Authors: Katherine Losse
• • •
Flying to Tokyo in late March 2008 felt like the fulfillment of every late-2000s American girl’s fantasy, since so many of us had seen
Lost in Translation,
and been entranced by its images of
familiar American actors ensconced in Japan’s cool, alien calm. I toyed with the idea of staying at the Park Hyatt, the hotel featured in the movie, but, in my perennial quest for authenticity, I picked the Okura hotel near the embassies, which had been renovated over the years to look exactly as it did when it was built in 1964. The Okura is a modernist Japanese wonderland full of exquisitely square, lacquered tea tables, enormous windows, and perfect stillness. When I arrived, I realized I was the only person in the hotel over five foot eight, and the only American. I felt like a huge cartoon character, with ungainly height and Technicolor blue eyes, struggling to appear restrained and petite amid the dainty Japanese women in dress suits and surgical masks having tea in the lobby.
When Facebook executives traveled, they had an administrative assistant arrange their trip for them but, in the simple, under-the-radar style of our internationalization team, I had no secretary and made all my travel arrangements myself. Not knowing how to arrange a car service in a foreign country, I took the subway to the translation office every day, finding my way via the signs in English that corresponded to the ones full of beautiful but, to me illegible Japanese characters. The train was full of young Japanese workers in accessorized outfits playing on their phones. It seemed almost weird that Facebook would be coming to Japan to bring them technology; they already had so much. They can probably do things on their phones that I won’t for years, I thought. This was why winning Japan was so important to the guys in the office: not because they cared about the Japanese in particular, but because we needed to conquer the best. It was the Normandy of technology wars and, oddly
enough, I, the American girl who didn’t really care about beating Japan at anything, was the advance force, bringing them something they may not even need.
As it turned out, simply launching Facebook in Japanese wasn’t enough to get many users beyond those with existing ties to America on board the site. Japan had a strong recent history of anonymous social networks, like the native network Mixi, and Facebook’s insistence on real names flew in the face of that. In early 2010, Facebook opened a Japanese engineering office to target the Japanese market specifically but, to date, the network remains relatively unadopted (at 9 percent penetration) compared to other countries worldwide. But, back in 2008, we had high hopes that we could succeed.
At night, I went upstairs to eat in the restaurant on the roof of the hotel, fifty stories up, looking out over Tokyo. I didn’t know enough Japanese to leave the hotel for dinner, and feared that I’d get lost. Gazing across the glittering city, I felt disoriented by Tokyo’s size and its residents’ calm acceptance that the city appears to go up and outward forever. My meals would go on for hours, with chefs preparing course after course of shrimp and exotic fish and finely cut vegetables on the gleaming grill at the bar at which I sat. As I sipped on tiny cups of sake and grew increasingly full, I would think, “I’ve come a long way from the Riviera,” remembering the down-at-the-heels hotel in Las Vegas with a view of a parking garage that was my first Facebook-sponsored trip. When the bill came, I hardly looked at it as I signed, knowing that, like Thrax on his search for the most expensive restaurant in town, I could now, finally, charge anything I wanted to.
The ’round-the-world trip was a strange mix of power and disorientation, as if I were poised on the next great turn into the unknown of the cycle that I had signed onto almost three years before. When I left Tokyo a week later, and flew directly to Rome, it was the day before my check landed in my bank account, so I didn’t have enough money to get Euros to pay for a taxi to the city. Sitting on my suitcase with my BlackBerry dying, I searched the Web until I found instructions in English for a train from Fiumicino airport to the city center. I sighed with relief when I was sitting safely on the train, its heavy steel wheels rumbling loudly into the ancient heart of civilization.
Having been traveling for almost twenty-four hours, I was so eager to get to the hotel that I accidentally got off the train a stop early and ended up walking the last blocks, trailing my suitcase along the dark cobblestoned street, exhausted and disheveled after a long flight during which the sun never set, allowing me to take photographs of Siberia that I later posted on Facebook. It was as if a part of me, childlike and overeager, still couldn’t believe that I was doing this: flying around the world leading a charge for a company worth millions that would take over the world. At other times on that trip, I still felt like a kid alone in Europe with a backpack and not enough money to get to the next city.
