The Boy Kings

of my tastes and thoughts, no one in the Bay Area would think of me. Even in the office, where I would spend six or more hours a day, I felt more visible online than off. People were too busy reading their screens to talk to each other.
    That spring, a new Facebook engineer, not yet indoctrinated into Facebook’s culture of the virtual, suggested a new feature. “I have an idea,” he posted on the internal discussion board, “it would be a feature that allows you to suggest to two friends who don’t know each other that they should meet and hang out.” A veteran Facebook engineer jumped on the thread quickly to correct him. “We already have that feature,” he said, “it’s called the Friend Suggestion feature, where you can suggest that two people become friends on Facebook.”
    “No, I meant a feature where you could tell two friends to hang out in real life. . . . Oh, never mind,” the new engineer said, giving up.
    Incidents like these, and the contentment people at work seemed to feel as they gazed, mesmerized, at their thirty-inch monitors, made me realize finally that this—Facebook, social media, our apps and phones and screens—was never really about real social life or interaction. Social media is about bringing us online and asking us to play with one another in digital space. Social media then is the ultimate Internet game, played according to the rules and metrics created by the boys who make the games and write their algorithms.
    However, it was also as if the boys who knew the Internet best also knew that there was something dark about it, about this drive to have everything while revealing nothing. This, I think, is why they trolled, for trolling in itself is a kind of admission thatwe can’t win online as our true selves, that authenticity online makes us too vulnerable, that vulnerability (or “vulns,” as the hackers say) can be exploited too easily in an online world in which information is so widely connected and distributed.
    Trolling, I decided, was the native mode of the Internet, and not exactly sharing in the literal way that Facebook declares it. Sharing is complicated and private; humor is entertaining, appropriate to an audience. Neither Mark nor any of the boys said anything that particularly revealed their emotions, for the most part. In fact, it was from them that I figured out early on that serious posts were kind of beside the point, despite Facebook’s business need for us to post transparently about our lives.
    So, I would troll instead. However, as a girl, I knew I couldn’t troll exactly like the tech boys. I didn’t want to post indignantly about how some new device or code upgrade was doing it wrong. I decided that, if I were going to troll, I would have to go at it from the opposite direction. Rather than trolling with technical details, I began trolling with a fatuous, un-articulated emotion that the boys could never get away with. “<333333333333333333333,” I posted as my status regularly, sometimes <3-ing particular things and people, with an exuberance that seemed infectious, for my coworkers began doing the same thing. Though I had begun posting hearts on everything as a joke, soon everyone in the office was earnestly decorating their Facebook posts with little hearts, skipping language, hardly bothering to comment anymore. It was if at some level we all intuited that “<3,” whether intended earnestly or as lulz, was all anyone was looking for anyway and so, Facebook, with its ubiquitouslike buttons and comments became a race to bestow and harvest as much digital love as possible.
    Around this time, Facebook was testing a feature whereby users could reward each other with Facebook credits (Facebook’s virtual currency, in which one credit equaled one dollar) for posting something particularly entertaining. Rather than rewarding one another by posting <3s in our comments, we could now reward each other with actual money. For the engineers who created the feature, it was as if the two were the same, and the guys in the office participated in the test happily, posting credits along with their comments. Thrax, ever shrewd, decided to take advantage. “This is a stickup, give me all your credits,” he posted as his status one day. The guys in the office, realizing with delight that they had been expertly trolled, handed over their credits to Thrax in the comments under the post. As I watched the stickup transpire in my News Feed, I felt a certain