Authors: Katherine Losse
• • •
On my return to Palo Alto three weeks later, I rediscovered that, in the new world we were building, living life without
technological mediation would be a luxury. At work, we usually approached each other with a swift efficiency, anxious to rush off to some online business, but now I lingered and smiled when I ran into coworkers in the hallway, still basking in the memories of my vacation. When in conversation at happy hour with Chris Kelly, Facebook’s general counsel, whom I regaled with stories of my Brazilian adventures, I saw his face register a surprise and slight confusion that my Brazil-influenced personality was different, my presence calmer and more open to conversation. I had a brief panic that perhaps I should mask my joy at being present instead of a mere vessel from which controlled Facebook posts and comments flowed. Within a week, though, my behavior readjusted to the Palo Alto norm and my Brazilian warmth was gone: I conducted myself blank-faced, keeping conversations at work to a cold minimum, saving the information transmission for email, IM, and Facebook. I was back.
Still, having been away from it, I was more unnerved now by the office’s intense devotion to the screen, so I lay low, finding a shallow substitute for the Brazilian sea by moving to a new apartment building with a pool, still within the mile. I could barely afford it but I felt, after Brazil, that a pool was necessary, as though it could fix things, if only because the splashing water wasn’t safe for technology. The apartment was in a 1920s Mission-style building called the
Casa Real
whose Craigslist listing promised that it was once the home of the rich and famous of Palo Alto, though at the time it was a poorly maintained, overpriced money factory like all the other apartment complexes in town. The fact that I lived at the
Casa Real
is an irony that is not lost on me.
Real
in this case meant “royal,”
but in the heart of the city that aims to digitize our lives, I interpreted it differently.
That spring, I noticed that one of the designers, Ariston, a soccer-playing Duke graduate who was fanatical about movies and talked about wanting to make feature films one day after his Facebook millions were secured, was frequently updating his status on Facebook with the word
motion
. He was telling us all something, virtually, loudly, but in code.
Motion,
I found out late one night at the office while talking to Emile and Thrax, was the code name for what would be known as
Video,
a project that Ariston and Thrax were developing on their own, without Mark’s direction or consent. Typically, in order for a Facebook feature to be developed, it had to be part of the product road-map, which was a six-months-out plan that was overseen and approved by Mark and that determined what products would be built and when and who would work on them. In this case, Thrax and Ariston didn’t care to wait for the roadmap to catch up to them: They wanted Video, and they wanted it as soon as possible, so late at night they sneaked into the screen- and blanket-laden room off the engineering floor and built Video.
Years later, the building of Video would be described in a Facebook recruiting advertisement as a “brilliant hack” that proved how maverick and self-directed the engineers were. But, in truth, making Facebook Video was not a radical disruption so much as it was, like most of Silicon Valley’s products, an evolution and combination of various existing products, an obvious next step for the company’s suite of technologies. After all, video already existed on YouTube, which was founded by a former Facebook employee who had left a month before I started,
and on the streaming video site that Thrax had already built in college. The fact that Facebook later used the story of Video’s maverick origins as a recruiting tool shows how the making of Video was a culturally vital act of rebellion for Facebook; you can’t claim the identity of a hacker company if your engineers aren’t breaking any rules.
So, while Thrax and Ariston did not invent video, they were compelled to bring it to the company and claim it as Facebook’s own (like all of Facebook’s products, such as Photos, the product was simply and grandly called Video, as if it were the one and only). Their compulsion wasn’t just to disobey orders and build something they weren’t supposed to, but, in the spirit of the company, to strive toward a monopoly. The would-be kings did not come to Facebook to only half digitize the world, to own a record of text and still images. They wanted to own moving images. They wanted to see everything. They wanted to film everything. They wanted no limitation on the documentation and distribution of our lives, or the degree to which they could access the lives of others. And finally, perhaps, they wanted to be stars, by building the technology so that they could make the movies that would make them and everyone around them stars. As if to drive this home, the Facebook Video frame was fashioned in the form of a movie screen: wide and black, as though we were watching ourselves in a theater. If there was anything prescient about this in 2007, it was that the world wasn’t yet in a place where everyone wanted to use technology to make them a star.
