Authors: Katherine Losse
“Soul mates,” Thrax said as we walked out of Walmart, speaking to himself and to me at the same time. I was so tired, still on Italian time, that it felt like I was living the line from
The Crying of Lot 49
that I picked for the “About Me” section of my profile, “Later, sometimes, she would have trouble sorting the night into real and dreamed.” Was any of this real? What was I doing in a Walmart, in some boy from Georgia’s grenade T-shirt, exhausted by world takeover? How could I be soul mates with a coworker that I would most often communicate with on AIM, like some disembodied voice from the Internet who only rarely appears in human form?
Soul mates seemed like such an odd word for Thrax to use that I continued to muse as we walked toward the car to meet
the others, who had stayed behind. Connections, it had begun to seem, not a particular connection, are the point at Facebook and, through Silicon Valley’s efforts, the thing that we are all connecting to was technology, not people. No one person, in the age of the social Internet, could provide the constant, easy attention that the technology can. As employees as well as users of Facebook, the work we did wasn’t about focusing on one other person, or even on a few. Our job was to create a machine that attracted the attention of as many people as possible and allowed us to give it back in kind, and the only way it was possible to pay attention to that many people and be paid attention to is through technology. In real life, we didn’t have that many inputs and outputs. We could only talk to so many people in a day. Technology, then, was our new soul mate, telling us it understands us, telling us that we are connected, that someone loves us, that we are not alone.
But then, I realized, Thrax might, as a human, have needed to identify a “soul mate” or two or three because the rest of his world was a chaos of technically enabled attention and infamy, a million races to beat others at this or that, in which a new race began as soon as the last one ended. In the constant chase after attention and fame, he might now more than ever need someone who didn’t care who was winning, how many followers he had or what he had said online. Saying soul mates then, in our new world, wasn’t about a real relationship but simply an assertion and desire for such a thing to exist, that there be some substrate of real beyond the screen, much like the sustenance in the form of sloppy joe mix that we had just bought at Walmart, that we must eat because, without it, regardless of how much we live
in the digital world, we couldn’t subsist. Perhaps one day soul mate, like friend, would be a category of Facebook relationship, content to be neither anything more, or anything less, than that.
• • •
A few weeks after my return, there were rumors of an important new hire that Mark had made to the executive team. That Friday, he convened an All Hands to introduce Sheryl Sandberg, a high-powered, multimillionaire advertising and operations executive from Google, whom Mark said he had been courting for an executive role since the Davos World Economic Forum in January. “Sheryl and I met at a party and we immediately hit it off,” Mark announced. “We began talking for hours. She asked me questions about how I was running the company. I was really impressed with how smart she is.” Mark spoke with an uncharacteristic smile and glow, not flirtatious exactly, perhaps a function of some kind of sense of relief, as if he had been seeking someone like Sheryl for some time. “When I met Sheryl the first thing I said was that she had really good skin,” Mark continued, “and she does,” he said, gesturing toward Sheryl, whose face was admittedly creamy in tone. She was smiling, and didn’t flinch.
Sitting among my colleagues, I felt bemused and a bit perplexed, as I had never heard Mark comment on anyone’s skin before. He obviously had never spoken about any of the engineers’ skin as making them particularly suited to their role. Mark went on to say that, “Everyone should have a crush on Sheryl,” and some engineers claimed in an engineering-wide email thread immediately after the meeting to have the requisite crushes. It
seemed odd to me, as if all of this kneeling to worship Sheryl was some kind of compensation for the fact that no female employee had ever received such treatment before. At any rate, Sheryl had arrived, and would be occupying the role of chief operations officer. I wasn’t sure what that implied at first, but it turned out to mean that she would handle everything that Mark didn’t want to: essentially, all department operations outside engineering. In addition, with her Google ads background, she would have a prominent role in ads strategy.
