A really good film written by Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing) and directed by David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club). This is a sad film about sad people. Posh Harvard kids, frustrated computer geeks, hyper-social web partiers-entrepreneurs: sad people all of them.
The lawsuits against Facebook founder Zuckerberg from his earlier business associates are just a classic but efficient way of structuring the story, but it’s not another legal thriller. The real point of the movie is in the portrait of Mark Zuckerberg himself. The inherent weirdness of computer geeks is the subject, and this oxymoron: a computer geek turning businessman, whereas they normally lack both the social skills and interest. It’s the story of a man obsessed by computer programming and pushing their science project into a global business almost accidentally (the title of the original book is ‘The accidental billionaires’). It’s interesting to see that Zuckerberg was opposed to advertising or any ‘business model’ in early days and it’s very similar to how Brin and Page, the Google founders felt. They were all obsessed by growing their baby and not bothered to figure out whether it could be ‘monetized’ one day. Other similarity by the way: Brin and Page too were sued by Bill Gross the founder of GoTo.com for stealing the idea of their business model (keyword auctions and cost-per-click).
The secret ‘rosebud’ of citizen Zuckerberg in the film is that he did it to impress his ex-girlfriend after she dumped him. And if he could not win her back, at least he could make her feel bad. Other motivation: get revenge on the rich kids who wouldn’t accept the little Jewish nerd in their posh prestigious Harvard club. I suspect the real motivation for Mark Zuckerberg was simpler and probably indeed it was not primarily money. Like Page and Brin the Google founders, he just did what he was good at, obsessed by, i.e. focusing at designing cool web tools, and the ‘business model’ would follow popular success ultimately. But it took little time for those engineers to embrace the tricks of start up business and outwit ‘real’ businessmen (like Parker in the film).
Some may consider, with some reason, that the film carries the stereotypes against geeks. A mixture of disgust, contempt and fear that people from the ‘old’ media, from Hollywood and New York, feel for the young Silicon Valley geniuses. The ‘technology’ press has attacked the film for being ‘anti-geek’ or ‘anti-Zuckerberg’. I disagree with that. It shows Zuck as a sad guy. Arrogant certainly. Perhaps even a bit of an arrogant asshole in the way he treats people. Borderline autistic, driven with sexual and social frustrations but not really a bad guy. It reflects the ambivalence in the vision most non-geeks have of geeks. Zuck-the-Geek is no corporate Wall-Street villain. His idea of happiness is hacking all night with friends and pizzas, not buying yachts, cokes and prostitutes. And between the arrogance of the self-made billionaire and the arrogance of the posh Harvard twins (who in the end extorted him some $65m in settlement), our sympathy goes to Zuckerberg. Today’s web billionaires are in fact no more cynical than entrepreneurs and inventors have ever been and perhaps less (see the ruthlessness of a Thomas Edison). The dominant feeling is pity for all of them.
The conclusion of the film is that ‘social’ networks are ironically making people – including Zuckerberg - lonelier in a lonely world; that Facebook turned the social pressure of being cool and popular into a global real-time competition, luring people into thinking that happiness would derive from maximising the number of online‘friends’ and the volume of interactions with them.
Wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Network
