Authors: Katherine Losse
From the minute Thrax’s project began to be built, forcing each other to perform in videos became a kind of a company ritual: Video was most often used by Facebook employees for practical jokes. At a party, someone would turn a camera on and pretend to be setting up for a photo, but after everyone was posed and moue-ing, they would reveal that it was a video all along. The subjects of the video would shriek when they realized what had happened, everyone would collapse into laughter, and
the video would always be posted to Facebook for everyone to watch and laugh at. The joke never seemed to get old.
After we all finished speaking dutifully into the camera, Thrax posted the video to his sandbox in the development tier for other Facebook employees to view. Employees often loaded Facebook from this tier because it gave us access to new things that weren’t available on the site yet (one caveat about using a development version of Facebook was that things were often broken and buggy there, so one never knew whether a wall post would go through or a photo would appear). Other employees, who were sitting at their desks in Palo Alto, posted comments on Thrax’s video to say they saw me sleeping in the video five minutes before. This is bizarre, I thought. We are still in the car, locked in a glass bubble in the middle of Joan Didion’s beloved Central Valley with farmland on either side, and already people have been able to watch our carbound activities. Why is this kind of immediate sharing of our most mundane moments with distant friends even a thing that is happening? The answer to this question, as with all the things that Facebook made over the years, was that the sharing was happening because it could. If it could be built, it must be, and we must be, if not the first, then the biggest builders of this and every other thing. This was the code of the valley.
Thrax and Emile entertained themselves by filming more videos and sending them back to Facebook, and reading the comments on the videos that were posted immediately by our colleagues in Palo Alto. It was a perfect, near-live feedback loop: We couldn’t be alone for a second, even in a moving car. And, apparently, our activities in the car were more interesting than whatever the people back home were doing, because they
couldn’t resist watching and commenting on them. It is an odd logic, this, but it is the logic the social net depends on: That because something or someone you know was filmed, it becomes interesting, worthy of watching. Technology and distance make us more fascinating to each other.
Midway to Palm Springs, we stopped at a truck stop to buy drinks and stretch. There was a store next to the convenience mart full of fake guns and firecrackers, and Emile, Thrax, and Justin bought them, playing cowboys in the parking lot at three in the morning. This made more sense to me as a thing to do with friends on a highway in the middle of the night. Of course, Thrax was making a video of this activity that he would post to the site as quickly as was technically possible. However, because we were in Bakersfield in the center of absolutely nowhere, his Sprint data card didn’t work and we had to return to a strictly analog existence for the last hours of the drive. The boys’ fingers itched with nervousness, drumming loudly against their knees in the dark, unmediated hush of the car. When technology failed, they had nothing to do.
It was too early to show up at the house we had rented, so we stopped at the Cabazon outlet mall on an Indian reservation, where every retail brand has an outlet and where the winds from the desert sweep unrelentingly across the asphalt, like a Sahara in a strip mall. I felt better when we were shopping because, unlike hacking, it was familiar territory. This was the one activity where my companions would consent to follow my lead. “I think you should wear linen shorts,” I told them, since we were going to the Empire Polo Field, where Coachella is held.
The name Empire Polo Field struck me as appropriate for
us because, in a way, we were like colonists, but for the social Internet instead of land. When other people saw the crowds at Coachella, they saw faces; we saw profiles on new Facebook accounts. We knew they would all have a Facebook profile one day.
At the mall, we went to Ralph Lauren and searched the aisles full of fake palm trees and golf shirts for linen, which they, of course, had. As we were leaving, one of Thrax’s friends called from Georgia, and we stood around in the windy parking lot while they talked in Southern accents so strong I could hear a drawl oozing through the phone. I leaned closer to absorb the accent: It was so thick and real, from a place I could barely imagine. His friend wanted to come to Coachella but couldn’t afford it, and I was reminded how lucky I was that Dustin gave me his ticket.
We left the mall for the vacation house, where Chase and his crew of Stanford graduates were already ensconced. I made Brazilian caipirinhas out of copious limes and lemons for everyone, and pretended in all the stark sunshine that I was in Brazil again, even though I was surrounded by my pale coworkers of Silicon Valley. Thrax wandered around with his video camera, as always taping everything and nothing: the kitchen countertop strewn with booze and bags of chips, the pool, the people lying on chaises. They waved idly at the camera when it was pointed at them, saying
hello
. “You shouldn’t film for so long as you are walking into the room,” Chase said, “It makes the video look like a porno.” I suppose that Chase was right in a way: The taping of everything made it feel like we were in a porn movie, without the sex, but with all the weird, awkward exposure of our private presences to an audience we couldn’t see. Thrax agreed, but nothing changed. The camera was always on.
Each morning at Coachella we parked the car in the dusty lot of the Polo Field and walked across acres of horse-soiled dirt to get to the entrance. (Years later, everyone would be rich enough to buy VIP passes and bypass the dusty march, but for now this was a long, dreaded, communal part of the Coachella ritual.) We made lazy commentary on the long walk in for the camera, MTV VJ style, about the fashions of Coachella: As usual, there were moccasin boots and American Apparel shorts that year, as if everyone were living a three-day Western desert fantasy, like
Casablanca
for Palm Desert. I was reminded of my favorite writing professor’s injunction that we “Make up movies for ourselves to star in; write the lines.” Life was exactly like that, everything was a line and a scene, except that these movies were really being filmed, and we had to invent our characters on the spot.
