The Boy Kings

their inbox. As soon as someone wrote in to report the bug, I knew that, most likely, they were black. White people, I discovered by reading people’s messages and walls, tended to lurk and judge more than they communicated, so their accounts rarely generated that bug. It was almost as if the system itself was designed for lurking instead of direct communication and broke under any different mode of use.
    By night, in Menlo Park, I studied the engineers as they came over to the pool house to grill, swim, and socialize. They were always a little anxious and awkward, working to remain calm and in control in situations where their programs weren’t at hand to do that for them. When all else failed, we could always talk about the site, because it consumed our days, transacting almost all of our activities and experiences. It seemed like we wrote on each other’s walls as much as we saw each other in person. And also, we each had a life-changing financial interest in making the site as addictive and ubiquitous as possible.
    It felt somehow life-affirming to be away from the computer, to see people in person instead of reading their intensely crafted profiles on Facebook. I had already started to wonder whether the fact that I was more comfortable offline than on, unlike the engineers, would mean that I would have to be the bearer of the human—the one who feels where others couldn’t or wouldn’t.
    I kept a running tally in my head of the things and activities in the summer house that seemed human and normal, looking for reassuring evidence that, despite Facebook’s fascination with the cool, technical mediation of our lives we were just warm, social animals after all. I used what I knew of life from Baltimoreas my gauge. Baltimore is maybe the least technically advanced, most tragically human place in America. Kids in Baltimore didn’t hack or have computers; hacking for them meant hanging wires from window to window to poach electricity from the house across the way. I kept Baltimore’s poverty in mind as the baseline against which all this Silicon Valley technology and all the real-life fantasy it enables could be measured.
    On weekends, the house’s dining room table was converted to a Beirut (beer pong) table for parties, and I counted this as a positive: Beirut was clearly active, social, real. At Hopkins we played it in dirty row-house fraternity basements that were the privileged mirror of the dirty row houses that the poor squatted in only streets away. I gave the Beirut table extra points for being a little messy, a little loud, a little burly (involving cheap beer rather than smooth, pricey liquor), and because laptops weren’t safe there amid the flying ping-pong balls and splashing beer. Anything that got engineers off their computers must be healthy.
    People brought instruments to the house and played them, and this too seemed like a reassuring sign. Mark had a guitar and on occasion he played Green Day songs while we all sang. Pictures of these sing-alongs also made their way to Gawker three years later, but the bloggers didn’t find the video on Facebook of us singing “Wonderwall” and its rousing chorus of “Mayyyybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves meeeeeeeee.” I sang extra loud on the chorus, perhaps aware of the lyrics’ special resonance. Watching the video again on Facebook today, I noticed that we seemed much happier here than in later videos, brimming with energies that have long since been focused and contained.I suppose that that summer, nothing was certain; it all could have turned out to be an odd camp that we attended and then disbanded, instead of an early moment of youthful alacrity in a company’s inexorable rise to power.
    Thrax kept a stock of musical instruments in the den that he played whenever there was anyone to listen, and he had a crowd-pleasing ability to instantly play any song he had ever heard. At parties, he entertained guests by playing songs on the keyboard long into the night. Thrax’s total lyrical recall intrigued me from the first, seeming like the musical expression of all the autistic savant tendencies of Silicon Valley, a way of turning all their obsessive, numerical perfectionism into music. Eventually it came to seem, like the emerging social Internet itself, to be just another way of grabbing and keeping attention, of saying, “Look at me.” But, for a while, it was entertaining, even charming, a gift of song in a sterile valley.
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