In fact, the idea that building this technology could make you visible to the world like a celebrity, or even turn you into a celebrity, didn’t really occur to me then. In 2007, Facebook still
seemed as though it was gaining value precisely by being private, by showing you what you would have seen anyway offline: the intimate lives of people you were already intimate with, private moments that you had participated in. Mass fame seemed like the confused pursuit of actors in another medium: reality television. At the time, the only people I was connected to on Face-book were people that I knew and with whom I shared real-life social experiences. I couldn’t fathom yet why you would want everyone, even people you’ve never really known, to know you.
To me, Facebook Video was just another gadget to play with, but a little gratuitous at that point, technology for technology’s sake. The test videos Thrax uploaded overnight as he built the product seemed to make this point over and over: They were scenes from an empty, dark office, scenes of faces flickering at the camera, saying nothing, fiddling with their floppy hair. Nothing happened in them and I wondered what impulse caused him to click record. Why this moment and not the one five minutes later? I always wondered that when I saw that a new video had been posted.
The lack of action or purpose in the test videos perfectly represented the motivation behind these projects: to technologize everything, just to say that we did. The televising and digitization of private life was the new colonialism: without any continents left to explore and own, private life had become the last frontier. “Television Rules the Nation,” a hidden quote that Thrax and Ariston inserted in the header of the Facebook Video page, was visible only to those who knew to highlight it with their cursors. When everyone would be using Facebook, the technologists would have captured life itself, all the moments
in our lives that used to be belong only to the people who lived them. To own not the physical map of the world but the map of human life was, I began to think, the goal.
• • •
As a woman and a customer support employee I was expected, for the most part, to follow the engineers’ leads, because we were a technical company and this implied that what we were doing required technical skills. The trouble was that I also embodied Facebook’s ethos of rebellion all too well, and there was no role available, at the time, for a woman who broke the rules. I did my job and accomplished my goals, but beyond that I didn’t feel compelled to fall in line. I knew that if I simply did everything I was told, I would not be of any interest to Mark, who preferred employees who were slightly dangerous, like the cyberpunk characters in the 1990s movie
Hackers
that he and many other engineers referenced often. I decided I would develop my own project, off the grid, and in a nontechnical capacity.
While Thrax was building Motion/Video, Sam and I stayed up late some nights to prepare and launch Facebook networks in other countries. First, I would have to gather all the metadata about university networks abroad (like the names of schools, their locations, and their web domains, which we would use to authenticate students as legitimate members of their school’s Facebook network). Then, Sam would run a script he had written that would build the networks and check for any issues before declaring them live and ready for registrations. Once the networks had been launched on a given night, usually around
midnight or one o’clock in the morning, we would toast to our new territories. On the Watch Page, a page Dustin developed that allowed us to see how many Facebook users were registered in any given Facebook network, we would observe as users instantly began signing up for the new networks we had created. Next to the name of each network, a count depicting its number of users would steadily mount upward, first in the single digits, then growing into the hundreds. If we were doing really well, it could reach into the thousands overnight.
Building new networks abroad was fun and independently motivated, a very Facebook thing to do in the company’s developing corporate mythos of the self-starting employee, and good for the site’s growth. As such, our work was to be rewarded. However, as in any corporate hierarchy, any time people went around the rules at Facebook, it unsettled middle management. “You are doing an excellent job in customer support, but I’ve noticed that you are working outside the department,” Andreas told me in a performance review that spring, his eyes narrowing, wanting me to be afraid. He was more concerned with maintaining company hierarchy than, as the rest of us were, getting critical work done by any means necessary. It’s possible he didn’t stop to think that the networks abroad needed to be launched in order to build momentum for Facebook’s growth outside the United States. While Andreas didn’t understand this, Dustin did: One night, when I was hanging out with Sam at his desk on the engineering floor, Dustin tacitly encouraged us to launch more networks. “He’s your boy,” Dustin said to me, gesturing to Sam. He knew that the company had lucked out with us: We were doing work without his even having to ask. This, like Thrax
making Video, was the startup dream: that the product you are making is so compelling that your employees will advance it in their sleep, or at least in the time when they should be sleeping.
