How the World Got Wired

Chapter 16 — The Social Graph

At the very beginning of this book, in the prologue, I told you about your grandmother filming a sunset in Vietnam and uploading the video to Facebook so her family across the world could see it.

It is time, finally, to tell you where Facebook came from.

The story begins, like several of the stories in this book, in a college dorm room.

In the autumn of 2003, a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Harvard University, named Mark Zuckerberg, did something stupid.

He was upset about a breakup. He stayed up late one night, in his dorm, drinking a bit too much. He decided, in his late-night state, to build a website. He used his programming skills to break into the password-protected pages of several of Harvard’s dormitories and copy the small ID photographs of his fellow students — without their permission, without their knowledge. He then built a small site where the photographs of two students would appear side by side, and visitors could vote on which one was more attractive.

He posted the link to a few friends. The link spread across the Harvard campus by email in the middle of the night. By morning, the site had been visited by hundreds of students and had received about 22,000 votes. By afternoon, Harvard’s network administrators had shut it down. Zuckerberg was brought before the university’s disciplinary committee and almost expelled. He was, in the end, allowed to stay, but on probation.

The site he had built that night was called Facemash. It was, to put it gently, a bad idea.

I am telling you about Facemash, even though it doesn’t reflect well on its creator, for two reasons. First, it is the actual historical beginning of what would become, within a few years, one of the most important companies on Earth. And second, because it shows something I want you to keep in your mind for the rest of this chapter: the same young man who would soon connect billions of people across the globe, who would help your grandmother send her sunset, did not, at the start, think very carefully about how his creations might affect the people they involved. That habit, of building things first and worrying about consequences later, would follow him — and his company — for the next twenty years.

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