At 5 feet 10 inches, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and a heart-shaped, strong-jawed face, Haugen looks a little like Reese Witherspoon’s much taller cousin—and there’s a hint of Tracy Flick in her polished delivery. She has a TED Talk–ish way of introducing explanatory examples by telling you she’s going to offer an example, and still remembers exactly where she got into college (MIT and Caltech, though she ended up going to the newly formed Olin College) and where she didn’t (Yale—she was wait-listed, and still regrets indicating political science for her major rather than engineering).
But it’s clear that she thinks of herself as a humanist, rather than simply an engineer. She misses San Francisco’s participatory art scene, a cousin to the Burning Man scene, and remains annoyed that some on the left have painted her as a techno-optimist. “I don’t think the solution is technology,” she says. “Part of what we need is to have people see each other, with empathy and compassion.”
That’s what she feels for Zuckerberg. “Can you imagine having your entire adult identity wrapped up in something? Like, this is the only thing you’ve done? Can you imagine how hard it would be to admit that it has hurt people?”
Our next course has arrived—wild rabbit and gluten-free gnocchi for Haugen. “Oh, beautiful,” she says. She loves to cook, in part because it helps her manage her celiac disease, which she was diagnosed with in her mid-20s while she was at Google. That was a hard period in her life: She describes a severe autoimmune reaction, unexplained weight loss and gain, puzzling neuropathic pain, and a visit to the hospital for symptoms of malnutrition. Her work deteriorated, and she said Google placed her on a performance-improvement plan, which she feared was a corporate glide path toward being forced out. “I should have gone on medical leave, but I was young, and I felt ashamed that I was sick. Because in our culture, we shame people for that, right?” She was also married at the time—to a colleague at Google—and was going through a separation. “I lost a couple of years when I was like, I don’t know…” she trails off. “I was alive. I succeeded. I succeeded in not dying.”
Haugen has a boyfriend she met on the island—they were roommates, she says—and the two treat food as an organizing principle in their lives. She’s gluten- and dairy-free; he’s keto. They met through the cryptocurrency community, and his support has been crucial for her. She texted him when all the attention started. “I was like, ‘Hey, so I want to give you an out. We haven’t been dating that long. At any point, if it gets to be too much, you can tap out. Like, I celebrate your joy, right?’ ” He didn’t tap out. He’s spent his share of time in the weirder parts of the internet, and wasn’t intimidated. She describes him as playful. “I feel like that’s part of the fun of the crypto world,” she says. “These are people who are in different boxes,” people who’ve found success without Harvard MBAs or corporate jobs.
As we talk, Haugen maintains intense eye contact, like a Dale Carnegie trick, and when we say goodbye, she shakes my hand in an old-fashioned businessman manner that’s somehow out of step with her generation of wavers and huggers. I’m reminded of how clear she was during her congressional testimony, exuding the kind of sensible moderation both parties seemed able to get behind. It’s not hard to imagine a political future for Haugen, who says she’s mostly voted Democratic, though she describes herself as an “Eisenhower Republican,” and rhapsodizes about how he integrated the military. But she says that a traditional political career is off the table for her, in large part because of how much effort she puts in managing her celiac. The touring will be stressful enough on that front.
She thinks there’s probably a book in her future. She also dreams about an open-source social network for students of all ages to learn and experiment on—think of it as a lab for aspiring software engineers. But in the meantime, Haugen is focused on getting the raw material of the documents in front of as many people as possible and is worried about what to pack for the chilly European leg of her tour. “There’s a little sliver of a chance I might have dinner with Macron,” she says, excitedly.
Haugen keeps faith in the power to enact change even while it remains to be seen whether any meaningful legislation will come out of her testimony. Whatever policy solutions do come may not work, Haugen acknowledges. She worries that current calls to censor content or break up Facebook are “so reductive” and risk running afoul of the First Amendment. “At which point, the way we will get change is if, like, we have 18-year-olds having dance parties outside Mark Zuckerberg’s house.”
Meanwhile Haugen is okay with being the face of all of this. “I am a non-noble Cincinnatus,” she says, referring to the Roman hero who refused power and returned to his farm once the battle was won. “If a new social movement is needed in order to make change, I will leave the beach, go do that, and I will return to the beach as soon as it is done.”
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