The TV hurls out images that reproduce the system and voices that echo it, and there is no spot on earth it does not reach. The entire planet is a huge suburb of Dallas. We eat imported emotions as if they were canned sausages while the young children of television, trained to watch life instead of making it, shrug their shoulders.

In Latin America, freedom of expression consists of the right to protest on a few radio stations and in local newspapers. It has become unnecessary for the police to ban books: their price alone bans them.

The following day, we were sitting at lunch on the roof of the hotel with the skyline of São Paulo stretching as far as we could see when Mark declared imperially, as he gazed at the view, “We’re going to write a book about Facebook together someday.” That sounds fun, I thought, but then my mind reeled with questions. What would that book even be like? The book I would write about Facebook would be so different from the one Mark would write. It was weird that he assumed I thought the same way he did. My face must have betrayed my doubts and questions, because Mark looked at me with his typical coy smirk, and said, more directly than usual, “I don’t know if I trust you.”

You shouldn’t, I thought, giving him a half-innocent look. But Mark’s idea had planted a new one in my head. I could leave to write my own book, I thought. And after so many years of biting my tongue and speaking on behalf of Facebook, it would be a relief to finally speak and write as myself. After all, as The Wire teaches, you should never trust anyone, in business, at least. Keep your hackers close. Mark, who preferred to hire hackers, knew that. And at that moment, I felt almost, for a second, close to him, as if in the mutual ground of breaking into something—him, the business of registering the identities of everyone in the world, me, the company culture he had built—we had finally found a common bond.