The Boy Kings

A book about Facebook that will ignite cultural conversations about technology, gender, race and the future of the internet.

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Kate Losse was a grad school refugee when she joined Facebook as employee #51 in 2005. Hired to answer user questions such as "What is a poke?" and "Why can't I access my ex-girlfriend's profile?" her early days at the company were characterized by a sense of camaraderie, promise, and ambition: Here was a group of scrappy young upstarts on a mission to rock Silicon Valley and change the world. Over time 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 behaviour to the habits and rules of these brilliant but socially awkward Internet savants who have become today's youngest power players?

Increasingly sceptical, 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 ghost-writer, the voice of the boy king. This book takes us for the first time into the heart of this fast-growing information empire and reveals 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?