The Upgrade: A Cautionary Tale of a Life Without Reservations by Paul Carr Page A

was. Ah well, I’ll find out when she blogs about it tomorrow morning. It’s amazing what some people consider “work.”
    Tomorrow morning duly arrived and Eris left early, heading for an early panel about interaction, or design, or something before catching her flight home. “You really should come to San Francisco,” she said. “I think you’d love it.” I promised her I’d think about it, showed her to the door and then went back to bed to await the inevitable hangover.
    And, sure enough, by the time I was woken up half an hour later, it was raging with full force. So I really could have done without the shouting from the kitchen …

    “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckFUCK.” Zoe’s morning was apparently not shaping up as well as her previous evening had.
    “FUCKKKKIING HELLL.”
    I stumbled out of bed, pulled on my jeans and opened the door. “What’s wrong?” I groaned. “You can’t possibly tell me you’re suffering from post-coital guilt. Doesn’t seem your style somehow.”
    In fact Zoe had a much more serious—and hilarious—reason to be upset. An hour earlier she had woken up—cheeks still flushed from her adventure on our rented upholstery—and switched on her laptop to catch up on the day’s news and gossip. And that’s when she had discovered the horrible truth—a commenter on a geek gossip site had seen her leaving the party with a guy and had decided to write about it. The blogger had become the blogged.
    Stifling a grin—with limited success—I poured her a cup of coffee and listened as she explained what had happened. The problem was not that she’d been spotted leaving the party with a guy—that was hardly news for someone who blogged about one-night stands—but, rather, the identity of that guy. Not only was he Internet-famous too, but he was even more well known than Zoe.
    “You mean, the guy last night was ___________?” I said, barely able to contain my laughter.
    “Yes.”
    “Holy shit. He’s like a fucking member of the geek A-list.”
    “Yes, I know,” she said.
    “Oh dear.”

503
    But if Zoe thought her fifteen minutes of unwanted fame was traumatic, it was nothing compared to what would happen, a few hours
later, and less than a mile from our rented apartment—to a business reporter called Sarah Lacy.
    Lacy had first come to prominence when she wrote a cover story for BusinessWeek magazine about Silicon Valley’s new breed of young Internet entrepreneurs, the twenty-somethings responsible for popular sites like Facebook and MySpace and Digg. The article had been so well received that she’d been commissioned by publishers Gotham to write an entire book on the subject, with the title Once You’re Lucky , Twice You’re Good .
    The book was due to be published the following month, and, while researching and writing it, Sarah had won the trust of many of her subjects, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth had recently been valued at one and a half billion dollars. Very much the man of the moment, Zuckerberg had reluctantly agreed to be interviewed on stage at South by Southwest—but only if Sarah conducted the interview.
    The event was the conference’s hot ticket—so much so that two auditoria had been set aside for it: one for the interview itself and a second where the whole thing would be broadcast on a huge screen for those who couldn’t fit into the main room.
    “You going to the Zuckerberg interview?” Zoe asked as we left the condo, heading for a late brunch. I hadn’t planned on it.
    “One point five billion reasons why I’m going to say nothing interesting and you’re still going to lap it up?” I said. “Yeah—sounds fascinating.”
    “Not jealous at all then?”
    “Of Mark Zuckerberg? Please.”
    “Suit yourself. I hear this Sarah Lacy girl is cute.”
    “Really?” I said.
    “Well, I might poke my head round the door. See if there’s anything in it for the FT article.”
    “Thought you might. See you