The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim.
—Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle
FEBRUARY 1, 2012
Emails from Mark were always bracing. He preferred FB messages in general, so email meant something serious was afoot. The first lines of this morning’s directive—do not share the contents of this email, or the Sec will come get you—didn’t allay the momentary alarm.
The “Sec,” of course, was the internal security apparatus, which caught people looking at user profiles or leaking confidential information. As with the Stasi in East Germany, all who lived under its jurisdiction knew they were being watched.
The email instructed us to assemble at four o’clock that afternoon in “the tent.” As the campus’s main courtyard was still under construction, Facebook had erected what resembled an expansive gospel-revival tent in one of the football-field-sized parking lots to serve as a company-wide rallying hall. And so the throngs poured out of the doors at five minutes to four to hear the news from the prophet of our religion. I arrived late as usual, and took a seat in the back row.
Mark started by announcing that the company was officially filing to go public. A spontaneous cheer erupted and he was forced to pause. Then, in one of his more rambling speeches, he warned how going public would also bring the distracting eye of public scrutiny, including no small amount of ridicule. That was something that Facebookers, in their sheltered amour propre, had never been forced to endure.
Given the potential distractions of frivolities like the stock price and whatever the Wall Street Journal might say about a service it surely didn’t understand, Zuck had one message to impart: Stay focused on our mission!
As the child of Cuban exiles, I was reminded by this scene of a piece of collective cultural memory: Castro giving a photogenic victory speech on a flag-draped podium surrounded by his olive-green-clad coterie, during the early days of the revolution. The swirling immediacy of the moment, that spark of history being made before your eyes, the cheering, sea-like crowd, the charismatic contortions on Castro’s face. That feeling that the universe had conspired to make something big happen right there in front of you, and you were a part of it by being present. That’s what stared out at you from photos by Glinn and Korda in those heady days of early 1959, which is why they transfixed the world, and still decorate some confused malcontent’s bedroom in Berlin or La Paz.
In Havana, my cousins were forced to listen to rambling speeches about maintaining core values inside a one-dimensional cult of personality. In Menlo Park, I was sitting in a tent full of people wearing identical uniforms of Facebook swag and doing the same.
Back in Havana, my cousins were eyeing posters of Che and Fidel on crumbling buildings and the sides of lurching, belching buses. Alongside were rousing posters, designed in that wonderfully retro socialist realism only the Cubans still embraced: ¡TODO POR LA REVOLUCIÓN! ¡HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE! ¡PATRIA O MUERTE, VENCEREMOS!
Meanwhile, I was walking around Facebook, surrounded by stenciled portraits of Mark and equally exhortatory posters: PROCEED AND BE BOLD! GET IN OVER YOUR HEAD! MAKE AN IMPACT!
At their extremes, capitalism and communism become equivalent:
Endless toil motivated by lapidary ideals handed down by a revered and unquestioned leader, and put into practice by a leadership caste selected for its adherence to aforementioned principles, and richly rewarded for its willingness to grind whatever human grist the mill required?
Same in both.
A (mostly) pliant media that flatters the existing system of production, framing it as the only such system possible?
Check!
Foot soldiers who sacrifice their families and personal lives for the efficient running of the system, and who view their sole human value through the prism of advancement within that system?
Welcome to the People’s Republic of Facebook.
But one can simply quit a job in capitalism, while from communism there is no escape, you’ll protest.
As for the actual ability to opt out under capitalism: look at Seattle or SF real estate prices, and the cost of a decent US education, and consider whether Amazon or Facebook employees could really opt out of their treadmill. I’ve never known one who did, and I know many.
Ask your average family providers, even those in a two-income family, whether they felt they could simply quit when they liked. They could barely get a few weeks off when they had a child, much less opt out. Switching jobs would amount to nothing more than changing the color of the shackles.
As the ever-sagacious @gselevator quoted: in communism people made lines for bread, while in capitalism they make lines for iPhones. Sure, iPhones are better than bread, and the standard of living in capitalist countries is clearly higher, but the lived experiences of either, from the point of view of the working proles, bears more than a passing resemblance.
The reality is that capitalism, communism, and every other sweeping ideology feed off the same human drives—the founder’s or revolutionary’s narcissistic will to power, and the mass man’s desire to be part of something bigger than himself—even if with very different outcomes. National Socialism, Technofuturism, Bolshevism, the Islamic State, Pan-Arabism, la Commune, Jonestown, the Crusades, la mission civilisatrice, the white man’s burden, evangelical Christianity, Manifest Destiny, Spanish Falangism, the Church of Latter-day Saints, the Cuban Revolution—the villain with a thousand faces, yoking together the monomaniac’s twitchy urge and the follower’s hunger for a role in some captivating story.
What would our historians do without that loyal stagecoach, that motive force, of history? What would I even be writing about?
