The Boy Kings

the last time any of us ever stayed in acheap hotel together on Facebook’s dime. From what I had read of the first dot com boom six years earlier, when programmers went from working in nondescript cubicles to throwing money around on bottle service in downtown Manhattan like they were bankers in American Psycho, it seemed only a matter of time before we would all realize the full extent of privilege that comes with working for the next big thing on the Internet. Not just a good salary and bragging rights over your friends but the right to expect to stay in five-star hotels and sleep on 400-thread-count sheets every night.
    We couldn’t use our computers anywhere near the convention; the security of anything with a circuit was most probably compromised. In order to go online at all and remain in contact with Palo Alto, we had to connect via an elaborate system the boys wired in our room, draping cables over the headboard and across the floor. While the boys were at Home Depot buying cables to rig the room, I parted the faded chintz curtains to enjoy the vertiginous view of the backside of the Strip, concrete parking garages and hotel towers reminiscent of Eastern bloc buildings. I reveled in the cracked, gold-speckled Formica sink and the smoke-stained walls of our room. “Let it unfurl,” felt like a goad to some grand experiment, bigger than any of us, and it was already happening.
    Downstairs, the Riviera casino was at once garish and dim, thronged with pale hacker types wearing black T-shirts, shorts, and tall boots. Some had ponytails and beer guts, others were skinny punks. All were busy hacking or going to talks about hacking. The entire convention was a contest to see who could outhack the hackers, war games for people who didn’t feelcomfortable in sunlight. Las Vegas was the perfect host, since in the August swelter it was too hot to leave the hotel during the day.
    In the elevator on our way to the conference, a goon, as the Defcon staffers are called, told us that the elevators had been hacked to go twice as fast as usual, and we laughed nervously as we sped the thirty floors down to the casino.
    As we walked across the casino floor to a talk on hacking forms of identification (which, fittingly, I got into by wearing Sam’s badge, since Sam had decided to go to the pool instead), Thrax asked passersby rhetorically, in an exaggeratedly pretentious voice reminiscent of a BBC announcer, “Are you the wheat, or are you the chaff?” The young men scurrying across the floor in their oversized T-shirts printed with the names of obscure Web sites didn’t notice him, intent on winning their next hacking competition. Though the diffuse hacker community was connected twenty-four hours a day via IM and Internet Relay Chat throughout the year, Defcon is the one time where they get to come together with their people, their tribe; there are tests, levels, judgments. It felt, appropriately, a bit like being in a video game, finding our way down long hallways and bypassing the goons who guarded certain rooms.
    I didn’t know what Thrax considered wheat or why he was posing the question to the room, but at that moment I felt like I was the perfect actor for my role there, as girl to these boys: I knew to be graceful where the boys were gawky, savvy where they were clueless, sociable where they were awkward. I also felt, in my own way, that I was a hacker, too; I had found a side route into a technical world at Facebook where otherwise I wouldn’treally belong. In computer hacking, gaining ground-floor access to a system is called getting root, or having the security key to the entire system, meaning you can change things or delete data at will.“If you have root, you can do anything,” Dustin said sometimes as an admonition to engineers, warning them never to give up root access to Facebook to an outsider. And I was getting root.
    • • •
    As we were lounging on the beds in our room at the Riviera later that afternoon, avoiding the 110-degree heat outside, Thrax announced, with an air of finality, “I am going to make a reservation at the most expensive restaurant in town,” as if this was a sport and finding not just any expensive restaurant but the most expensive one would score us the most points. And why not? Facebook was paying. Thrax had figured out that much about his position of privilege: that he had an expense account and that we should use it. Sam and I said nothing, continuing to stare up at