike stillness couldn’t be captured; the light was too diffuse to make sense to the camera. I thought of my colleagues back in California and how they would be awed by this dark sublimity in the midst of a strange and wild continent, so raw and far from anything they had experienced. I wanted them to see it, or better experience it, since the moment was so much bigger than the view: It was the velvet vastness, the utter quiet, the slight wind brushing sand against our skin, the far-off glow of the bar we’d left behind. I left the dunes feeling certain that life was still meant to be lived, not continuously filmed, mediated, and watched from afar.