The Boy Kings

“lulz,” or jokes, as possible. Lulz, on the Internet, were a goal in themselves, a new way of creating a scene and attracting attention from people waiting patiently to be entertained in front of their screens.
    Thrax’s Facebook hack was just the latest in a long sequence of virtual scenes that he had made. He told me about them as we hung around the pool house that summer, tapping away on our laptops at the kitchen table or strumming on guitars in the dark on the living room couches. As a child, his mother arranged for him to have headshots taken and shopped him around at auditionsfor child actors. When that didn’t pan out, he took to the online world, where he and his friends created online personas and held LAN parties (in which people network some computers together in a room and play games) late into the night.
    In high school, Thrax built a website (ready-made blog sites like Tumblr and WordPress didn’t exist yet) where he blogged about the parties he went to each weekend. “Everyone at my school read it,” he recalled. “There was always drama on Monday about what I had written and everyone would talk about it all week.” By college, he was an active participant in the Something Awful forums, a site where people who are essentially professional Internet users (though they were often only thirteen years old) stay abreast of every meme and Internet in-joke cresting through the online world.
    People in forums like Something Awful and the infamous 4Chan—an anonymous message board with a no-rules policy that results in an endless contest by users to shock one another with the disturbing or merely absurd—don’t use the Internet the same way average Internet users do. They play the Internet like a war. The goal is to win every battle—a comment war, an attack against a Web page, or a contest to create the funniest memes. Battle is waged by an often passive-aggressive, often humorous Internet kind of fighting called trolling, and the best troll wins. The trick of trolling is to prove that you know more than your opponent—via wit, argument, or sometimes, silence—to show that they don’t control you. In Internet culture, everyone is either the king or the pawn—or what, in Internet culture circa 2006, was “the pwned,” a combination of “pawned” and “owned” that means both.
    One Saturday afternoon that summer, as we lounged on couches in the pool house, half surfing our laptops and half talking, sometimes sending AIM messages though we were sitting three feet away from each other, Thrax told me a story from his precollege years. One day, Something Awful’s moderators decided that, finally, he’d gone too far with his trolling and banished him from the site. To Thrax, this was worse than a very public high-school breakup. “That’s when I realized how much of an asshole I was,” he recalled, with a seriousness that verged on what almost seemed like tears, “It really affected me and I felt devastated.” As I listened to Thrax talk about the dark days of his ban, slightly confused by the amount of emotion he felt for his banished Internet profile, I perceived a new, strange kind of existential crisis that affected these young men: a failure to exist virtually.
    That summer, I dismissed this insight. Thrax was simply an interesting kind of freak and there would never be a mainstream market for his brand of obsessive online self-documentation and attention-seeking. I was wrong.
    • • •
    It was ten o’clock on a weeknight in July and the streets of Menlo Park were, as usual, dark and empty. Thrax and I were driving to Safeway to buy groceries. The radio in his car, a used BMW that he had bought off of Craigslist a few weeks earlier for six thousand in cash, worked intermittently, and received just one signal from an old-timey jazz station that only played at night. These technical limitations, rare in a world where engineers coulddeploy technology to get whatever they wanted, already felt like they fostered a kind of luxury, a rare form of value. Instead of choosing from ten GBs of pirated, curated, and sorted mp3s, we were grasping to pull one radio signal from the air, and it would play what it chose, in analog.
    There were two Safeways in Menlo Park. A new one, with soft tones and Whole Foods–like stage lighting, and an old one, with seventies signage and the harsh glare of fluorescents. The old one was scheduled to be torn down but, for the time being, it stayed open