Ultimately, culture is embodied. As understood by Raymond Williams (1985), “culture” refers to the meanings and values implicit and explicit in particular ways of life. As a news report on the Facebook boot camp suggests, Facebook counts on its engineers to be as “nimble as ninjas, always ready to change course” (Bloomberg, n.a.). According to Pedram Keyani, engineering director and company culture advocate at Facebook, culture needs to be nourished to evolve, and it needs to be embodied by the management. Being bold, fast, and open, focusing on impact, and building trust constitute the core company values and tenets of the culture at Facebook, allegedly perfectly embodied by its founder Mark Zuckerberg (Keyani, 2014). On the company’s 10th anniversary in early 2014, Zuckerberg reflected back on what he called “an amazing story so far,” pondering why, of all people, they were the ones to build Facebook. After all, he says, “we were just students.” The quick answer: “we just cared more about connecting the world than anyone else. And we still do today” (Zuckerberg, 2014). The ethos and rhetoric of openness is ubiquitous at Facebook, despite or, perhaps precisely because of, continuous allegations to the contrary.6 Zuckerberg is celebrated for openly answering any questions employees may have at a weekly company Q&A; products are launched “openly” all the time without “secrecy”; and, when Facebook moved from its headquarters, most of the walls inside the building were pulled down to support and reflect Facebook’s “open communication environment” (Keyani, 2014).
Mark Zuckerberg’s T-shirt, the moving furniture, and the open ofice space are not simply allegorical accessories. They are not meant to provide a stroke of cultural paint over an otherwise technical canvas. Mark Zuckerberg’s contempt for mundane decisions should not simply be dismissed as empty PR talk; nor should the refurbishing of Facebook’s headquarters be taken as a token of style. Then, why talk about a T-shirt and hacker culture? From the perspective that culture is a whole way of life, technologies are integral to culture, not separate from it (Slack and Wise, 2002). Culture maters to an understanding of software and algorithms inasmuch as they are inherently intertwined and co-constituted (Pickering, 1995; Slack and Wise, 2002; Williams, 2005). Indeed, as computer historian Nathan Ensmenger suggests, “software is where the technology of computing intersects with social relationships, organizational politics, and personal agendas” (Ensmenger, 2012; Haigh, 2001). Nowhere does Mark Zuckerberg’s personal agenda of making the world more open and connected, Facebook’s organizational goals of maintaining engaged users to ensure revenue, and users’ desire to see stories that interest them and stay connected to the people they care about intersect more with the power of software to frame the world as it does on Facebook’s news feed. As a starting point, therefore, we need to acknowledge that what Facebook calls the hacker culture is deeply engrained in the code and products that emerge from the cultural life of its engineers. While Mark Zuckerberg claims the T-shirt keeps his goals and motivations intact by eliminating one more decision from his life, it also says something about the ways in which the CEO of the world’s largest social networking site thinks about human autonomy and decision-making. Similarly, perpetuating a work environment in which moving furniture is part of the everyday life of Facebook engineers or tearing down walls for meetings to happen anywhere at any time is much more that a design decision made by an interior architect. They are the physical manifestations of the “under construction” ethos that permeates the culture of engineering at Facebook. As John Tenanes, who oversees Facebook’s buildings as its director of real estate, tellingly says about the physical layout Facebook’s headquarters: “It’s designed to change thinking” (Hardy, 2014).
Life at the Top
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