The Boy Kings

failed, they had nothing to do.
    It was too early to show up at the house we had rented, so we stopped at the Cabazon outlet mall on an Indian reservation, where every retail brand has an outlet and where the winds from the desert sweep unrelentingly across the asphalt, like a Sahara in a strip mall. I felt better when we were shopping because, unlike hacking, it was familiar territory. This was the one activity where my companions would consent to follow my lead. “I think you should wear linen shorts,” I told them, since we were going to the Empire Polo Field, where Coachella is held.
    The name Empire Polo Field struck me as appropriate forus because, in a way, we were like colonists, but for the social Internet instead of land. When other people saw the crowds at Coachella, they saw faces; we saw profiles on new Facebook accounts. We knew they would all have a Facebook profile one day.
    At the mall, we went to Ralph Lauren and searched the aisles full of fake palm trees and golf shirts for linen, which they, of course, had. As we were leaving, one of Thrax’s friends called from Georgia, and we stood around in the windy parking lot while they talked in Southern accents so strong I could hear a drawl oozing through the phone. I leaned closer to absorb the accent: It was so thick and real, from a place I could barely imagine. His friend wanted to come to Coachella but couldn’t afford it, and I was reminded how lucky I was that Dustin gave me his ticket.
    We left the mall for the vacation house, where Chase and his crew of Stanford graduates were already ensconced. I made Brazilian caipirinhas out of copious limes and lemons for everyone, and pretended in all the stark sunshine that I was in Brazil again, even though I was surrounded by my pale coworkers of Silicon Valley. Thrax wandered around with his video camera, as always taping everything and nothing: the kitchen countertop strewn with booze and bags of chips, the pool, the people lying on chaises. They waved idly at the camera when it was pointed at them, saying hello . “You shouldn’t film for so long as you are walking into the room,” Chase said, “It makes the video look like a porno.” I suppose that Chase was right in a way: The taping of everything made it feel like we were in a porn movie, without the sex, but with all the weird, awkward exposure of our private presences to an audience we couldn’t see. Thrax agreed, but nothing changed. The camera was always on.
    Each morning at Coachella we parked the car in the dusty lot of the Polo Field and walked across acres of horse-soiled dirt to get to the entrance. (Years later, everyone would be rich enough to buy VIP passes and bypass the dusty march, but for now this was a long, dreaded, communal part of the Coachella ritual.) We made lazy commentary on the long walk in for the camera, MTV VJ style, about the fashions of Coachella: As usual, there were moccasin boots and American Apparel shorts that year, as if everyone were living a three-day Western desert fantasy, like Casablanca for Palm Desert. I was reminded of my favorite writing professor’s injunction that we “Make up movies for ourselves to star in; write the lines.” Life was exactly like that, everything was a line and a scene, except that these movies were really being filmed, and we had to invent our characters on the spot.
    Once we got through security we raced to see Ratatat, whose metallic chords and looping beats were, along with Facebook’s musical heroes, Daft Punk, one of the soundtracks of 2007, introspective and masculine and hazy, like a long desert drive or a programmer’s long code session. After the set we stood around on the lawn, forming a small island in a sea of people all racing to find something to see. The cell towers on the polo field were overloaded by phones grasping for signals, and we lost all the bars of connectivity on our devices. Rendered inconsolable by the loss of connection, Justin stared at the screen of his BlackBerry, changing position every few minutes to see if he could find a signal. His new BlackBerry Pearl had just been released that week and, even though it was signalless, as we stood on the grass illuminated by the setting sun, he proclaimed it beautiful, touching its curved lines with love. It was as if this new smartphone carried all the secrets of the world, like the conch shell in Lord of the Flies .
    Back at the house that night, we collapsed on the living room floor in