Authors: Katherine Losse
As Facebook matured, the staff came to encompass three distinct types of guys. Skilled, dependable programmers, often Asian-American or foreign born, who were hired to code and keep the site running. Supervising them, the Harvard and Stanford boys, mostly white, who wrote code, while they acted as the reassuringly familiar white faces of the company and ascended the ranks into leadership positions. Finally, the elusive, heavily video recorded, highly sought-after hackers, whose job was as much to act the part of the fresh-faced rogue impresario as to write code. Facebook needed these three types because while all could code, the hacker was what the quiet programmers and by-the-books college boys couldn’t be: the classic, renegade American hero that we all know from books and movies.
• • •
It was a hot July afternoon in the office and I was being barraged with IM’s from colleagues asking me if I was dating Sam. These were people who didn’t usually IM me; they were the office social hubs, usually Harvard and Stanford guys, who felt it was their job to stay on top of all relevant office gossip that may affect the company social scene. There were lots of office couples developing, and so they wanted to make sure they stayed up to date on the latest romantic news.
“Huh?” I typed back to the many queries. “Sam is gay. Didn’t you know that?”
“Yeah, but it says on Facebook that you guys are complicated.”
“What?”
I went to Facebook and saw that on my profile I was suddenly “in a complicated relationship with Samuel Henley,” and there was even a story to that effect: “July 23, 2 AM: Kate Losse and Samuel Henley are in a complicated relationship.” Oh, I thought, I get it. Sam was testing the new product, News Feed, which would launch weeks later. Engineers and customer support were always testing as part of our preparation for product launches, trying to find the bugs in a feature before launch, and around the office testing was a good occasion for a joke on everyone else. We could get away with anything if we said it was a test.
Still, I was taken aback by the fact that the site had literally written a story about us and distributed it to our friends, illustrated with a photograph that had been posted to Facebook a few weeks earlier, of Sam and me in the pool at the summer house. This fully articulated story, written and illustrated by a machine, meant that authorship was no longer human but algorithmic; we didn’t write our own stories anymore. In the photograph the algorithm chose to illustrate our new relationship (to provide visuals for a relationship story, News Feed finds a photo in which both parties to the new relationship have been tagged), we were dangling over the edge of the summer-house pool, our bodies trailing off into the water, and Sam was smiling straight into the camera, while I look slightly off center, quizzical. The
water was a beautiful green, pacific, surrounded by darkness. It was an entrancing picture and I could see why everyone, regardless of the fact that Sam and I were just friends, wanted the story to be true. Everyone loves love stories, even if they are just the byproduct of a quality assurance test.
This new product was intended, as all engineering innovations are, to produce efficiency, allowing us to consume content about our friends more easily and automatically than before. However, the publicity provided by News Feed, the way it functioned like a newspaper, did more than just feed information more efficiently. It established a world in which anything that happened to us became food for a narrative, in which we became like characters in a novel that Facebook and its algorithms were writing, whether we wanted to be in it or not.
As was the case with all new features, we had already been using News Feed for months before it launched. As I lay around the pool house with my laptop, watching people play, I was also reading the newspaper-style updates that would appear in my feed. They were usually photo albums from fellow coworkers—pictures of parties at the summer house and elsewhere around Palo Alto.
The general concept of News Feed was simple: An algorithm was now surfacing content that it believed, based on your activity on the site (what you looked at), you would find interesting. But like all technology, the social news generated by a computer lacked some of the nuance of the real-life gossip channels it replicated. Information that would have gotten to you via human contact and conversation now surfaced as impersonally as if you were reading the
New York Times
(or more aptly,
People
).
As News Feed was nearing completion in August 2006, I was sitting on the gray modern couches in a sunny alcove on the engineering floor, testing the feature, when Pasha, the product manager in charge of News Feed and the only woman with an engineering background at Facebook, asked me to review some of the stories for wording. “I’m not good at this,” she said, “You are. Help me.” I supposed that she had turned to me because at that point I had already developed a reputation as the literary one, due to my status updates composed of music and literary quotes and my general disinterest in saying anything absolutely literal.
