The Boy Kings

the fall of 2004, with my newly created Facebook account, here I was: on the Internet under my real name. Visiting Facebook’s rudimentary privacy page, which had just a few drop-downs that offered options to make your profile visible either only to your school or only to your friends, I realized that it was possible, for the first time on the Internet, to protect my profile from being visible to anyone outside of my immediate group of acquaintances. I breathed an elated sigh of relief. Now, we can all finally use the Internet! I thought. No more dealing with creepy guys assuming that just because I was on the Internet, I was available to be virtually stalked and harassed with pictures of penises, followed by a barrage of insults if I didn’t respond. The privacy protections of the restricted network (people outside of Hopkins couldn’t see my profile or even that I had one) made it feel, surprisingly, okay.
    Facebook made it easy for the Internet-wary to be comfortable, because, in addition to the privacy protections, the initial layout of the site was minimalist to the extreme. It was strikingly clean, and novel in its simplicity, lacking the gaudy advertisements and spammy content that were inevitable elsewhere on the Internet. The profile consisted onlyof a modestly sized photo and a set of profile fields that the user could fill out or not, according to their own comfort level. It seemed fun, literary almost, like a newly published, frequently updating book that was more interesting to peruse than the dry, archaic texts I studied in the library. The first interest I listed on my profile was the gold standard, because I had always been interested in the idea of things that don’t change form, that hold value, that aren’t subject entirely to the whims of an economy in which nearly everything is disposable, temporary. The other interests I listed on my profile were flirtier and less abstract: praias (“beaches,” in Portuguese), braiding my hair. This was the trick with Facebook, like the way you present yourself at a party: to say something without saying too much, to appear interesting without trying too hard, to be true to yourself without telling everyone everything. “Never apologize, never explain,” Roland Barthes wrote in The Pleasure of the Text, which we studied in class. This seemed like the right way to approach a prying technology that, I could already sense, would never be satisfied by just a few bits of data. Much later, Facebook would seem to whisper, “Tell us everything.” Even though in the beginning it was less inquisitive and shared your information less far afield, I already sensed that I had to remain its boss: I had to be able to tell it no .
    Facebook was entertaining and engaging precisely because, unlike most technical applications at the time, it didn’t seem like a sterile bunch of lines of code. Just as at the other prestigious universities that had Facebook networks, the Johns Hopkins University Facebook network was a delightful web of in-jokes about campus culture—such as the “I CheckMyself Out In The Mattin Center Windows” group devoted to the vanity-provoking windows of the Arts Center, or the “Hopkins 500,” devoted to the approximately five hundred students who could be seen at parties interspersed with profile photos of artificially tanned sorority girls, intense medical students, and Hopkins’ requisite lacrosse players. It was the first Internet site I had ever used that mirrored a real-life community. The cliques on Facebook were the same ones I ran into at the library and campus bar, and the things people said to each other on their walls—water polo team slang, hints at the past weekend’s conquests, jabs at Hopkins’ lacrosse archrival Duke—were similar to what you heard them saying at study tables or around pitchers of beer. The virtual space mapped the human space, and it had all happened virally in weeks.
    • • •
    Logging on to Facebook that first day, in retrospect, was the second, and to date the last, time that any technology has captured my imagination. The first was when Apple advertised the first laptop, the PowerBook, in the 1990s—with the words, “What’s on your PowerBook?”
    “World domination,” my teenaged self answered instinctively. That’s what these devices were made for, I thought: so small and yet so powerful, so capable of linking quickly to and between everything else in the world. I had a sudden fantasy of