The Boy Kings by Katherine Losse Page B

everything seem, always, like a game. In the ideology of the new Silicon Valley, work was for the owned. Play was for the owners. There was a fundamental capitalism at work: While they abhorred the idea of being a wage slave, the young men of Silicon Valley were not trying to tear down the capitalist system. They were trying to become its new masters.
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    Without anything academic to study in Palo Alto, I kept myself entertained by studying people. By day, I studied the profiles of the people whose Facebook accounts I had to log in to and fix or investigate. I developed a taxonomy of all the different types of college users. There were surprisingly few types: the fraternity kids, the artsy alternative kids, the middle-of-the-road boys and girls who play soccer and study political science. My favorite profiles, more often than not, were those of black students, who tended to use Facebook more socially and conversationally than white students. It reminded me of a difference I had observed in Baltimore between the anxious, solitary white grad students and friendlier, more talkative local Baltimoreans, making me wonder if black culture, or maybe just southern culture, placed more emphasis on community and conversation, whereas white culture was focused more on the idea of every man for him or herself.
    Around this period, we discovered a bug that affected the inboxes of people with over five hundred messages. They wouldsuddenly see a so-called ghost message hovering in their inbox. As soon as someone wrote in to report the bug, I knew that, most likely, they were black. White people, I discovered by reading people’s messages and walls, tended to lurk and judge more than they communicated, so their accounts rarely generated that bug. It was almost as if the system itself was designed for lurking instead of direct communication and broke under any different mode of use.
    By night, in Menlo Park, I studied the engineers as they came over to the pool house to grill, swim, and socialize. They were always a little anxious and awkward, working to remain calm and in control in situations where their programs weren’t at hand to do that for them. When all else failed, we could always talk about the site, because it consumed our days, transacting almost all of our activities and experiences. It seemed like we wrote on each other’s walls as much as we saw each other in person. And also, we each had a life-changing financial interest in making the site as addictive and ubiquitous as possible.
    It felt somehow life-affirming to be away from the computer, to see people in person instead of reading their intensely crafted profiles on Facebook. I had already started to wonder whether the fact that I was more comfortable offline than on, unlike the engineers, would mean that I would have to be the bearer of the human—the one who feels where others couldn’t or wouldn’t.
    I kept a running tally in my head of the things and activities in the summer house that seemed human and normal, looking for reassuring evidence that, despite Facebook’s fascination with the cool, technical mediation of our lives we were just warm, social animals after all. I used what I knew of life from Baltimoreas my gauge. Baltimore is maybe the least technically advanced, most tragically human place in America. Kids in Baltimore didn’t hack or have computers; hacking for them meant hanging wires from window to window to poach electricity from the house across the way. I kept Baltimore’s poverty in mind as the baseline against which all this Silicon Valley technology and all the real-life fantasy it enables could be measured.
    On weekends, the house’s dining room table was converted to a Beirut (beer pong) table for parties, and I counted this as a positive: Beirut was clearly active, social, real. At Hopkins we played it in dirty row-house fraternity basements that were the privileged mirror of the dirty row houses that the poor squatted in only