The Boy Kings

was happening, a Big Brother by another name, but with what the company considered a positive value instead of a negative one. One Saturday in November, when I was in the office (weekends were the best time to work because it was the only time when the office was quiet and I could get anything done), I took a break to play Rock Band with Emile and Thrax in the glass-walled game room on our floor. They decided that it was not enough to simply play the game. Everyone needed to see us playing the game. They rigged a video camera that broadcast our performance onto the wall and also onto the Internet, where Emile and Thrax’s legions of Internet fans were apparently waiting, ready to watch from their bedrooms in Croatia and Louisiana. They also rigged an input device so that the fans could talk to us. Their chats were broadcast onto the wall for us to see and respond to. We were as close as we could get to total transparency, a set of characters in a virtual world full of people watching and listening and talking with us from around the globe.
    In the midst of banging out a version of Linkin Park’s “Crawling” on our plastic instruments, a viewer typed “You are gay,” at us, religiously following one of the Rules of the Internet, which is to always question someone’s sexuality, for no reason. “Yes, I am gay,” Thrax typed, following another rule of the Internet which is do not argue with trolls, if you do, they win. I felt a bit like Margaret Mead on Bali, watching the natives of a distant world enact their culture.
    The fans watching us on the Internet were perplexed to see me there, since another rule of the Internet states that there are no girls on the Internet, and they proceeded from questioning my gender or even my existence, to telling me that they would like to fill all my holes. This was standard Internet behavior, and I barely blushed, though it seemed a bit violent, in a virtual way, much like the Internet itself. People will do and say anything online because they can. Thrax and Emile were unperturbed, barely registering the curse words flowing at us through the screens, since this was the way the Internet was. Not only were insults the Internet standard but, as Facebook grew, we were becoming the Internet, its new owners, like the rail men of 1880s America surveying their newly installed rail lines in the Wild West, kicking the iron and making sure it worked. And work, it did. Like the boys in their rooms in distant states, we were safe here five floors above Palo Alto, connected by wires to worlds we would never see.
    Later that afternoon, I walked the few blocks home to my apartment. As I was cooking dinner, with my laptop open on the kitchen table, my screen was still tuned to the game room in the office, the boys were still playing, and the watchers were stillwatching, throwing insults and questions at the screen as Rock Band songs started and stopped, chords scrolling endlessly to infinity. I closed the laptop and drove to San Francisco to meet friends and go out, in real life.
    San Francisco is a thirty-minute drive from Palo Alto, but every mile felt like it was taking me slightly closer to reality, or at the least, to some Bay Area approximation—now abuzz with Twitter and a whole new generation of social apps—of it, that I sorely needed. Like the old Facebook relationship status option that we removed some time in 2007 in order to make the site sound a bit more mature, when it came to reality, I was at a point where I would take whatever I could get.

CHAPTER 8
THE <3 ECONOMY
    I f, in 2006, Palo Alto felt like a shimmering, tech Disneyland, a city in circuit-board form, all tidy blocks and green lawns and the near-silent hum of every form of digital device anyone could think of, by 2009, it had started to feel like a shopping mall for venture capitalists searching for the next Facebook. New, glossy restaurants sprang up to serve unending rounds of business lunches; a Four Seasons Hotel went up at the intersection of University and the 101; all last traces of Palo Alto’s scrappier preboom days were washed away, replaced by the town’s brand of bland, midrange minimalism.
    San Francisco, by contrast, was still a welcoming, disorderly mixture of tech wealth and street grime. When I went there on the weekends, I could only wear flat gray boots and tights underneutral skirts, because anything I wore emerged a dirty gray anyway, not unlike San Francisco’s sky with its persistent fog