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Over time, this sense of mission became so intense that working for Facebook felt like more than just a job; it implied a wholehearted dedication to "the cause." Employees were incentivized to live within one mile of the office, summers were spent carousing at the company pool house, and female employees were told to wear T-shirts with founder Mark Zuckerberg's profile picture on his birthday. Losse started to wonder what this new medium meant for real-life relationships: Would Facebook improve our social interactions? Or would we all just adapt our behavior to the habits and rules of these brilliant but socially awkward Internet savants who have become today's youngest power players? Increasingly skeptical, Losse graduated from customer service to the internationalization team—tasked with rolling out Facebook to the rest of the world— finally landing a seat right outside Zuckerberg's office as his personal ghostwriter, the voice of the boy king.
This book takes us for the first time into the heart of this fast-growing information empire, inviting us to high-level meetings with Zuckerberg; lifting the veil on long nights of relentless hacking and trolling; taking us behind the scenes of raucous company parties; and introducing us to the personalities, values, and secret ambitions of the floppy-haired boy wonders who are redefining the way we live, love, and work. By revealing here what's really driving both the business and the culture of the social network, Losse answers the biggest question of all: What kind of world is Facebook trying to build, and is it the world we want to live in?
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"Logging on to Facebook that first day, in retrospect, was the second, and to date the last, time that any technology has captured my imagination. The first was when Apple advertised the first laptop, the PowerBook, in the 1990s—with the words, 'What's on your PowerBook?'
"'World domination,' my teenaged self- answered instinctively. That's what these devices were made for, I thought: so small and yet so powerful, so capable of linking quickly to and between everything else in the world. From the laptop, I could write and distribute information faster than ever before. It was intoxicating to imagine, and Facebook's sudden, faithful rendering in 2004 of the physical world into the virtual felt the same. What could you do, now that you could see and connect to everyone and everything, instantly?
"But what, also, could be diminished by such quick access? In the realm of ideas, it seemed easy: Who wouldn't want to distribute and discuss ideas widely? However, in the realm of the personal, it seemed more complicated. What was the benefit of doing everything in public? Is information itself neutral, or do different types of information have different values, different levels of expectation of privacy, different implications for distribution and consumption? Should all information be shared equally quickly and without regard to my relationship to it? And, finally, and most important, as we ask whenever we begin a new relationship with anything, would this be good for me?"
— From the Introduction
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 26, 2012 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781451668278
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781451668278
- File size: 1243 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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July 9, 2012
Losse offers an insider's look into the early years and growing pains of Facebook in this compelling, but ultimately unenlightening book. Anyone who's seen The Social Network or read a shred of gossip news regarding the king of the boy kings, Mark Zuckerberg, will be familiar with Losse's decoction of Facebook's potent mix of youthful exuberance and Silicon Valley hubris. The author was hired as a "customer-support rep" (the company's 51st employee), and was promptly given the "keys to the kingdomâ" the master password that gave her access to every user's personal information. But Losse's professional place in the fledgling company was tenuousâshe was at once attracted and repelled by the power she wielded, but she also never quite fit into the "Paolo Alto club" culture of the company. Eventually, she served as the official ghostwriter for Zuckerberg, bringing her close to the action, but not quite involved in the action. As such, this reads less like a whistleblower's revelatory tell-all, and more like the personal grumblings of a discontented former employee. Right before Losse quit her job (she also worked on the company's internationalization efforts), she made a final trip down to Sao Paolo with Zuckerberg to bring Facebook into Brazil. There, a security detail tells her that she is "only important because is;" unfortunately, so is this book. -
August 1, 2012
An account of the early days of Facebook from a former employee, who examines how the social network's origins match up with the Internet behemoth of today. Though he claims that "privacy is dead," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg guards his own privacy closely, insisting that seamless sharing benefits humanity. He apparently hasn't taken umbrage with this book, from Facebook's "51st employee." Losse joined the company in 2005 as one of the first customer-service representatives, fielding a wide variety of questions and answering outraged letters demanding an explanation of the privacy settings. In her memoir, the author dutifully chronicles the machinations of Zuckerberg and company as they codified their boss' vision. Losse depicts the offices as "frat-house"-style environs, with the all-important programmers on one floor and everybody else--in the author's understanding, the vastly less important workers--on another. Seeing an opportunity, she worked on preparing editions of Facebook for other countries; when told not to by her manager, she went ahead and did it anyway, noting later that the atmosphere at Facebook simultaneously encouraged the establishing of control and the dismantling of control. Despite some genuine insights into the nature of the network, the narrative is hampered by the dull chronicles of the author's personal life. For example, ruminations on a pseudo-romance with a programmer named "Thrax" add little to the story. When Losse shares that she "was happy to hear that Britney Spears was nice" from Spears' former personal security guard, the book begins to feel like Facebook itself--some useful, interesting parts overwhelmed by unrelated news of little interest. An uneven look at the early years of Facebook.COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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