The Boy Kings Read Online Free PDF

pixelated photo of Mark wearing an Oxford button-down and a slight smirk, was called “The Creator,” and it did feel a bit like being a kind of omnipotent, all-seeing god.
    After an hour’s instruction from Jake, we were set loose on the emails flowing in from colleges across the United States. They ranged from the briefest request for a password to long expositions on the social phenomenon that was Facebook and the way it had already changed social interaction on campuses for better or for worse, depending on the author’s viewpoint.The most glowing fan letters to Facebook betrayed the author’s new sense of power while using this technology: even the shyest person could now glean information and participate virtually in social worlds that formerly seemed restricted or off limits.
    There were also complaints about the usual stalker types familiar from the rest of the Internet, voraciously devouring images of women, seeking the most flesh-baring photographs, and spamming women with requests for sex. Jake, Oliver, and I played the police of the virtual college campus, issuing warnings and adjudicating arguments, and were also its tour guides, explaining how poking and tagging and blocking worked to people who were just learning to conceive their social lives in virtual terms.
    “What does poking mean?” was a question asked hundreds of times a day, sometimes by people who really didn’t know and other times by people who relished the sexual frisson of writing to Facebook to ask about “poking” and its many interpretations. We always responded innocently, “It’s just a way to get someone’s attention,” knowing full well the range of childish and sexual connotations in play. Being coy, not admitting the libidinal urges driving so much of the site’s usage, was professionally necessary, a way to differentiate Facebook from the cheap and overtly sexual vibes of MySpace. Being coy was also part of the fun, part of the illusion we as a company were constructing that life on Facebook, unlike in reality, was always safe, easy, playful, free, void of cost or obligation. As Dustin Moskovitz, Mark’s Harvard roommate and Facebook co-founder, said over lunch in the office that fall, with his dry, practical intelligence, “Everything on Facebook is flirty.” He was right. Facebook, likeflirting, was a fun way to present yourself lightly and attractively to the world, with no downside, and no commitment.
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    A few weeks later, just as I was beginning to worry that I would be one of the only women working at Facebook, Maryann and Emma joined the customer support team. They were close friends of Jake and Oliver’s from Stanford, pleasant in appearance, also nontechnical in major, and we got along as well as needed to perform our duties. At night they disappeared to parties full of former Stanford students and the requisite ping-pong balls and beer-laden Beirut (beer pong) tables that were their university’s preferred nighttime sport.
    This particular social clique preferred to discuss parties to more personal or intellectual topics, so we didn’t go beyond casual pleasantries, but that was fitting for our mission of superficially connecting everyone in the world. We had Facebook as a topic of conversation. If we wanted to know more about each other we could visit each other’s profiles and read the details we put there, and if we wanted to get closer than that, we could IM each other privately. From my first day onward, it was like my coworkers and I were connected always, virtually at least, chatting and emailing and posting on each other’s Facebook walls. The first thing Dustin said to me after I had been taught my initial Facebook duties was to get on AIM. “We are on it all the time,” he said, and it was true, for better or worse, we were.
    Since a formal coolness was how our team interacted—smiling nods followed by fast descent into our screens and theemails and Facebook pages contained