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

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    Sarah Lacy was indeed cute, especially for a business reporter. Wearing knee-length designer shorts and with her dark curly hair held back in a hairband, she was certainly in marked contrast to Zuckerberg who prides himself on his geek chic look—a black fleece and Adidas flip-flops. “When online dating goes horribly wrong,” I whispered to Zoe as we sat at the back, waiting for the interview to get started.
    The room was chock-full-o’nerds and their excitement at seeing their hero was beyond embarrassing. As Zuckerberg walked onto the stage, accompanied by thumping techno music, a group of men in the first two rows stood up and started dancing.
    “I’m not sure I can cope with this,” I said to Zoe. “Pretty reporter or not, I may have to get out of here.”
    “Yeah,” she said, “and I assume you’ve noticed that the pretty reporter is wearing a wedding ring.”
    “Jesus, Zoe, how can you see a wedding ring from here?”
    “Comes with the job, darling.”
    The interview got underway and it soon became apparent that the organizers had made a terrible mistake. The computer programmers and web designers that comprised the majority of the audience couldn’t care less that Facebook was a multi-billion-dollar company: all they were interested in were the technical details of how the site ran, how it was coded and what features were coming next. Lacy, though, is a business reporter, and so wanted to press the world’s youngest billionaire on how he saw his role changing over the coming months. It was a classic case of right content, wrong audience.
    Another problem that soon became apparent was that Zuckerberg is a really, really difficult interview subject: much more comfortable in front of a computer than an audience. From the start, he answered Lacy’s questions with defensive one-word answers and awkward jokes.
Lacy, for her part, tried to put him at ease by playing on their friendship to the point where she was almost flirting with the world’s most unflirtwithable man. It was painful to watch.
    I was curious what the rest of the audience thought, so I called up Twitter on my phone. I’d used the service a few times since Michael had introduced me to it, but not to the point where I was convinced of its purpose. But looking at the “tweets” relating to the Zuckerberg interview, I suddenly understood it. “ This Lacy chick is the worst interviewer ever ,” wrote one Twitterer. “ This interview sucks ass ,” said another. Twitter was the perfect tool for hecklers who are too cowardly to actually shout something out. I could learn to like it. By this point, I actually felt sorry for both Lacy and Zuckerberg—the former was asking good questions and was doing her best to coax answers from her subject; the latter was clearly uncomfortable on stage and just wanted to get back to his nice, safe office.
    It was a terrible interview, but it was hard to decide whose fault that was. The audience, though, was suffering from no such uncertainty—here was some woman interviewing the great Mark Zuckerberg and not even asking any technical questions. “Ask a proper question!” One of them found some courage and started to heckle.
    I couldn’t take it any more. I walked out of the auditorium and headed to the bar. For the amusement of my friends back home—and maybe Maureen—I decided to kill some time writing a post for my blog: a fake transcript of the speech, with Zuckerberg parodied as a monosyllabic idiot savant and Lacy as an over-friendly bimbo …
    Austin Convention Center Ballroom A—2 p.m. : BusinessWeek journalist Sarah Lacy enters, followed by Mark Zuckerberg. The audience applauds wildly.
     
    Sarah Lacy (SL): “Thank you—thank you all so much. Now let’s
hear it for this guy—Mark Zuckerberg everyone! So, I wanna start by asking—as I did in my book—why do you think Facebook … which I use, like, all the time—is so great?”
    Mark Zuckerberg (MZ): “Well …”
    SL: