The Boy Kings

wrong things—things that weren’t peppy and fawning enough—and we kept having to reshoot scenes to get things right. I was not as good an actor on film as I was on Facebook, where I could craft my lines and persona in advance. So, by seven o’clock, I was tired and, like a Hollywood diva, I was already in bed.
    “I’m wearing my pajamas already,” I typed to Thrax.
    “So am I,” he typed back. “I just woke up. Let’s go out.”
    Oh right, I remembered—the star engineers didn’t have to go to work at all if they didn’t want to. At this point, Thrax went to work maybe three days a week.
    “Maybe,” I typed. That’s the thing now, with texting, you don’t have to decide what you want to do until a second before. Technology enables an intoxicating degree of freedom, endless opportunities to do something or not.
    An hour later, I had time to rest and get dressed, out of my pajamas and into a pair of jeans and a sweater. I flitted through the littered streets alone to meet Thrax; Ethan, a designer who lived near my new place in San Francisco; and a newer engineer, Liakos; at The Phone Booth, a dive bar on South Van Ness Street. It was a dirty, hip place, lit all in red and purposefully seedy, the scene of many Mission love crimes, I was sure. As always, the louche aura and grime of San Francisco were comfortingly authentic. In this bar, people could even smoke due to some archaic loophole in San Francisco smoking laws, addingto its stench of authenticity. I greeted the guys at the bar and ordered Fernet—an herbal, oily black liquor from Italy, popular in San Francisco for reasons no one knows—and went to put the Cure on the jukebox. It was a simple recipe for Mission happiness, as far as I was concerned.
    I decided that I had good cause to celebrate with witchy drinks in darkest Mission: Improbably, I had come to occupy the highest position I could at the biggest tech company of the decade. I had become the boss himself, or at least his ventriloquist’s voice. And while I could be scared—what if I fail, what if he fires me, what if they find out I don’t wholly believe in our world-bending mission—I felt mostly just relieved. Everything that could have gone wrong already had, but I was still there and, unlikely as it might seem, I was winning. My stock options were starting to be worth enough that I could leave Facebook at any time and still have a livelihood. From then on, whatever happened at work wouldn’t really matter.
    The bar filled with taut-muscled gay men in leather jackets, like some movie version of New York in the 1970s. Inspired by their seventies vibes I played Fleetwood Mac songs on the jukebox and danced on the sticky dance floor. Amid all this vintage authenticity I forgot myself. “Second hand news,” Lindsey sang on the jukebox, not referring to News Feed or any other form of mediated information, but to a different kind of connection that never seems to die. “When times go bad, when times go rough, let me lay you down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff.”
    After more Fernets and a lot of talk about Facebook and our aim to create what one of the boys excitedly called a new social operating system, Thrax and I walked back to my apartment onValencia Street. So did Liakos, who, like many of the Facebook engineers, followed Thrax’s activity closely and seemed not to be able to bear to let him out of sight for a second. Thrax was as bewitching to his coworkers as to his distant Internet fans who followed his antics online. I could never tell, with all their liking and following of him and his online presence, if they wanted to be him or they wanted him. Was he their hero or their object of desire, and are those two things all that different when it comes to boys and their icons?
    Silicon Valley’s culture of the boy king made gay icons and followers out of people who aren’t necessarily gay. Desire is strange, and our digital world made it even stranger, for we could consume and get off on anything we wanted, in any combination of people and things. As another Rule of the Internet reads: “There is porn of it,” where “it” could be whatever fetish you desire, in any digital format: “There are no exceptions.” The Internet has made it so that there are no limits to what we can do to gratify ourselves. If hackers are what you want, they are there for the watching.
    But, that night, for once, we weren’t on the Internet. I got blankets for Liakos and