I had chosen a seat behind a detached pair, who on further inspection proved to be Chris Cox, head of FB Product, and Naomi Gleit, a Harvard grad who’d joined as employee number twenty-nine, and was now reputed to be the current longest-serving employee other than Mark.
Naomi, between hushed chats with Cox, was clicking away on her laptop, paying little attention to the Zuckian harangue. I peered over her shoulder at her screen. She was scrolling down an email with a number of links, and progressively clicking each one into existence as another tab on her browser. Clickathon finished, she began switching slowly from tab to tab, lingering on each with an appraiser’s eye. They were real estate listings, each for a different San Francisco property. Catching the address of one, I opened my MacBook and used our great enemy Google to find the address. The location was a decent but not exceptionally choice part of Diamond Heights, a popular, quiet neighborhood for many nesting techies. The real estate agency had done its Google homework, and the listing was easy to find. It was one of these modernist deconstructionist takes on the Victorian paradigm the new structure had likely replaced: all black stone, stained wood, and ridged zinc, with the merest hint of some abstract notions of bay windows, but mostly an asymmetric monstrosity. List price: $2,400,000.
We need to maintain focus while we go public, uttered the social media comandante.
Every über-successful tech company has gone through the same struggle to keep people from being distracted by potential share price. What made companies like Facebook unique was the persistent scale of the wealth discrepancy, as early employees stayed on and the growing company hired help that was decently paid, but not due to receive anything like life-changing riches.
In a society defined wholly by consumption, the difficulty of wealthy and nonwealthy Facebookers discussing money would be comparable to a Swedish anarchist discussing political philosophies with an Islamic State militant. And so the protocol is to not talk about it at all publicly. People of course did discuss it among themselves. Among what were surely many such groups, there was one called NR250, which was more or less a collaborative how-to on being affluent. The title came from “New Rich,” and the 250 from its originally involving the first 250 or so employees, or so the story goes (and at this point it’s more than just early Facebookers). Yes, they were literally nouveaux riches in all senses of the term, and from all reports (more than one member has dished to me) they acted like it. How to buy land under an LLC to hide the fact you’re amassing a compound, the best resort on Maui, how to book or lease private jets, the best high-end credit cards to use, and so forth. But not a word of it while on campus.
In day-to-day terms, it was something like what the famous Google masseuse Bonnie Brown wrote in her autobiography about that company’s encounter with the bipartite wealth split:
A sharp contrast developed between Googlers working side by side. While one was looking at local movie times on his monitor, the other was booking a flight to Belize for the weekend. How was the conversation Monday morning going to sound now?
The members of this ruling class furiously denied their very existence, however. Naturally, if you were to poll Southern whites about racism, they’d stubbornly maintain that the South was an exemplar of equal rights. The British upper class would declare their country to be the model of meritocracy. To the extent I can use the word “privilege” without feeling like a social justice warrior and puking in my mouth, the beneficiaries of such privilege <heave> never see it. Similar to the proverbial fish who doesn’t see the water it’s floating in, the FB nobility didn’t grasp their pride of place in the corporate hierarchy.
At a more formal level, that attitude meant Facebook didn’t have table-stakes benefits like 401(k) matching for years. As I once joked to British Trader when she asked if Facebook had a pension scheme, the IPO was the pension. Except, of course, it wasn’t for many Facebookers, as later employees (including this one) were not due to receive life-changing wealth when the company went public.* Facebook eventually did commit to matching retirement contributions, but the internal debates on the topic revealed the rift between the haves and the have-mores. Some didn’t understand the problem (the have-mores), and some worried about tuition at Stanford and affording a home in even relatively modest San Mateo (the haves, sort of).
What was intriguing was how the unwealthy embraced the system, even if they weren’t the beneficiaries of this new social order we’d all joined. The junior hire was sucked along by enthusiasm and cluelessness, but the more senior employees at the middle-manager level knew the score. They knew that they lived one lifestyle, but their old-timer supervisor, who wasn’t necessarily more talented, lived very much another.
This was a textbook case of the Marxist argument that capitalists instill the values of the property owner into their managerial classes, while still keeping most of the fruits of labor, in order to make common cause against the exploited proletariat, even though manager and worker have more in common than either does with the senior leadership. Even the most flag-waving Facebook (or Amazon or Google) middle manager, hired when the company was mature, realized he didn’t make beans compared with what the early employees and founders—the true owners of the company—were worth. And yet the managers sided with their overseers against the very people they worked alongside every day. Say what you like about Marxism in practice, but it describes our contemporary technobourgeois society exactly.
As in companies, so in nations: the national conversation also ignored the socioeconomic rift, almost geologic in size, between how the affluent and the just-making-it lived. Facebook was merely the United States in microcosm.
Keep focused on our mission!