The Boy Kings

occupied what was called the developer tier of the site, which only engineers and other employees could access. Engineers would play in their sandbox as they developed new code for the site, and only when the code was fully developed would they migrate the code to the live site at one of the weekly midnight pushes. While I talked to the camera, Thrax narrated the scenery passing by. “Buses welcome,” and “Daylight headlight section,” he read off the highway signs. “I think we’re in the middle of nowhere.” We were indeed in the middle of nowhere, but I kept talking to our distant audience, and Emile did too. Then we signed off, “We love you, Jamie,” we said, and at that moment it sounded like we did, although it wasn’t something we’d say to him in person. I think we could tell him we love him because he was so far away, and to love him is to love the technology that allows us to speak to him anyway, safely, intimately, from afar. Our technology, ourselves: For us, at the heart of this revolution, they were ever increasingly the same.
    From the minute Thrax’s project began to be built, forcing each other to perform in videos became a kind of a company ritual: Video was most often used by Facebook employees for practical jokes. At a party, someone would turn a camera on and pretend to be setting up for a photo, but after everyone was posed and moue-ing, they would reveal that it was a video all along. The subjects of the video would shriek when they realized what had happened, everyone would collapse into laughter, andthe video would always be posted to Facebook for everyone to watch and laugh at. The joke never seemed to get old.
    After we all finished speaking dutifully into the camera, Thrax posted the video to his sandbox in the development tier for other Facebook employees to view. Employees often loaded Facebook from this tier because it gave us access to new things that weren’t available on the site yet (one caveat about using a development version of Facebook was that things were often broken and buggy there, so one never knew whether a wall post would go through or a photo would appear). Other employees, who were sitting at their desks in Palo Alto, posted comments on Thrax’s video to say they saw me sleeping in the video five minutes before. This is bizarre, I thought. We are still in the car, locked in a glass bubble in the middle of Joan Didion’s beloved Central Valley with farmland on either side, and already people have been able to watch our carbound activities. Why is this kind of immediate sharing of our most mundane moments with distant friends even a thing that is happening? The answer to this question, as with all the things that Facebook made over the years, was that the sharing was happening because it could. If it could be built, it must be, and we must be, if not the first, then the biggest builders of this and every other thing. This was the code of the valley.
    Thrax and Emile entertained themselves by filming more videos and sending them back to Facebook, and reading the comments on the videos that were posted immediately by our colleagues in Palo Alto. It was a perfect, near-live feedback loop: We couldn’t be alone for a second, even in a moving car. And, apparently, our activities in the car were more interesting than whatever the people back home were doing, because theycouldn’t resist watching and commenting on them. It is an odd logic, this, but it is the logic the social net depends on: That because something or someone you know was filmed, it becomes interesting, worthy of watching. Technology and distance make us more fascinating to each other.
    Midway to Palm Springs, we stopped at a truck stop to buy drinks and stretch. There was a store next to the convenience mart full of fake guns and firecrackers, and Emile, Thrax, and Justin bought them, playing cowboys in the parking lot at three in the morning. This made more sense to me as a thing to do with friends on a highway in the middle of the night. Of course, Thrax was making a video of this activity that he would post to the site as quickly as was technically possible. However, because we were in Bakersfield in the center of absolutely nowhere, his Sprint data card didn’t work and we had to return to a strictly analog existence for the last hours of the drive. The boys’ fingers itched with nervousness, drumming loudly against their knees in the dark, unmediated hush of the car. When technology