So, I nodded and pretended to listen while my manager chastised me, and then, late at night, continued to launch new networks with Sam anyway. This dissonance between upper and middle management is what happens when you work for a company like Facebook, which is simultaneously about control and the dismantling of control. Facebook wanted to disrupt the market without having its own order disrupted, to perpetually change and break things without allowing its users the same privilege. Internally, it was the same: Engineers were tacitly encouraged to break rules while the rest of the company had to follow them, unless they had some tricks of their own. The people in the company who could get around this paradox were the ones who could
social
it (the short term for
social engineering,
or hacking one’s way around something using social means) by breaking the right rules and, above all, remaining popular, and in doing so riding all the inherent corporate contradictions as far as they would take them. Facebook’s work environment, like much of Silicon Valley, and even like the Internet itself, was always about power: about maximizing your own power while conceding as little of it to others as you could.
• • •
Maybe as reward for my labor or maybe because he just happened to have an extra ticket, in April 2007 Dustin bestowed a ticket to the Coachella music festival on me. All of my friends at the
company were going, but at three hundred dollars per ticket plus three days of lodging expenses, sadly, I didn’t have the money to go. So, when Dustin gave me the ticket I felt like Cinderella with the glass slipper: I could go to the ball in the desert. I hadn’t left Palo Alto since my trip to Brazil two months earlier and I was, as always, anxious to leave—light and heat and live music were as essential to me as coding and Python (the preferred programming language in the valley) were to my coworkers.
As the sun was going down over Palo Alto, Justin, Emile, and Thrax picked me up in Justin’s Honda (later, everyone drove Audis, but no one had that kind of money yet, so mostly we drove practical Japanese sedans) at my apartment for the long drive to Coachella. We always did everything at night, since everything in the valley was cooler and more vital in the dark, and driving was no exception. We would be in the car for six hours, traveling past garlic-scented Gilroy and onward to the flat dreariness of the I-5 and, finally, outward to Palm Springs. I assumed that we would sit and talk and listen to music like my friends and I always did on the drives to Los Angeles from Phoenix, but this was a different time and a different kind of road trip. As we drove into the darkness of the I-5, computers and gadgets started to come out of custom-made Facebook messenger bags and were turned on.
While I was resting against the headrest in the backseat, trying to sleep, I saw the telltale glow through my eyelids of the laptop screen bobbing in front of me. “Noooo, not again, not here,” I thought. I understood the constant presence of photos and video at parties but in the car? While I was sleeping? “Kate’s going to hate me forever,” Thrax said to the screen, turning it on
me, “Talk.” The video camera on his MacBook Pro was recording my nap, which was now over. It was my job to perform. So, I talked about nothing into the camera, addressing Jamie, who was sitting at home watching us on Facebook from his sandbox. Sandboxes were testing areas that occupied what was called the
developer tier
of the site, which only engineers and other employees could access. Engineers would play in their sandbox as they developed new code for the site, and only when the code was fully developed would they migrate the code to the live site at one of the weekly midnight pushes. While I talked to the camera, Thrax narrated the scenery passing by. “Buses welcome,” and “Daylight headlight section,” he read off the highway signs. “I think we’re in the middle of nowhere.” We were indeed in the middle of nowhere, but I kept talking to our distant audience, and Emile did too. Then we signed off, “We love you, Jamie,” we said, and at that moment it sounded like we did, although it wasn’t something we’d say to him in person. I think we could tell him we love him because he was so far away, and to love him is to love the technology that allows us to speak to him anyway, safely, intimately, from afar. Our technology, ourselves: For us, at the heart of this revolution, they were ever increasingly the same.