The Boy Kings

high school years on AOL, and knew that having a public, guileless, and unprotected Internet presence was little more than an invitation to be spammed by sexual solicitations from faraway men. Before social networks, AOL Instant Messenger and similar chat services were the only truly interactive, in-real-time forms of communication on the Web. In those days, I was always somewhat dismissive of boys who asked me if I had AIM, because it was obvious that they wanted to communicatein instant message form to avoid all the social challenges and filters of real life and, say, ask me out without having to look me in the eye, or look at me at all. So, the idea of creating a profile on an open, national social network felt like an unnecessary risk, another way of making yourself available to millions of distant strangers for the benefit of only a few friends. Who needed that? The lonely, maybe, or the exhibitionist, but most people weren’t enough of either to make a public online profile listing all your private details that compelling. However, by building a virtual agora made up only of people you might actually know in real life, Facebook had suddenly created a good reason for everyone, not just the Internet-obsessed boy in his bedroom, to be identifiably on the Internet.
    As one such boy who attended a class for which I served as a teaching assistant protested, pre-Facebook, and after Googling me without success, “You’re not on the Internet!” (Because for the boy in his bedroom, and eventually for everyone else on the Internet, gathering data about people using Google felt like a god-given right). “Good,” I replied, with satisfaction.
    It wasn’t like I didn’t use the Internet, to the contrary. In the 1990s, when the Internet was in its infancy, I had an email account that I could only access using a no frills program that had no buttons like those currently seen on the Web; to send an email, I had to type a command like “send.” Teenage hacker friends that I met at punk rock shows in Arizona used the Internet primarily to trade information about what were then high-tech hacks: a tone dialer cobbled together from Radio Shack gadgets that allowed you to make free phone calls from pay phones, or a breakdown of how credit-cardnumbers are generated that allowed you to crack credit cards. It almost seemed, then, that this was what the Internet was for: an anarchistic sphere devoted to wielding technology against corporations. I thought it was cool, but in the absence of sites targeted to more general interests there wasn’t much for me to do online except write emails and visit bulletin boards, all green text on black screens.
    A hacker once taught me that, in Pine, the email software used before AOL came along, you could type commands like “finger” to see when someone had last checked their email. This was when I realized that, online, there was always a way to get more data: You just had to know how to go deeper into the code and know more than the average user about its obscure loopholes and commands.
    After the boom of the late 1990s ushered in the consumer Internet, I became a regular on forums devoted to fashion and style, such as Makeup Alley, where women traded beauty and fashion information. Under pseudonyms, we discussed our lives, always protecting our personal details from prying eyes or search-engine crawlers. The overriding rule of the Internet was simple then: You could say whatever you wanted as long as you didn’t say who you were. I also took care to avoid all the cheap-seeming websites, like the fledgling MySpace, which appeared to be founded on the idea of empty exhibitionism and populated by predatory men looking for pictures of women to devour and discard. I was on the Internet enough to know that in the few short years that broadband had been available, it had become easy for men to find images of women to use as a shallow substitute for sex or love. For women, there wasno value—there was even potential harm—in putting yourself online and offering yourself up to strangers, to have your image distributed infinitely across the Web. As the boys of the Internet often said on the troll-filled message board called the Daily Jolt, the only community discussion forum at Hopkins before Facebook landed, “There are no girls on the Internet.” It was true; there weren’t. If we were there, we were as protected by pseudonyms and secrecy as the guys who were searching for us.
    Now, in