However, once I was ensconced at what the Internet told me was the best hotel in Rome, I could relax, and took great pleasure in doing so. The room was small, as they are in Europe, but the walls were covered in baroque gold leaf and the bathroom was covered in black marble. I ordered room-service spaghetti from the Michelin-starred restaurant on the roof of the hotel
and figured out how to order cars in advance to get anywhere I needed to go. It took a while to get the hang of it, but I was steadily learning how to play this business-trip game.
While Tokyo was interesting, Rome was, for me, much more comfortable, which made sense, for a million cultural reasons. There, in the musky villas of Italy, one of which housed the translation office where I worked with translators, was where the whole concept of conquering, and sociality, seemingly native to Italians, was invented (or at least that is what we were told in elementary history class). As I dressed each morning to take the car to the office, I felt like the female version of an ancient conqueror, intent on taking over Italy.
In my off hours, I ran around the city in gladiator sandals that would be perfectly in fashion when I showed up at Coachella two weeks later. Touring the Colosseum, I noticed a sign etched with a quote from Agricola that read, “The Romans, great robbers of the world, after all the lands have been devastated by their exploitation are exploiting the sea. They cannot get enough of East or West; they alone desire to possess with equal madness the richness and misery of nations.” I took a picture and uploaded it to Facebook. Ironically or not—I couldn’t tell anymore. At this midpoint in my career, I was on a mission to conquer the world, and the words resonated. That afternoon (which was the middle of the night in Palo Alto and prime engineering work hours), Thrax reached out to me, over AIM:
“Where in the world is Kate?”—thrax96
“I’m in Rome, conquering.”—k8che
“I’m at my desk, conquering.”—thrax96
I supposed then that we were both right, and whatever earlier misgivings I held about conquering it still felt exciting to be the bearers of this new world. That evening at Harry’s Bar on Via Veneto, a luxe-styled vintage expatriate hangout with copious velvet drapes and tassels, I made sure to toast to our exploits. “To conquering,” I said with a slight tip of the glass towards the Colosseum, never quite sure, as one can never be sure on the Internet, in its flat tones and wide openness to interpretation, whether I was half-mocking anything, including myself.
After a week and a half in Rome, working late nights and then the next day until dusk, taking a break in the early evening to drink Americano aperitifs on the Via Veneto and watch the passersby, I was ready and happy to return to the United States. In truth, I felt a new sense of victory and accomplishment after years of struggle and a sense that nothing was ever quite whole. In the previous three weeks, I had finished the Japanese and Italian Facebook, and even gotten a bit of a tan from walking around Rome. What’s not to like? Facebook’s cognitive dissonance was dissolving, for me at least: What they promised to the engineers, I—a woman, a nonengineer, a humanist, a writer—could have, too, and it could be fun. On my Air France flight back to Los Angeles, I thought of nothing but home: palm trees, sundresses, good Mexican food, the southwestern United States. Everything was finally coming together.
• • •
Even the fact that Air France lost my luggage on a layover at Charles de Gaulle Airport didn’t ruin my bliss: It was April 24,
2008, time for Coachella again, and, as we had been saying on Facebook since 2005, I’m going to Coachella, bitches. In the only outfit I had, an ensemble that I had been wearing for at least thirty-six hours, I jumped into a rented Jeep and drove toward Palm Springs, in love with the desert dust, gritty and real, and the sun, bigger than it ever gets in northern California. The desert was my territory, prickly and warm and endlessly beautiful. Away from the thirty-inch monitors and endless nervous distraction of the Internet, I could live. I sang along to the bouncy Akon songs that played on the radio, more exuberant evidence that I was home in the United States, where our culture is hybrid and poppy, without history, perpetually new.
Since, as the logic of technology dictates, we must always be upgrading, Thrax had found a new house this year, bigger and grander than last year’s, although there still weren’t enough beds. It was a classic Palm Springs midcentury modern with a tennis court and a hot tub and at least three bedrooms. I hoped that I wouldn’t have to sleep under the coffee table as I had the year before. But, after parking the Jeep in the driveway and entering the house, greeted by a mirrored wet bar already stocked with booze and backed by glass doors looking onto the pool and the desert, I didn’t care anymore. I could sleep outside on the pool chaises if I had to: In the desert, I was home.
