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a user at a school in the Midwest wrote in to report a group that was devoted to gay bashing. Upon investigating the group I found that it indeed violated the Facebook terms of “no death threats,” as the words “kill gays” were all over the page. With a click of a button in my administrative tool, the group was deleted. I also wrote an email to let the offending group creator know that his hate speech wouldn’t be tolerated. This commenced a long correspondence between me and this unfortunate soul in the heartland who insisted, virulently, upon his right to say anything he chose about gays. He also baitedme by creating new groups with increasingly violent slogans and images of beheaded bodies, which I continued to delete, responding as calmly as I could. Finally, just as I was fearing that this stalemate would go on forever, I happened to glance at his password, which in the early days was displayed next to a user’s name in our admin tool. “Ilovejason,” it said. Pitying him more than feeling angry, I wrote back and told him that this case was closed and if he created one more hate group I would disable his Facebook account forever. He stopped writing after that.
    Between the alternately dull and dramatic emails from users, the highlight of the work week was Friday afternoon happy hour, when at around five o’clock, our caterer would wheel a table laden with snacks, wine, and beer directly into the grid of desks where we sat. Engineers would emerge from behind their screens for a few minutes to grab a beer and return as quickly as possible to their screens. Customer support employees, who were hourly rather than salaried workers, would continue to dash off emails to users, sometimes with a beer in hand, before clocking out and grabbing another beer and gathering on the gray, modern mass-market couches in an alcove near the office entrance to talk.
    By six or seven o’clock, after a few beers, people grew chattier, engineers and admins and customer support reps mingled, and we began to get to know one another in person. It felt like that early moment in any social circle when you’re not sure what will happen: Who will be friends with whom, what cliques will form, who will be most popular? It all still felt protean, unformed, like the first months of freshman year. All that was clear was that Mark was in charge, supported by a small group of deputies from Harvard and Yale—Dustin, Matt—and it was upto the rest of us to figure out what our roles would be and where we would fit.
    Mark rarely drank or socialized at the happy hours with the rest of us. Occasionally I heard stories, sometimes from Mark himself, about parties and high jinks at the house in Palo Alto that he had lived in with Dustin and a few other engineers the year before—something about a drunken flight on a zip line and another story about blown circuitry in the middle of a beer-fueled coding session. There were whispers that they used Face-book to stalk Stanford girls and invite them to parties, but that made them no different than most guys on the network. But, by fall 2005, when I started working there, Mark’s demeanor in the office, if it had ever been particularly relaxed, was already developing into that of the intent executive preoccupied with larger things than company happy hours, despite the fact that he wore shorts and T-shirts and often padded around the office barefoot.
    The most relaxed I ever saw Mark was when my dad, a math professor, came to visit the office one happy hour that fall. Suddenly every engineer in the office, including a suddenly smiling and talkative Mark, gathered around my dad to talk about calculus and graphs. I hadn’t even told anyone that my dad taught math; it was like they sensed a kindred, elder spirit, someone who understood with them that graphs were the most beautiful and inspiring things in the world. Mark was so at ease and unassuming in that conversation that when I asked my dad as we left the