Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
With
Friends Like These
(The Social Network, 10/11/10)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Who
cares about the origins of Facebook? Well, obviously the makers of The
Social Network do, as do the moviegoers who made it the nation's
#1 box office draw last week. One imagines other interested parties,
such as the few hundred souls who make serious study of the history
of the tech industry, and business journalists, and management students.
But the vast majority of just plain folks are probably much like Bill
Maher, who asked the other day, "What's next, Google, the Musical?"
First, let's take the movie on its
own terms. In recounting the Facebook origin myth, The Social Network
is a rags-to-riches, pull-yerself-up-by-yer-bootstraps fable for the
knowledge industry (which, in fact, pretty much all industries must
be, now). Based in part on Ben Mezrich's unauthorized history The
Accidental Billionaires, it tells the story of one Mark Zuckerberg
(Jesse Eisenberg), the Harvard undergrad who designed the basic features
of the site and launched it from his dorm room in 2004. Though socially
inept, Zuckerberg reads the zeitgeist as well as he writes code: what
he calls "The Facebook" almost immediately goes viral, prompting
a long and ugly legal battle over ownership of the idea.
Opposing Zuckerberg in separate
lawsuits are his first business partner Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield),
and a pair of identical twins by the preppily appropriate name of Winklevoss
(Armie Hammer and Jon Pence). What happens comes largely from the imagination
of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, A Few Good Men),
since all the real principles in the dispute signed non-disclosure agreements
and could have no role in recounting the story. As history, Network
is not just debatable. It's undiscussable.
To make compelling what is essentially
a dreary, he said/they said legal case, Sorkin and director David Fincher
aim to make their movie a kind of latter-day Citizen Kane, casting
Zuckerberg as the brilliant but flawed genius who creates a business
empire at the prompting of its own painful insecurity. Indeed, like
Kane, Network crackles along with considerable verbal
wit, if not the visual genius of Orson Welles. But instead of muttering
"Rosebud" on his deathbed, the Kane of our time ends up brooding
in front of his computer, waiting for the lost object of his desire
to "friend" him on his own website.
The question still stands: who cares?
Notwithstanding 500 million users and $25 billion in corporate valuation—all
abstractions, really—what's at stake in the battle between Zuckerberg
and his rivals? The chance that one the warring parties might end up
with a few million bucks more in settlement money than the others? The
possibility that an unlikeable schmuck like Zuckerberg will die friendless
in his entrepreneurial palace, Wii remote still in his hand? True, it
is nice that Network undermines the durable myth of the lone
genius, transforming the world just with sweat and a good idea. But
we all knew that was bullshit already—right? Sitting through two
hours of dueling legal hearings, one can't help thinking that watching
a good documentary on the effect of Facebook on our real-life sociality—an
eruption of addictive but trivial pseudo-intimacy—would be a better
use of one's time than this.
So, by all means: come ye business
majors, tech historians, and habitual readers of the gadget column in
The New York Times. The Social Network is for you. For
the rest of us, the stakes are just too low.
Contact
Nicholas Nicastro at his Facebook author's page, Books by Nicholas
Nicastro.
©2010 Nicholas Nicastro
back to Culture Blog