The Boy Kings

attention could be satisfied by whomever was online, chatting with us or viewing our updates and making comments. “Should we go?” Sam asked. “I don’t want to,” I replied, “they only want us because we aren’t there.”
    We lay back on the grass for a while and let the twinkling sky descend upon us, bathing us in uneven light, bright for nighttime. When we tired of the outdoors, we returned to the penthouse. None of the guys had returned from the club so we realized with glee that the one bed in the suite was ours. We jumped in, and I picked up the phone to call room service to deliver us a large plate of grilled cheese sandwiches, charged to Jamie’s room tab. After eating the sandwiches, we fell asleep under the crisp white comforter, our fingers still oily with grilled cheese. Later, as the light was dawning over the strip through the floor to ceiling windows, all the guys tromped in, in various stages of drunkenness, and fought for space on the bed and on every available soft surface. Realizing that we wouldn’t be able to continue our luxurious sleep, Sam and I got up and walked down to the pool, where people were already starting to gather in bikinis and swim trunks. We lay out on the chaises and tanned, half asleep, until it was time to catch a cab back to McCarran and fly home.
    That Sunday, after I’d slept off our long night, I logged in to Facebook to see an endless stream of videos that the boys had filmed at the club. In them, the boys were not chatting up or kissing girls they had met, as I had expected. Instead, they were performing an elaborate ritual only they would have the strange, cold vanity to invent, in which they would methodically chat up and reject girls that the bouncers had brought to their table. “Leave! You’re not pretty enough!” one of them seemed to say over the din of the club as he shooed the girls away in succession like so many servants.
    Even though I had been living in this boys’ world for almost two years, I was still a bit shocked. Their products ultimately reflected their real-life behavior. Instead of making a technology of understanding, we seemed sometimes to be making a technology of the opposite: pure, dehumanizing objectification. We were optimizing ways to judge and use and dispose of people, without having to consider their feelings, or that they had feelings at all.
    What would happen to me? I wondered. Was I pretty enough to make it past the bouncers? Was that, in the end, what this was about? Was it even possible to be pretty enough? Were my colleagues ever satisfied with reality, or was reality always deficient in comparison to the perfected digital image? Did I even care? Did it matter if I was trying to win a war I didn’t believe in? I wasn’t sure, any more, what I believed in, but I knew that I didn’t want to live in a world where I appeared only for a bunch of engineers to judge me and shoo me away.
    In their minds, perhaps, the way this worked was that everyone who wasn’t them was deficient. They were architecting a systemthat placed them on top. “I was born perfect,” Thrax would say to me, in all honesty, the following year at Coachella, gazing down at his body as we lay around in bed, chastely as always. When he said it I, as I usually did upon hearing one of the boys’ preposterous statements, laughed at the absurdity of his claim. What does being born perfect even mean? I didn’t know, but perhaps your own perfection is what you would have to believe in if everyone else in the world isn’t good enough. And that’s why you’d want to reinvent a world in which everything had to appear perfect, all the time, as if forcing everyone else to believe in being perfect, too, or at least try. With my instinctive desire for authenticity and the slightly worn-out thing—the soon-to-close New Frontier—I didn’t even know what perfection looked like. Perfect, to me, was the not perfect, the unfinished, the thing you loved because it had depth and edges and idiosyncrasies.
    As I sat at my kitchen table in the Casa Real reading my News Feed and its exaltation of a boyishly cold, digitally perfected ego, I realized that I was furious at all this. I hate Judge-book, I hate rankings, I hate algorithms, I thought, in a moment of total rage at everything—the company, these boys—that was near, but also far beyond my control. I just wanted to be happy and loved for who I was and I wasn’t sure all the algorithms or fame in the