The Boy Kings

the meeting and I went back to my desk.
    I liked the idea of constructing philosophical blog posts, but when faced with Mark’s topics I felt a curious sense of displacement, like I couldn’t do this even if I tried. “I may not be really sure what Mark means by this, but I know I don’t believe in it,” I thought to myself as I walked back to my desk. It sounded like he was arguing for a kind of nouveau totalitarianism, in which the world would become a technical, privately owned network run by young “technical” people who believe wholeheartedly in technology’s and their own inherent goodness, and in which every technical advancement is heralded as a step forward for humanity. But that reasoning was deeply flawed. While technology can be useful, it is not God; it is not always neutral or beneficent. Technology carries with it all the biases of the people who make it, so simply making the world more technical was not going to save us. We still have to think for ourselves, experience the worldin reality as well as online, and care about one another as people as well as nodes in a graph, if we are going to remain human. And finally, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be one of many “cells in a single organism.” I liked my autonomy, my privacy, the fact that I was different from everyone else—a unique individual.
    These thoughts brought me as close to philosophical debate as I had been since graduate school, which was fun. But when it came to the prospect of writing for Mark on these topics, it felt close to impossible. These philosophies, while interesting and provocative, weren’t the ones I could write. They presumed some kind of beneficence of technology and its makers that, having spent years at the heart of the Facebook machine, I knew not to put my entire faith in. It’s not that the people making technology were bad. They were just no better than anyone else when it came to understanding humanity and what we need, and giving them the power to decide what we—you, me, people we’ve never met—need as humans didn’t seem like the wisest choice. But then, wisdom is not what technology is about. Technology is about solving things another way; without experiencing the problems, without afterthought, without having to do much at all. Technology can do these things for you so you don’t have to. Sometimes, that can be helpful. Other times, I think that by using technology to accomplish our human goals we end up missing out.
    After days and weeks spent mulling over these topics and their implications, I finally came to the conclusion that if Mark believed those things are true, he was going to have to convince people of them himself. The issue wasn’t one of eloquence—simply writing well, which was my task as Mark’s writer. Thequestion was what did any of these values actually mean, and why should we want them? This was something only Mark could explain. I told him that I was having trouble coming up with satisfactory essays on the topics he’d assigned, and asked him to schedule time to explain his ideas in more detail, but he was too busy or wasn’t inclined to explain further—it was hard to tell. I came to the conclusion that perhaps he thought I could invent these arguments of whole cloth, or that we already were cells in a single organism and I should be attuned enough to intuit what he meant, but I couldn’t, and so the essays were never written or posted.
    • • •
    Although I liked my new job, I was unsettled as ever by Facebook and the valley’s imperative to technologize everything. Having lived in this world of endless photographs and rankings and updates for years, I had begun to notice that, whether or not there was a correlation, my real-world relationships were becoming anorexic, starved of presence. I didn’t know anyone in the Bay Area—Facebook employee or not—who didn’t obsessively read their social media feeds and construct real and online conversations almost entirely out of these threads. “Did you see that post on Facebook?” or “I saw your tweet,” they’d say. In this way, our posts and public presence online had become the inexorable, primary topic of discussion, rather than anything private or intimate or in person. If you weren’t playing in the public sphere, sporting about on the social media field while everyone watched and clapped, it was as though you didn’t exist.I knew that if tomorrow I stopped updating my social networks with the ephemera