Authors: Katherine Losse
The Boy Kings (2 page)
Chapter 7: I’d Rather Be Conquering
Chapter 9: The King Stays the King
A
t the sputtering beginning of this new century we were all, perpetually, waiting for something to happen. After the sudden, unexpectedly fiery morning of 9/11, we developed a new, nonspecific vigilance: a demand to know that some critical event, somewhere, was occurring, however distant. Most things that the cable news reported on after 9/11 seemed irrelevant: a toothless bomb scare here, a prop-plane crash there. We clung to televised surveillance because it was the one thing we could count on: distant wars and threats. To assist our indiscriminate monitoring, cable news created a news ticker that ran underneath the newscast to assure us hourly that yes, somewhere, something terrible had occurred. And, perhaps, because war, unlike understanding and diplomacy, seemed clear and defined, our president started a war, but that didn’t work; so he started another war, and that didn’t work either. Suddenly, nothing was really working.
I spent the early 2000s nursing a nervous anxiety that reflected the nation’s, fed by a general sense of foreboding and by outsized ambition and aimless anticipation—the impulse 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 was
right: 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 high school years on AOL, and knew that having a public, guileless, and unprotected Internet presence was little more than an invitation to be spammed by sexual solicitations from faraway men. Before social networks, AOL Instant Messenger and similar chat services were the only truly interactive, in-real-time forms of communication on the Web. In those days, I was always somewhat dismissive of boys who asked me if I had AIM, because it was obvious that they wanted to communicate
in instant message form to avoid all the social challenges and filters of real life and, say, ask me out without having to look me in the eye, or look at me at all. So, the idea of creating a profile on an open, national social network felt like an unnecessary risk, another way of making yourself available to millions of distant strangers for the benefit of only a few friends. Who needed that? The lonely, maybe, or the exhibitionist, but most people weren’t enough of either to make a public online profile listing all your private details that compelling. However, by building a virtual agora made up only of people you might actually know in real life, Facebook had suddenly created a good reason for everyone, not just the Internet-obsessed boy in his bedroom, to be identifiably on the Internet.
As one such boy who attended a class for which I served as a teaching assistant protested, pre-Facebook, and after Googling me without success, “You’re not on the Internet!” (Because for the boy in his bedroom, and eventually for everyone else on the Internet, gathering data about people using Google felt like a god-given right). “Good,” I replied, with satisfaction.
It wasn’t like I didn’t use the Internet, to the contrary. In the 1990s, when the Internet was in its infancy, I had an email account that I could only access using a no frills program that had no buttons like those currently seen on the Web; to send an email, I had to type a command like “send.” Teenage hacker friends that I met at punk rock shows in Arizona used the Internet primarily to trade information about what were then high-tech hacks: a tone dialer cobbled together from Radio Shack gadgets that allowed you to make free phone calls from pay phones, or a breakdown of how credit-card
numbers are generated that allowed you to crack credit cards. It almost seemed, then, that this was what the Internet was for: an anarchistic sphere devoted to wielding technology against corporations. I thought it was cool, but in the absence of sites targeted to more general interests there wasn’t much for me to do online except write emails and visit bulletin boards, all green text on black screens.
A hacker once taught me that, in Pine, the email software used before AOL came along, you could type commands like “finger” to see when someone had last checked their email. This was when I realized that, online, there was always a way to get more data: You just had to know how to go deeper into the code and know more than the average user about its obscure loopholes and commands.
