The Boy Kings

awe. We had finally, literally created an economy of love, in which friendship and affection had a monetary value and a system for transacting it. However, engineers seemed more excited about trading credits to one another as a form of affection than anyone else at the company did, and the adding credits to comments feature was never launched.
    “Miss u,” master troll Carles of the blog Hipster Runoff said often, to and about everything, in his daily musings on Internet and popular culture that I read daily at work. Missing, I started to think, was the one true emotion of the Internet. In communicating primarily virtually we are always missing things, missing each other’s points and missing out on the experiences of being with each other. So, I began to post that I missed things—people, places, brands, states of mind—as much or more as I <3ed them. The only thing we never missed was our screens, staring back at us always, ready to make us feel just slightly less alone. “Miss u, real life,” I could have posted, but few people at work would have gotten it. Real life was something everyone in my News Feed seemed relieved to leave behind, if only for the immediate reason that real life can’t be owned and graphed and, as such, can’t make you famous and rich.
    If success is measured, as it is on the Internet, by memes spread and likes garnered, my Facebook trolling persona was successful, but my real life in Palo Alto remained an uneventful routine of work punctuated by runs on the Stanford campus, which swarmed with students dreaming of their own Silicon Valley success story. So, in early 2009, I decided to move to San Francisco and commute daily to Palo Alto. I found a room in an apartment at a messy end of the Mission that had been migrating from a working class to a digital class neighborhood for ten years. I was so excited to start over in the city that I didn’t mind the fact that in the old Victorian I’d be sharing with two roommates the fridge door barely opened and the sills were caked with dust so thick that it might predate the 1906 earthquake (which the house, auspiciously for us if there were to be another earthquake, survived).
    However, it was 2009 and, unlike in bohemian times, the past was never really behind us, just as the present was a different place than it used to be. Technology didn’t really want us to ever leave things behind: We were expected instead to carry the past with us, all the time, in the form of pictures and tags and the smiling avatars of every person we have ever met, whether or notwe still cared for them and they for us. The information was just there, populating, feeding, following us around as we conducted our lives. In this way, friendship never waxed or waned, but was always present in digital space. This was the eternal now of the Internet, and this, not Palo Alto or San Francisco, was where we had all begun to live.
    • • •
    Some weeks after I moved and was settled into my new place, Thrax asked me on AIM, “Do you want to go out in the city tonight?” He wanted to hang out because I’d left Palo Alto, in address at least. Men never want you to leave if they think you are really leaving. In this way, men and bosses are the same. And further, at Facebook, watching out for the boys was in a way my job, whether I wanted to hang out with them that night or not. “They are your boys,” Mark’s administrative assistant would say to me sometimes, implying that I shouldn’t leave them entirely to their own devices, even though they were always up to their own devices, trolling and playing and judging, wielding their digital might. Devices, after all, was what it was all about, as Justin knew in advance when he spent all of Coachella struggling to receive a signal on his new, now completely outdated, BlackBerry Pearl.
    “I’m tired, I woke up early today,” I typed back to Thrax. I was tired because that morning I had to be at work at a somewhat normal working hour—ten o’clock—to star in a video detailing Facebook’s completed internationalization process, which a documentary filmmaker had been hired to produce. “You are going to be the star of the film,” the filmmaker had told me, andit reminded me of an old Hollywood scene of a starlet fresh off the bus from Iowa. “Are you a producer who is going to make me a star?” I felt like asking.
    The shoot that morning had been long, the lights bright, and in my interviews I kept saying the