Pasha handed me a printout of the News Feed stories the team had prepared. At first glance they were, technically, neat: pulling profile photos and updates from the story’s characters to create an algorithmically generated story. However, as I read through them I cringed a bit—they were not about telling a meaningful story, they were about delivering news in as hard and fast a way as possible. “So and so is no longer in a relationship,” the story said, illustrating the news with an icon of a broken heart, one not unlike the icon of a broken hard drive that signals doom on an old Macintosh. Building the algorithm was one thing, I realized, but delivering stories that felt like they had been delivered by a human was another. I tried to intuit what model of the social world the stories assumed, and if it was one I recognized. Some of the stories didn’t seem like anything I would be instantly apprised of in real life: For example, that some acquaintances were having a party I wasn’t invited to, or that an old ex-boyfriend was now in a new relationship. While in real life I might find out about these things later, they just
weren’t things that I needed or wanted to know immediately, as they happened.
I shared my concerns about the bluntness of News Feed with Pasha—that it wasn’t just telling me things quickly but telling me things I typically wouldn’t know about—and she said that she would take them back to the engineers. None of the stories were removed. I wondered, then, if News Feed and the future of Facebook would be built on the model of how social cohesion works—what is comfortable and relevant to you and what isn’t—or if it would be indifferent to etiquette and sensitivity. It turned out to be the latter, and I’m not sure Mark knew the difference. To him and many of the engineers, it seemed, more data is always good, regardless of how you get it. Social graces—and privacy and psychological well-being, for that matter—are just obstacles in the way of having more information.
As I worked with my fellow Customer Support Team members to help engineers test News Feed and work out the bugs, I began to see that we were trafficking in a new kind of programmed, automatic gossip, in which the mere act of updating your profile (or in this case, of Sam updating his profile and linking to me) becomes a story—online and off. The machine becomes the wandering bard, telling stories, real or something other. As Jean Baudrillard wrote, “The map becomes the territory.”
When Sam was done testing a few days later, he removed our relationship from the site and we went back to being single, to the disappointment of our coworkers. And in the meantime, News Feed slowly became the core of the Facebook product, occupying
the center of the homepage and, increasingly, the center of our social lives.
• • •
In a sense, Thrax’s Facebook hack in spring 2006, which, in addition to making Facebook look like MySpace, also generated innocuous conversation posted to unsuspecting users’ walls (e.g., “Hey, nice shoes,” or, “This wall is now about trains.”) was the first to elide our speech, motivated by individual intention, with that of a machine’s. Unlike the usual viruses that create spammy posts that are trying to sell something, Thrax’s Facebook worm created conversational messages that sounded like posts a friend might have written. “The whole point of them was that they could have been real,” Thrax explained, describing the hack later to an adoring tech blogger. I doubt, however, that making a philosophical point was the hack’s main goal, as Thrax and the other hacker boys that came to Facebook rarely trafficked in philosophical arguments. They preferred instead to use the Internet to create and distribute as many “lulz,” or jokes, as possible. Lulz, on the Internet, were a goal in themselves, a new way of creating a scene and attracting attention from people waiting patiently to be entertained in front of their screens.
Thrax’s Facebook hack was just the latest in a long sequence of virtual scenes that he had made. He told me about them as we hung around the pool house that summer, tapping away on our laptops at the kitchen table or strumming on guitars in the dark on the living room couches. As a child, his mother arranged for him to have headshots taken and shopped him around at auditions
for child actors. When that didn’t pan out, he took to the online world, where he and his friends created online personas and held LAN parties (in which people network some computers together in a room and play games) late into the night.