At a one-on-one meeting with Sheryl weeks later, I found out that she had an interest in the topic of women at Facebook and in Silicon Valley generally. In her months-long process of getting to know the company, she scheduled individual meetings with all the women in engineering. (By that point, they numbered about fifteen out of hundreds of engineers, including Maryann, who had been promoted into a position as user experience lead on the engineering design team, and would eventually come to manage the user experience team, a new department that was devoted full time to testing new features and collecting user feedback.)
Sheryl and I met in a small meeting room off the mini-kitchen on the engineering floor. “I don’t know if you know this, but I do a monthly women’s meeting at my house that is women only, where women in the valley can gather and hear an interesting female speaker and talk with one another,” she said, “so I care about this stuff.” She paused for a moment. “Tell me everything,” she said, directly, leaning forward on the couch where she sat. I liked her forthrightness and the way she looked at me directly, creamy skin and all.
I told her that I was generally happy in my role as internationalization PM, which I was. I also let her know that there were a few situations involving men in the department that I thought she should know about. For example, one of the engineering directors had been known to proposition women in the company for threesomes; I also had an issue with an engineer who behaved alternately dismissively and aggressively toward female product managers, but the situation had been handled ineffectively. “I was told by an engineering director to go in and talk to the guy and try to resolve the situation myself, but when I did that, the engineer somehow twisted things around and called me a bad feminist, as if to distract from the conversation at hand, and the conversation didn’t go anywhere. It was pretty unpleasant,” I said.
“Offense as defense, I get it,” Sheryl commented.
“Yeah, exactly,” I concurred. Sheryl is cool, I thought, she gets it.
“Well, thanks for talking to me, I really appreciate it,” Sheryl said, winding up our conversation.
That was the last time I met privately with Sheryl, and I thought that if her conversations had gone similarly with other female employees then her arrival was definitely going to be a boon for women at the company. I didn’t hear back immediately about any of the issues I had raised with her, until she stopped briefly by my desk one day a few months later and in the low, succinct office voice that she mastered, said, “I just want to know that the situations you told me about have both been handled.” I had heard nothing about it. “You see, I’m so good that I make things happen and no one even knows about them,” she smiled.
It was then that I noticed that the director who propositioned employees had been subtly demoted and the aggressive engineer had been transitioned to another team. Both men, of course, continued to work at the company, so in some sense I wasn’t sure what exactly would be different. However, the fact that that there had been some action, after years of guys getting away with whatever behavior they wanted, was comfort enough.
Sheryl’s housecleaning sweep through the department was the last transformation of our workplace that most of us saw from her, as far as our day-to-day work was concerned. Mark continued to conduct the All Hands meetings and serve as the voice and visionary of the company, which was his due, of course. However, women I talked to were disappointed that Sheryl and her voice had quickly receded to the background, leaving Mark and his vision of a brash, move fast/break things culture to define the company.
Aside from the initial excitement and activity surrounding Sheryl’s arrival, as 2008 drew to a close, the office was crowded with more and more guys, in desks packed increasingly close together, but there were still very few women. Facebook had started to resemble, more than ever, a fully fledged fraternity. Sam even said so to me as he was telling me about some tournament—whether chess or ripstiking or gaming—the guys on our floor had held the night before. He liked the fraternity aspect of Facebook, to my initial surprise but, as I thought about it, I began to see why. These were the brothers he and all the boys never had, the popular techno frat that didn’t exist at Harvard or Stanford. The engineers had been together so long that they knew each other inside and out, like frat boys in their senior year. They played
games of chess all day on the kitchen tables, and didn’t look up when I watched, as if they didn’t see me, because they didn’t; like any woman on the sidelines of a varsity match, I was not in the game. They raced ripstiks around the floor all day and night, keeping charts on the whiteboards of who won.