Later, sitting on the pool deck, taking in the huge purplish-blue sky, Thrax asked, sans camera for once, about my flight from Rome, not whether it was a good flight but what class I flew in. “Did you fly business class?”
“Yep,” I said. “Aw, yeah!” he cawed, “it’s official!” In his eyes, my status at the company had finally been recognized. It was funny but not untrue, I
guess, that flying business class, more than joining engineering, constituted proof that I had arrived. It was one thing for Face-book to ask me to get the site translated, it was another to buy me a nine-thousand-dollar plane ticket to Tokyo and another eight-thousand-dollar ticket to Rome and an eight-thousand-dollar return ticket to Los Angeles. The last month of my life—according to my travel receipts stashed away somewhere in my purse—cost Facebook more than my entire salary the year before. In Silicon Valley, you have to know that you are worth it to them, and money is the language they speak. Companies have
valuations,
as they are called, but so do employees, in the form of salary and perks and status, minute decisions made each day about where employees will sit and what they can get away with and what team they’ll be on. It’s simply that an employee’s worth is not so explicitly stated by monetary value; it’s all these things together.
As always, our days at Coachella passed like some kind of American Apparel–sponsored shaman journey that we shared with thirty thousand other people. The goal was to get from the car to the grounds to the sets we wanted to see, all without losing ourselves in the heat and the crowds. When, each night, we managed to find our way out of the trampled fields and to the car and home again we felt as if we had reached an oasis after a trek across the Sahara.
On Saturday night, we skipped the last headlining band and reached the parking lot early, having learned the year before that you have to have an escape plan. (In 2007 we didn’t have one, so we had to hack our way out of the parking lot by finding a hole in the bushes big enough to drive through.) Our conversation in
the car turned to how hungry we were and the fact that no one had eaten since our late breakfast at a roadside taco stand, so we turned off the highway in search of food, which is scarce in the desert at midnight. Soon, Thrax and I were in the grocery store again, only this time it was the Palm Springs Walmart instead of the Menlo Safeway. In 2008, even Walmart had an organic section, but I didn’t care, because all we were doing was finding enough food to feed us after twelve hours of trekking across the Coachella lawn in search of music. I didn’t argue with the hot dogs, sloppy joe mix, and white bread that Thrax dropped into the cart. My legs were wobbling with jet lag, and I was just trying to stay up and awake until we could get home.
In the checkout line, we leaned against the shopping cart, companionably close, hipbone grazing hipbone, too tired to talk. In my sun-worn and jet-lagged mind a vivid memory surfaced of us shopping family style at Safeway, two years before. Because Air France misplaced my luggage and I had yet to receive it, I was wearing Thrax’s signature T-shirt, the one with a grenade on it and the name of the first streaming video Web site he made in Georgia, and madras camp shorts. “You look like Thrax,” Emile had exclaimed with affectionate approval when I walked into the kitchen wearing Thrax’s clothes that morning. As we walked down the checkout lane, Thrax pulled the cart behind him and I followed along with one hand on the cart, tired. “This is how my mom used to pull me along in the supermarket,” he said, and in my boy’s outfit I did feel a bit like the child to his parent. It wasn’t the first time I felt like I was reverse aging into a pubescent boy, suffused by the postadolescent testosterone that saturates the office. “I’m just trying to make it family style,”
Thrax said, apropos of nothing, as if reading my mind, as the checkout clerk ushered us forward in line.
Oddly, Thrax often said something at the exact moment I thought it, as though our brains’ synapses operated on some transparent wavelength, speaking to each other even when we weren’t. Later on, when I was working directly for Mark and charged with the task of interpreting his thoughts for the world, Mark told me that his dream for Facebook was something like this, to make us all cells in a single organism, communicating automatically in spite of ourselves, perhaps without the need for intention or speech. Perhaps this connection with Thrax was some outcome of living in this new, technical Hotel California for so long, becoming attuned to each others’ rhythms unconsciously, like female friends or coworkers who end up having the same menstrual cycle. Or perhaps it is something more archaic and personal. I no longer knew.