The Boy Kings

why I was drawn here. In Marfa, it is the land and the sky, rather than any human enterprise, which scales, extending farther than the eye can comprehend, creating nightly sunsets that seem unworldly, even in contrast to any other sunsets one has been fortunate to watch. In Marfa, the ephemera of the social web recedes; it is the land and the art, like Donald Judd’s one hundred sculptures in mill aluminum, that ask you to pay attention and consider them daily.
    Marfa’s disinterest in the social Internet isn’t just metaphorical: The phones are slow for data retrieval, so posting a tweet or reading a feed is nearly impossible, at least from the phone. AT&T’s lack of investment in data infrastructure there has similar effects to the town’s lack of commercial and residential development, leaving the town in a masterfully preserved condition, as if the railroad age never left. Marfa, in fact, was founded as a function of the 1880s railroad boom: It was built to be a water stop for trains to take on water to make it across the next stretchof desert. I often found similarities between the railroad boom and Facebook: The builders of each made great fortunes by connecting with great centralized lines places that hadn’t previously been connected, sometimes inventing things, like photo tags or Marfa, that weren’t there before.
    One night in January 2012, with nothing much else to do, my friends and I walked to an old Ice Plant left over from the railroad days, now turned into an art space, where a well-known artist from New York, Rob Fischer, had assembled a glass house on a trailer and suspended it from the ceiling. He proceeded to roll and swing the house by means of a pulley back and forth from one side of the ceiling to another, sometimes smashing it against the steel beams supporting the building. At one point, as I was videotaping this (old Facebook habits die hard), the house began to swing and roll and shimmy on the pulley ever more violently. At a brief lull in the house’s movement, I turned off the camera, thinking I had captured all there was to be seen. Only a few seconds later, the house shifted violently, and one of its glass panes broke loose and slid the length of the house’s floor only to crash out the other side, creating a beautiful (and dangerous) cascade of broken glass that fell just feet from where I was standing. Not one of the forty people in the room with cameras had captured that exact moment on video, though it was the unintended climax of the piece.
    I think that this may be the truth of these technologies that we carry around: We film and post and read social media constantly in order to capture something, some exciting moment or feeling or experience that we are afraid to miss, but the things about life that we most want to capture may not be, in the end,capturable. And, perhaps, planning and efficiency themselves, the things that technologies like Facebook want to make easy and constant, are not as easily grasped as we think. Because, in all of our newfound efficiencies, what have we lost? What, like the moment at the Ice Plant when the glass shattered, is too unplanned and ephemeral to predict and capture with our technologies? Should we keep trying, or should we take a breath, and let some things go unshared and unrecorded, realizing that this ineffability may be the essence of life itself?

POSTSCRIPT
    Thrax96: Are you living in Marfa?
    K8che: Yes, are you in Austin?
    Thrax96: Yeah.
    Thrax96: Should we go in on a yacht?
    Thrax96: Like a rapper video yacht
    Thrax96: Except we actually own it, unlike rappers who rent it
    K8che: Haha
    Thrax96: Remember the multiple times we almost had sex?
    K8che: Lol
    Thrax96: Lol
    Thrax96: In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
    K8che: Not sure what you mean. Is that a metaphor about you and technology? Like the camera on your iPhone and MacBook and how you were always filming? You were the king.
    Thrax96: That was a double entendre.
    Thrax96: One eyed man.
    K8che: Oh, I get it.
    I still think that’s a metaphor about technology, I mused after I had signed off. “I’m going to put that in my book.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    F irst, I want to acknowledge my family for their love and encouragement.
    I would like to thank everyone on my team at Free Press, including Dominick Anfuso, Daniella Wexler, Carisa Hays, Meg Cassidy, Nicole Judge, and Claire Kelley, for their enthusiasm and support for this book. In particular, I am very