Their venture into a world of pure competition was here now, charted by points and what Facebook would soon call
credits,
a form of virtual Facebook currency that began to be tested internally as a way for Facebook users to reward each other for posting entertaining things. Winning battles for status was no longer the precocious activity of young hackers, but a codified way of life. And, just like in a real fraternity, there was an obvious hierarchy, as well as rituals, which in this case involved chess games and the occasional limo club night instead of football and pub nights. Facebook had made being a nerdy programmer cool and normal, at least within the confines of the valley.
I stopped paying attention to the social dynamics at work, since, like all frats, everything and everyone in it looked the same from the outside. I was a sorority of one, and it was getting lonely. Any hint of a new, creative, coed society that I had felt in the beginning, composed of gays and straights and men (or boys) and women, had become stratified and compartmentalized just like in the American institutions we had wanted to leave behind.
• • •
Fortunately, my job kept me traveling for the rest of the year, bringing me back to Palo Alto only long enough to get lonely
again before I could pack for some new and exciting destination. I was in Dublin for work on September 29, 2008, when the stock market crashed, and I spent the night in a bar at the Four Seasons Hotel, reading news of the crash on my laptop as piano music tinkled in the background. While checking Facebook, I received an invitation to a group created by a designer called “Party like it’s 1929,” that bore the description “If we’re going down, might as well go down in style.”
That night, I also received an email that Dustin had sent to the engineering team announcing that he would soon be leaving Facebook to, as everyone always said when they left, pursue new things. Noooooooo, I broke immediately into a silent wail, my eyes tearing up, not quite realizing until that moment how much I had depended on Dustin to be the company’s witty, practical, human counterpart to Mark. “Daddy Dustin,” Sam and I had sometimes jokingly called him, since we all sensed that Dustin was the one most likely to listen to us if we had a problem, or needed to talk to someone in power. I ended the night by writing a Facebook message to Dustin to express my gratitude to him simply for having been there, though I had never called on him directly, then went to sleep in my hotel room as the lights of Dublin twinkled coldly in the night.
Whenever I landed in some city, fresh from business class and flush with my Facebook expense account, I had the precious experience of being anonymous, free, unlinked to a hierarchy that I didn’t control. I started to revel in that freedom, purchased ironically by a site that would like to remove anonymity from everything. “In the future, when you check in to a hotel it will know what music you want to play and who your friends are,
based on your Facebook profile,” I used to tell people in my prior job as platform product marketing manager, to tout the possibilities of the platform and its promise that we could have our friends and our likes with us, at least virtually, all the time. But, in truth, I was almost happier escaping to places where no one knew me.
Several times, when I was not scheduled to make a business trip, I made the one-hour hop to Las Vegas for the night and checked into a hotel, in love with the glittering anonymity the city affords, the sense that no one on the Strip knows who anyone else is: There are too many people and too many nooks and crannies in all the casinos for anyone but the casinos’ eyes in the sky to keep track of. Real friendship and intimacy are beautiful and necessary, I knew, but I was starting to wonder exactly who my friends were. Were they all the people on my profile, or was there some finer specification, and what was it? It was hard to tell anymore.
Back in the office, friends were an elastic, untroubled term. Many of the people on my Facebook profile were coworkers I interacted with on the site only, but, to most, there seemed to be no discrepancy in this. In the logic of our business, to comment on a friend’s post was better than speaking to them, because everyone saw it. Everyone wanted to see everything. This was all justified under the company’s corporate buzzword,
transparency,
though no one seemed to know exactly what it meant. The fact that it was hard to define led Mark to begin a discussion on the company’s internal discussion page asking everyone to submit ideas for what
transparency
was. We discussed the word for days, and all that was decided was that no one knew. For some, like
Mark, who posted in the thread with everyone else, the word
transparency
seemed to have the ring of enforced integrity, as if in a transparent world there could be no lies, no hidden information, and that nothing bad could happen because everyone knew everything about everyone. I was not so sure. Having occupied a powerless role at Facebook, I was conscious of the way in which power affects behavior. The engineers acted; the support team and users were acted upon. This disparity was why, sometimes, revolutions had to happen, or at least percolate, anonymously and in secret.