"Like Facebook itself," Scott Brown wrote in a piece about The Social Network for WIRED, "the unreadable public Zuck is a fascinatingly content-free platform, a cipher that avid minds can't help but fill with their own interests and obsessions." Sorkin and Fincher built on that, giving the CEO a persona but also leaving him open to interpretation.On a fall night in 2003, Harvard undergrad and computer programming genius Mark Zuckerberg sits down at his computer and heatedly begins working on a new idea. Yet, folks don't know much about Zuckerberg personally, not really.
He's the one who has to make a good impression before Congress, the one who gets written into Saturday Night Live sketches, the one investors want to remove as chairman in troubled times. As Facebook's issues have grown in recent years, Zuck is the one who bears the brunt. As the site's public, um, face, public opinion about him will often reflect on public opinion about the company, and vice versa. This, of course, points to another fact about Facebook: It will always be conflated with Mark Zuckerberg. In this movie, whether or not you agree Facebook's CEO is that villain depends largely on how you feel about Facebook's CEO, bitch. (Film nerds, I'll see you in the comments below.) More than that, those stories " need a devil," as a lawyer played by Rashida Jones points out to Zuckerberg himself in a bit of fourth-wall-breaking. In that regard, it will always be a good film-a Citizen Kane for a different kind of media mogul. Some of this is due to the fact that the filmmakers constructed The Social Network as a modern creation myth, the Hero's Journey 2.0, and those stories are timeless. It says a lot about the state of the world then it says a lot about the state of the world now. It might seem a little naive now, but the lessons, the takeaways, are the same. Like many great works of fiction, Fincher and Sorkin's movie didn't, or at least hasn't, aged poorly. It might seem a little naïve now, but the lessons, the takeaways, are the same. Facebook couldn't just erase what it couldn't repair.
The "move fast and break things" mantra might've felt fun back in Facebook's early days, but as the company gained more power, the problems became bigger-and not all of them could be solved with more code. Today, amid the Cambridge Analytica and fake news dustups-and the fact that Facebook gets even Trump appointees in trouble-it feels eerily prescient.
"It's written in ink." In 2010, that seemed like a whip-smart Sorkin-ism. "The internet's not written in pencil, Mark," she says when reminded of the slight. Not necessarily historically accurate-only the people who were in the room know those truths-but about its messages: privacy matters (whether you're taking photos from a sorority web site or giving access to user data), connection comes with consequences, the tech boom gave an enormous amount of power to people who'd never touched it before.īut more than any of those overarching themes, when reminded of The Social Network, I always think of Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), the woman (fictional) Zuckerberg called a "bitch" on his LiveJournal and then confronted in a restaurant a few months after their breakup.
Now, nearly a decade later and 15 years into the life of Facebook, I think I've realized something: The Social Network was right.
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