The Boy Kings

thing), but didn’t want to betray they cared by actually saying so. “I don’t have the balls,” Thrax answered ruefully. I could see him picturing kidnappings and beheadings, as if all of Rio de Janeiro were like the deadly, warring City of God . Just the thought of a suburban American hacker suddenly immersed inRio’s cacophonies of carnival music and street dancing seemed almost impossible, as if the sensory overload would instantly overwhelm the circuitry of someone used to sitting alone in the dark, behind a screen. I realized this was why I was going back to Brazil, because despite the fact that I had found friendship and fun at Facebook, there was another side of me—one that loved discussing romance languages rather than programming them—that felt neglected and in need of sun. If no one from work wanted to go with me, it was fine. It was time for me to go on an adventure of my own, and for them to be the left-out ones.
    Landing in Rio de Janeiro after the long flight over the tropics was almost more of a relief than it was two years earlier. At the time, I was running from the ascetic world of academia; now I was running from an intense focus on administering a growing digital world. Comfortingly, Rio de Janeiro was unchanged, awash in golden light and lightly dressed bodies and the constant sound of samba. After checking in at the fifteen-dollar-per-night hostel on Rio’s hostel row, I ran directly to my beloved Ipanema beach, where the sands were alive with light and the play of bodies. People tossed soccer balls back and forth and played in the surf as hawkers called out, “Agua de coco, cerveja,” almost as though they were singing. There was too much to look at to focus on anything in particular, so I just took in the colors and the way it all felt: soft sand, the green of palms, the whitest light. Without a second thought, I lost track of time and the accumulated anxiety of living in a world where I was expected to be focused on a screen and be virtually available all the time.
    I hung out on the beach during the day and ventured outinto the samba clubs at night with new friends made on the stoop of the hostel, all visiting from somewhere, all going somewhere else next. It made me realize that, socially, the now of travelling, which consists of whoever is there, in whatever place you’ve all happened to end up at the same time, is more natural for me to inhabit than the now of the Internet, a disembodied world which includes everyone, everywhere, all somewhere else, behind some other screen.
    Some nights later, I was in the southern Brazilian beach town of Florianopolis, and my local hostel crew ventured to an outdoor reggae bar on a sea of sand dunes. While waiting for the band to start, a few of us walked far up into the dunes until we could see nothing but sand and sky in every direction. Someone tried to take a picture, but the moonlike stillness couldn’t be captured; the light was too diffuse to make sense to the camera. I thought of my colleagues back in California and how they would be awed by this dark sublimity in the midst of a strange and wild continent, so raw and far from anything they had experienced. I wanted them to see it, or better experience it, since the moment was so much bigger than the view: It was the velvet vastness, the utter quiet, the slight wind brushing sand against our skin, the far-off glow of the bar we’d left behind. I left the dunes feeling certain that life was still meant to be lived, not continuously filmed, mediated, and watched from afar.
    • • •
    On my return to Palo Alto three weeks later, I rediscovered that, in the new world we were building, living life withouttechnological mediation would be a luxury. At work, we usually approached each other with a swift efficiency, anxious to rush off to some online business, but now I lingered and smiled when I ran into coworkers in the hallway, still basking in the memories of my vacation. When in conversation at happy hour with Chris Kelly, Facebook’s general counsel, whom I regaled with stories of my Brazilian adventures, I saw his face register a surprise and slight confusion that my Brazil-influenced personality was different, my presence calmer and more open to conversation. I had a brief panic that perhaps I should mask my joy at being present instead of a mere vessel from which controlled Facebook posts and comments flowed. Within a week, though, my behavior readjusted to the Palo Alto norm