The Boy Kings

who let his shiftlessness slide. None of us blamed the kid. It was all in the game, and in some way, everyone was playing.
    The game of building kingdoms that executives from Mark down seemed to be playing reminded me of a quote from The Wire, “The king stay the king, unless he a smart-ass pawn.” I grew more obsessed with The Wire, the deeper I found myself falling into Facebook’s game (on weekends, I would sometimes watch an entire season and try to use it as inspiration to game Facebook’s system and better my career). Someone suggested that Thrax could be Omar, the stickup artist in The Wire who robs drug dealers (because his MySpace hack was kind of the Internet equivalent of a stickup) but that didn’t seem quite right to me. Omar had a Robin Hood politics to his piracy. He stole partly to redistribute the drug dealers’ wealth to the neighborhoods they fed on. In high school, Thrax had been a pirate for piracy’s sake: He had wanted to transfer media (movies, music, episodes of I Love Lucy, a show he openly adored) over to his servers just to have it, in the event that he might want to watch it someday and also, because having gigabytes of data at hand was part of how hackers proved their status to one another. The more media he could pirate and store on his copious hard drives, like digital stash houses, guarded by firewalls instead of guns, the better. “I’m kind of obsessed with piracy,” he would say to me, later, as if even he knew this drive to accumulate data was a slightly odd, excessive pastime, a new kind of drug.
    The minimalism that Mark espoused extended in my case to a minimalism of people. Without money to go out in Palo Alto (and with very little to do there if I went), I had to be selectiveabout what I did and with whom. The Harvard guys were less careful with money, because they didn’t need to be. While not typically flashy, they liked to take limos to party in the city or go wine tasting in Napa. Photo albums of these trips would always show up on Facebook afterward, full of pictures of engineers in dress shirts and ties lifting champagne glasses and rolling around on the floor of the limo, smiling with glee. I went on one Napa limo trip and, a week later, upon receiving my three-hundred-dollar share of the bill from one of the Harvard engineers, I realized that I would I have to find other ways to have fun.
    So I was lucky to have Sam and Thrax as friends; their less fancy upbringings made them frugal by habit. Sam rode his bike and the bus everywhere; his apartment was furnished with a couch and the dartboard that he brought from Massachusetts in homage to the bar games of his family’s working-class hometown. That fall, his sister Micaela, a clever bioscientist who dressed for the beach in short shorts and flip-flops regardless of the weather, moved from Massachusetts to live with him while she looked for work. Her social hallmark was that she proudly carried a six-pack of beer in her purse at parties, just in case the hosts hadn’t supplied enough, and the Facebook engineers whose parties we went to were duly impressed and chastened: Micaela had outmanned them.
    So it was that our social life in Palo Alto consisted of hanging around at our apartments playing games, like Scrabble or darts, or watching movies and, because our Facebook friends were always there, the office. When there was nothing else to do, we could always run around the empty office after midnight, tinkering with the toys and games the boys had accrued and lollingaround on the body-sized bean bags that are Silicon Valley’s furniture of choice. In many ways, the atmosphere of our lives that year was like an oversized preschool.
    One night, after drinking on the office roof, Sam, Thrax, Justin, and another self-taught engineer, Isaac, who had been hired over a year earlier to help Mark and Dustin code until he was let go a few months later, played hide and seek happily in the dark office, amid the desks and monitors and warren-like rooms filled with blankets and video screens. During our game, I hid under the catering table obscured by the folds of a tablecloth, like Eloise at The Plaza. Thrax eventually found me because, as you do when playing hide-and-seek in childhood, I gave myself away by giggling when he came near. But, given the circumstances, how could we not laugh? We were, technically at least, adults, crawling around on the floor under computers in some of the most expensive square footage in