Once we got through security we raced to see Ratatat, whose metallic chords and looping beats were, along with Facebook’s musical heroes, Daft Punk, one of the soundtracks of 2007, introspective and masculine and hazy, like a long desert drive or a programmer’s long code session. After the set we stood around on the lawn, forming a small island in a sea of people all racing to find something to see. The cell towers on the polo field were overloaded by phones grasping for signals, and we lost all the bars of connectivity on our devices. Rendered inconsolable by the loss of connection, Justin stared at the screen of his BlackBerry, changing position every few minutes to see if he could find a signal. His new BlackBerry Pearl had just been released that week and, even though it was signalless, as we stood on the grass illuminated by the setting sun, he proclaimed it beautiful, touching its curved lines with love. It was as if this new smart
phone carried all the secrets of the world, like the conch shell in
Lord of the Flies
.
Back at the house that night, we collapsed on the living room floor in exhaustion, too tired to continue the party into the early hours of the morning, as many Coachella concertgoers do. There weren’t enough bedrooms for all of us, and Chase’s group had done the work of renting the house, so they got the rooms and Emile, Thrax, Justin, and I slept on blankets on the floor. As we were nodding off to sleep at around two in the morning, Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and early Facebook employee, who had left the company weeks after I got there but was still friends with Chase, knocked at the door with what Chase later told me was a doctor’s bag full of drugs, which everyone politely declined. Standard methods of being bad, like doing drugs, seemed inefficient and superfluous to us. The real drama was in the way we were changing everything, the way the whole world would relate to one another, so fast, without anyone knowing it yet. This, not actual drugs, was what got us high. For the rest of the night, I drifted in and out of sleep on the scratchy Persian rug, my feet occasionally accidentally kicking Justin or Emile, while Chase and Sean talked on and on.
• • •
On a hot May afternoon, a few weeks later, I was sitting in the back seat of Thrax’s BMW, waiting for him to emerge from his apartment. Ariston, Thrax, and I were driving to San Francisco to see a band. Thrax finally came out of his building and walked to the car, slowly, because he was, of course, filming. He
opened the car door and settled the camera on Ariston, whose beatifically wide smile stretched an inch wider for the camera. “Heyyy, Thrax,” he said, almost flirtatiously. “Glad you brought that thing,” referring to the camera. “Ha ha, of course, dude, of course,” Thrax replied.
I noticed that when they were filming they spoke more intimately with one another. Perhaps it was because they were speaking not just to each other but to an audience that must be seduced. Technology was, as always, the alibi. But the camera didn’t really protect them: It picked up every lilt in their voice, every tinge of desire. I suppose we must seduce our viewing audience because nobody came to Facebook to be unknown, uncelebrated, alone. They came to build something that would make them larger versions of themselves that would create fame and propagate it to everyone, everywhere. This was a new fame factory, and we were flirting not just with each other but with fame, with the idea that, someday, if we played our cards right, everyone would be watching.
Thrax turned the camera on me where I sat in the backseat. I was wearing my favorite terrycloth hoodie, which was almost a piece of armor at that point, a thin form of resistance to our new, constant state of video surveillance. My face was in shadow but my smile is bright, teeth gleaming digitally on the video that will live online forever. I declared to the camera, “Video nation,” because that is what we were going to become. Facebook’s user numbers were mounting quickly that April, reaching 20 million, our international networks were beginning to grow, and video would soon be launched. Thrax laughed with delight. “Video nation,” he concurred, and cut the scene.
F
acebook is a technical company,” Mark began saying with increasing frequency at All Hands meetings in the spring of 2007, as we prepared for a new wave of product launches. It was a mantra that he wanted us all to memorize and repeat as often as possible to anyone who would listen. At first, I wondered what the force of this insistence was: why
technical,
and not
social
? If the product was about people, why was it important to say
technical
over and over?
Talking to various engineers about this, I discovered that Mark’s point was to differentiate Facebook from other web companies for purposes of recruiting. “Good engineers will only work at a company that grants privileges to the technical people,” they explained. “They need to know that their
ideas and decisions will be considered primary, and not those of marketing or business guys.” The unmentioned competitor in this conversation was MySpace, which, in March 2007, had more than one hundred million users to Facebook’s 20 million but, nevertheless, remained an object of scorn. In the technical world, MySpace was considered a mere shell for spam, a skeleton social network built by an email marketing company rather than an engineering company. Because its parent company, Intermix Media, was based in Los Angeles, MySpace initially gained traction among aspiring Hollywood actors and musicians, thus cloaking it temporarily in an aura of artistic cool, but it did very little to develop itself as a product after that point. Thus, MySpace was not technical, and Facebook was. As far as Mark was concerned, Facebook was the first social network devoted to technology first, and he wanted to stake this claim within the tech community. Thus, Facebook planned and arranged its first F8 conference in downtown San Francisco, which was where Facebook would publicly announce its commitment to technology.
As May 2007 approached, the company prepared furiously for F8. The proof of the company’s technical nature, which would be unveiled at F8, was the Facebook Platform, a new product or set of tools that would permit a Web application like Facebook to interface with external code written by outside developers. This would enable engineers who were not employees to build applications that run on the site. Users could then interact with friends on the site in a wide range of applications beyond the ones, like Photos and Groups, which were created by Facebook.
We were all so aligned in our sense that Facebook would
dominate the world that none of us really questioned the hubris involved in naming our conference “Fate.” Platforms are the ultimate technology for a Web site with global ambitions because they are a way of bringing every developer to play on your turf, even if they aren’t playing on your company’s team, and we were the first social network to build one. Moreover, as far as Face-book was concerned, we were the first social network committed to technical innovation at all.
However, because I was not technical, I was not actually invited to attend F8, despite being employee number fifty-one at a company that now had over two hundred employees. In the push for technical dominance, Mark had been engaged throughout spring 2007 in a shift that a few women in the company began referring to as the “technical purge,” in which everyone without a technical background suddenly found their positions in question. Mark began to insist that new positions be occupied by technical people. I wasn’t particularly surprised, since, as customer-support employees, we always had questionable status anyway.