The Boy Kings

to do something or be someone at all cost that characterizes one’s early twenties. Having graduated from Wesleyan with a degree in English, I found myself in a graduate program at Johns Hopkins that was, I soon discovered, as spectacularly failure-ridden as the new century. My Ph.D. program began golden and full of promise, with the assurance that we would enter easily into the ranks of the elite and tenured professors produced by the top-rated English department. However, constant and sundry department shakeups and scandals left us uneasy and uncertain, and my bright future seemed doomed. Jobs in English departments were dwindling and most Ph.D. students were finding themselves in decade-long holding patterns, waiting for jobs that would never come.
    To add to my sense of anxiety, Johns Hopkins was perched atop a hill in Baltimore, which is a bizarre and barren city, especially for someone from Arizona, unfamiliar with the advanced state of America’s postindustrial urban decay. Hopkins, we were told proudly in orientation, was the largest employer in the city. The unacknowledged second was the drug trade, supported by the steady stream of heroin flowing through the port. The streets just beyond the campus were full of mayhem, opaque and unreal to the outsider, with men on street corners wearing long white T-shirts whose daily work I would only come to grasp after The Wire began airing. As the show’s Omar explained, capturing Baltimore city’s prescient, postapocalyptic logic perfectly: “It’s all in the game.” He wasright: If we went to Hopkins hoping to indulge in the endless play of academic discourse, what we got instead was a cold education in the hard facts of twenty-first-century American life: wealthy institutions pitted against students, individuals against one another, rampant poverty and violence. No one—not the Hopkins students who were occasionally murdered, nor the grad students whose promised jobs didn’t actually exist—was safe anymore.
    In response, students I knew at Hopkins developed a streetwise approach to life. “You have to fight crazy with crazy,” we told each other before we ventured out on the empty, dangerous streets at night. It was this mode of watchfulness, alert to the sinister and absurd, rather than the lessons of literary theory, that I would end up taking from Baltimore when I left. Literary theory, after all, had begun to seem not so much like a profession as a luxury. As my thesis advisor often said, “I am rich, millions are not,” quoting American Psycho, but he could just as well have been describing Johns Hopkins, an island of money in the midst of an alternately warring and desolate city that wasn’t so much a twentieth-century relic as a window onto the twenty-first century.
    As if to occupy us while we all waited for news that something had happened somewhere, in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg released a technology that hit Hopkins and spread quickly across campus like iPods had the year before. It was called The Facebook then and I discovered it while sipping coffee at the campus cafe above the underground library. A couple of students sitting at the table next to me, who sported the Hopkins uniform of North Face jacket and sweatpants,spoke excitedly of the new network and what they were able to see on the site. “Everyone’s on it,” they said, “you can see where they’re from, where they live, and who their friends are. I don’t know if it’s creepy or cool.”
    I opened my clunky white iBook, typed www.thefacebook.com in the browser address bar, and created an account with my university email address. (This was required to log into Facebook then; one had to be a student at an Ivy or near–Ivy League school to use it.) It was true, you could see everything: all the students on campus, their pictures, their interests, their friends. And, in being able to see everything, I saw that The Facebook had miraculously solved the biggest social problem that plagued Hopkins and had led to its low rankings in student satisfaction. The campus had no public space aside from the library, which is why that afternoon, like most, I was sitting in the sunlit cafe with my laptop, taking a break from the dungeonlike stacks below. In an instant, Facebook had created a public space, albeit a virtual one, that was accessible at any time, from anywhere.
    In 2004, other online social networks, like Friendster, already existed. However, most college students had spent their