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Authors: Katherine Losse
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have to bother to ask them. But, like any novel or film, a story requires characters and drama.
The Harvard boys couldn’t satisfy this need alone. Their knowledge of the Internet derived from books and computer science coursework, not the trolling, rule-free websites wherekids from the middle of nowhere honed their understanding of Internet warfare and developed well-known online profiles and networks of like-minded hacker friends. One of these friends, Emile, had worked with Thrax remotely (they lived in different states at the time) on the hack and, after Thrax arrived and was a hit at Facebook, the Harvard engineers tracked him down in Louisiana and asked him down to the office. When Emile showed up for his interview, it was the first time that Thrax, along with everyone else, had met him in real life. After some hand-wringing by the Harvard guys about whether any or all of these unschooled hacker boys from the middle of nowhere were just script kiddies, Emile was hired on, too. I liked Emile: Underneath all his trolling and half-shaved, half-long metal haircut, he too, I sensed, had a good heart.
Indeed, the hacker’s appeal for the valley’s legions of software engineers, business development execs, and money guys is not in what he makes (most hacks are by definition, technically shoddy, because they are executed quickly) but in the fact that you never know what he is going to do, what boundaries he will transgress. Silicon Valley imagines that the hacker’s moves are sylphlike, quick, and made under the cover of night, while rule-abiding citizens, powerless, are asleep. In short, the hacker is sexy, a dangerous, bad-boy version of the plain programmer at work in his cubicle. The hacker’s capacity to surprise—or in Silicon Valley parlance, disrupt —is fetishized in the valley as a source of power and profit for tech companies, Facebook among them, which considers its stated ability to “move fast and break things” a core company value. As Paul Graham, the valley’s revered hacker guru and founder of the prestigious seed-capitalfirm YCombinator, put it while lecturing to valley entrepreneurs at what is called Startup School, “We don’t want people who do what they are told.” Or, as the startup enthusiasts on Graham’s Hacker News board counsel each other, “It is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
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
The Harvard boys couldn’t satisfy this need alone. Their knowledge of the Internet derived from books and computer science coursework, not the trolling, rule-free websites wherekids from the middle of nowhere honed their understanding of Internet warfare and developed well-known online profiles and networks of like-minded hacker friends. One of these friends, Emile, had worked with Thrax remotely (they lived in different states at the time) on the hack and, after Thrax arrived and was a hit at Facebook, the Harvard engineers tracked him down in Louisiana and asked him down to the office. When Emile showed up for his interview, it was the first time that Thrax, along with everyone else, had met him in real life. After some hand-wringing by the Harvard guys about whether any or all of these unschooled hacker boys from the middle of nowhere were just script kiddies, Emile was hired on, too. I liked Emile: Underneath all his trolling and half-shaved, half-long metal haircut, he too, I sensed, had a good heart.
Indeed, the hacker’s appeal for the valley’s legions of software engineers, business development execs, and money guys is not in what he makes (most hacks are by definition, technically shoddy, because they are executed quickly) but in the fact that you never know what he is going to do, what boundaries he will transgress. Silicon Valley imagines that the hacker’s moves are sylphlike, quick, and made under the cover of night, while rule-abiding citizens, powerless, are asleep. In short, the hacker is sexy, a dangerous, bad-boy version of the plain programmer at work in his cubicle. The hacker’s capacity to surprise—or in Silicon Valley parlance, disrupt —is fetishized in the valley as a source of power and profit for tech companies, Facebook among them, which considers its stated ability to “move fast and break things” a core company value. As Paul Graham, the valley’s revered hacker guru and founder of the prestigious seed-capitalfirm YCombinator, put it while lecturing to valley entrepreneurs at what is called Startup School, “We don’t want people who do what they are told.” Or, as the startup enthusiasts on Graham’s Hacker News board counsel each other, “It is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
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
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