The Boy Kings by Katherine Losse Read Free Book Online Page A

more interesting than the fact that the photo was taken and posted on Facebook is that it didn’t occur to anyone in the office that there was anything wrong with it, or that the picture revealed something about the culture of Facebook that it shouldn’t. Mark was too busy programming to get to the part of a liberal arts education where you study social inequality. As he wrote on his business card with boyish hubris, “I’m CEO, bitch.” That image was saying that power wasn’t something to be questioned; it was something to collect and brandish. This—not the anarchist ethos I knew from my punk-rock hacker friends—was Facebook’s new world order.
    As the months passed, moments like these occurred with unsettling regularity. When a female employee reported being told by a male coworker in the lunch line that her backside looked tasty—“I want to put my teeth in your ass,” was what the coworker said—Mark asked at an All Hands (it was hard to tell whether it was with faux or genuine naiveté), “What does that even mean?” I went to Mark at the open office hour he kept after the meeting and told him that it was unacceptable to blow off sexual harassment in the office. He listened to me, which I appreciated, but understanding of the crux of the matter; that is, that women by virtue of our low rank and small numbers were already in a vulnerable situation in the office, did not seem to register.
    Confronting him that day simply had the effect, I think, not of making him more sympathetic to women’s plight at Facebook,but of making him realize that I was a force he would have to reckon with. Employees weren’t supposed to challenge his power, but when we did we became, paradoxically, the thing we were supposed to be in the action-hero logic of the company: a rule-breaker, a threat, and, therefore, someone of interest to be courted and co-opted.
    Mark’s tendency to mock or disregard everything that wasn’t a technical issue triggered a sinking feeling that accompanied the heady glee we all began to feel over the early months and years as the Web site soared higher and higher, gaining more users and more rounds of funding and more celebrity. Sometimes my head spun just thinking about it—the wealth, the power, the eventual fame for all these people, I could see it all happening. This is the American dream, I thought, wide-eyed, for who even believed in the American dream anymore? In grad school we invoked the Horatio Alger myth to discredit any ideological move that was designed to distract the masses by suggesting that anyone could be rich, anyone could succeed. The irony of being a critic of the Horatio Alger myth only to end up in my own Horatio Alger narrative was almost too much.
    I was a student of the humanities, including histories of colonialism and revolutions and, despite Mark’s talk in All Hands, I knew that the war that Facebook was waging, if it continued the way it was going, wasn’t exactly revolutionary. The company’s entire human-resources architecture (and, conveniently, Facebook had no actual HR department to correct any of this for a long time) was constructed on the reactionary model of an office from the 1950s, in which men with so-called masculine qualities (being technical, breaking things,moving fast) were idealized as brilliant and visionary while everyone else (particularly the nontechnical employees on the customer-support team, who were mostly female and sometimes, unlike the white and Asian engineering team, black) were assumed to be duller, incapable of quick and intelligent thought. It was like Mad Men but real and happening in the current moment, as if in repudiation of fifty years of social progress.
    For example, on Mark’s birthday, in May 2006, I received an email from his administrative assistant telling me that it would be my job that day, along with all the other women in the office, to wear a T-shirt with Mark’s picture on it. Wait, what? I thought, he’s not