After the boom of the late 1990s ushered in the consumer Internet, I became a regular on forums devoted to fashion and style, such as Makeup Alley, where women traded beauty and fashion information. Under pseudonyms, we discussed our lives, always protecting our personal details from prying eyes or search-engine crawlers. The overriding rule of the Internet was simple then: You could say whatever you wanted as long as you didn’t say who you were. I also took care to avoid all the cheap-seeming websites, like the fledgling MySpace, which appeared to be founded on the idea of empty exhibitionism and populated by predatory men looking for pictures of women to devour and discard. I was on the Internet enough to know that in the few short years that broadband had been available, it had become easy for men to find images of women to use as a shallow substitute for sex or love. For women, there was
no value—there was even potential harm—in putting yourself online and offering yourself up to strangers, to have your image distributed infinitely across the Web. As the boys of the Internet often said on the troll-filled message board called the Daily Jolt, the only community discussion forum at Hopkins before Facebook landed, “There are no girls on the Internet.” It was true; there weren’t. If we were there, we were as protected by pseudonyms and secrecy as the guys who were searching for us.
Now, in the fall of 2004, with my newly created Facebook account, here I was: on the Internet under my real name. Visiting Facebook’s rudimentary privacy page, which had just a few drop-downs that offered options to make your profile visible either only to your school or only to your friends, I realized that it was possible, for the first time on the Internet, to protect my profile from being visible to anyone outside of my immediate group of acquaintances. I breathed an elated sigh of relief.
Now, we can all finally use the Internet!
I thought. No more dealing with creepy guys assuming that just because I was on the Internet, I was available to be virtually stalked and harassed with pictures of penises, followed by a barrage of insults if I didn’t respond. The privacy protections of the restricted network (people outside of Hopkins couldn’t see my profile or even that I had one) made it feel, surprisingly, okay.
Facebook made it easy for the Internet-wary to be comfortable, because, in addition to the privacy protections, the initial layout of the site was minimalist to the extreme. It was strikingly clean, and novel in its simplicity, lacking the gaudy advertisements and spammy content that were inevitable elsewhere on the Internet. The profile consisted only
of a modestly sized photo and a set of profile fields that the user could fill out or not, according to their own comfort level. It seemed fun, literary almost, like a newly published, frequently updating book that was more interesting to peruse than the dry, archaic texts I studied in the library. The first interest I listed on my profile was the
gold standard,
because I had always been interested in the idea of things that don’t change form, that hold value, that aren’t subject entirely to the whims of an economy in which nearly everything is disposable, temporary. The other interests I listed on my profile were flirtier and less abstract:
praias
(“beaches,” in Portuguese), braiding my hair. This was the trick with Facebook, like the way you present yourself at a party: to say something without saying too much, to appear interesting without trying too hard, to be true to yourself without telling everyone everything. “Never apologize, never explain,” Roland Barthes wrote in
The Pleasure of the Text,
which we studied in class. This seemed like the right way to approach a prying technology that, I could already sense, would never be satisfied by just a few bits of data. Much later, Facebook would seem to whisper, “Tell us everything.” Even though in the beginning it was less inquisitive and shared your information less far afield, I already sensed that I had to remain its boss: I had to be able to tell it
no
.
Facebook was entertaining and engaging precisely because, unlike most technical applications at the time, it didn’t seem like a sterile bunch of lines of code. Just as at the other prestigious universities that had Facebook networks, the Johns Hopkins University Facebook network was a delightful web of in-jokes about campus culture—such as the “I Check
Myself Out In The Mattin Center Windows” group devoted to the vanity-provoking windows of the Arts Center, or the “Hopkins 500,” devoted to the approximately five hundred students who could be seen at parties interspersed with profile photos of artificially tanned sorority girls, intense medical students, and Hopkins’ requisite lacrosse players. It was the first Internet site I had ever used that mirrored a real-life community. The cliques on Facebook were the same ones I ran into at the library and campus bar, and the things people said to each other on their walls—water polo team slang, hints at the past weekend’s conquests, jabs at Hopkins’ lacrosse archrival Duke—were similar to what you heard them saying at study tables or around pitchers of beer. The virtual space mapped the human space, and it had all happened virally in weeks.
• • •
Logging on to Facebook that first day, in retrospect, was the second, and to date the last, time that any technology has captured my imagination. The first was when Apple advertised the first laptop, the PowerBook, in the 1990s—with the words, “What’s on your PowerBook?”