In high school, Thrax built a website (ready-made blog sites like Tumblr and WordPress didn’t exist yet) where he blogged about the parties he went to each weekend. “Everyone at my school read it,” he recalled. “There was always drama on Monday about what I had written and everyone would talk about it all week.” By college, he was an active participant in the Something Awful forums, a site where people who are essentially professional Internet users (though they were often only thirteen years old) stay abreast of every meme and Internet in-joke cresting through the online world.
People in forums like Something Awful and the infamous 4Chan—an anonymous message board with a no-rules policy that results in an endless contest by users to shock one another with the disturbing or merely absurd—don’t use the Internet the same way average Internet users do. They play the Internet like a war. The goal is to win every battle—a comment war, an attack against a Web page, or a contest to create the funniest memes. Battle is waged by an often passive-aggressive, often humorous Internet kind of fighting called
trolling,
and the best troll wins. The trick of trolling is to prove that you know more than your opponent—via wit, argument, or sometimes, silence—to show that they don’t control you. In Internet culture, everyone is either the king or the pawn—or what, in Internet culture circa 2006, was “the pwned,” a combination of “pawned” and “owned” that means both.
One Saturday afternoon that summer, as we lounged on couches in the pool house, half surfing our laptops and half talking, sometimes sending AIM messages though we were sitting three feet away from each other, Thrax told me a story from his precollege years. One day, Something Awful’s moderators decided that, finally, he’d gone too far with his trolling and banished him from the site. To Thrax, this was worse than a very public high-school breakup. “That’s when I realized how much of an asshole I was,” he recalled, with a seriousness that verged on what almost seemed like tears, “It really affected me and I felt devastated.” As I listened to Thrax talk about the dark days of his ban, slightly confused by the amount of emotion he felt for his banished Internet profile, I perceived a new, strange kind of existential crisis that affected these young men: a failure to exist virtually.
That summer, I dismissed this insight. Thrax was simply an interesting kind of freak and there would never be a mainstream market for his brand of obsessive online self-documentation and attention-seeking. I was wrong.
• • •
It was ten o’clock on a weeknight in July and the streets of Menlo Park were, as usual, dark and empty. Thrax and I were driving to Safeway to buy groceries. The radio in his car, a used BMW that he had bought off of Craigslist a few weeks earlier for six thousand in cash, worked intermittently, and received just one signal from an old-timey jazz station that only played at night. These technical limitations, rare in a world where engineers could
deploy technology to get whatever they wanted, already felt like they fostered a kind of luxury, a rare form of value. Instead of choosing from ten GBs of pirated, curated, and sorted mp3s, we were grasping to pull one radio signal from the air, and it would play what it chose, in analog.
There were two Safeways in Menlo Park. A new one, with soft tones and Whole Foods–like stage lighting, and an old one, with seventies signage and the harsh glare of fluorescents. The old one was scheduled to be torn down but, for the time being, it stayed open twenty-four hours, so we always ended up there. We went grocery shopping in the middle of the night because it was the only time that we were both awake. In the morning, Thrax was sleeping and I would be at work. After midnight, he was working (or at least he was at the office, where he alternately coded, watched, or filmed videos, and managed his Internet presence across multiple forums and sites) and I would be asleep. Our schedules overlapped only between ten and midnight, and this is when we became friends.
In the empty Safeway lot, Thrax parked his car, letting the jazz station that we fought so hard to find trail on for a few seconds before turning off the engine. As we walked toward the fluorescence of the grocery store, I noticed that we were both wearing thrift store T-shirts and old jeans: the suburban indie uniform, though we both come from places the other has never been. I was surprised that we had anything in common at all, not just our clothes, but music, our dry humor. Georgia seemed too far to be familiar. I’d read too many stories about the South in my literature classes to think of it as anything but other: a place where all the American themes of racial darkness twist into
something even darker, stranger, more impenetrable than in the American states like California and Connecticut, which are seemingly without accent. Yet here we were in the parking lot in the middle of the night, two young Americans on a mission to buy groceries in matching outfits.