Only Disconnect

As Facebook’s stock plummets, Neil Archer, whose new book on The Social Network is published this month, argues why the Facebook movie is as timely as ever.

Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg is now $29 billion poorer than he was at the start of 2022. This after a 2021 in which his company, now labelled ‘Meta’, but still known to most of us as Facebook, experienced its worst year ever.

Perhaps more significantly for Zuckerberg and his company – $29 billion, like the nine-figure ‘parking ticket’ he pays up at the end of 2010’s The Social Network, might be no great shakes in the scheme of things – Facebook’s reputation as a Silicon Valley magnet is in serious deficit. Providing a platform for hate crime, fomenting political polarization, stealing data, contributing to digital loneliness, replacing journalism with ‘fake news’: Facebook has played a part in all of them.

At the time of its release, The Social Network was a box-office and critical hit, a film of its moment; one in which the world was still learning the implications of social media platforms, and getting used to the idea of increasingly young tech billionaires. David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s film, with its icy trailer tagline – YOU DON’T GET TO 500 MILLION FRIENDS WITHOUT MAKING A FEW ENEMIES – skilfully juxtaposed the excitement of Facebook’s invention with the toxic legal backdraft it generated, as Zuckerberg is pulled into twin lawsuits over ownership and intellectual property theft.

The challenge in writing a book about The Social Network, even just a decade on, is that the film cannot keep up with Facebook itself. In some respects the film’s reputation has declined along with the company whose origins it narrates – the film, I think unfairly, judged for not being able to see the future of its own subject.

The Social Network still holds up today, though, and not just as a nostalgia piece from a time when texting meant AOL Instant Messenger and Facebook wasn’t even a thing. This is because it understood already how virality and instantaneity, and the power and riches that come with them, also come with their own trail of irrevocable damage.

As I argue in my book, The Social Network, based on Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, is itself in many respects a revenge project on the part of Eduardo Saverin: the Facebook co-founder cut out from the company once it took off, and when Silicon Valley wonderkid Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) assumed its presidency (Saverin came to Mezrich with the idea for the book, and in turn, Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for the film). Saverin was the victim of a stock dilution that brought his share value in the company from potentially billions to merely a few million: its revelation the dramatic climax of the film, and a distillation of its story, in its moment of betrayal, bragging one-upmanship and cut-throat competition.

Should we care? The Social Network falls on Eduardo’s side, but the bigger question posed by the film is how did this bunch of kids get to this point? Writing as part of Routledge’s Cinema and Youth Cultures series, my interest in the film both springs from and centres on this question. Describing events that happened when its protagonists were still college age, barely out of their teens, The Social Network’s contribution to a longer history of youth film is to ask what youth now actually means, in a context where barely-mature children can be contesting such sums of money, and such potential power.

It’s also a power to inflict damage – psychological, reputational – via the click of a mouse. Facebook’s now infamous catalyst was Zuckerberg’s ‘Facemash’, on which Harvard students could be matched and faced-off in terms of their relative ‘hotness’: a site so contagious it managed to crash the university’s network. As The Social Network has it (and as Zuckerberg’s own blog records it), the site was devised partly as an act of drunken spite following a break-up. When Mark later runs into the ex-girlfriend in question (played by a young Rooney Mara), her cool put-down is also a terse lesson in the implications of writing and publishing whatever you feel online: ‘You called me a bitch on the internet… It’s not written in pencil, Mark, it’s written in ink.’

A paradox to which Sorkin’s rapid-paced screenplay nods, though, is that the more our words online become both indelible and further-reaching, the less we have to say. How can we, when we’re saying them so quickly, and so briefly, packing our arguments into 140 (later 280) characters, or in clickbait posts competing on Facebook’s news feed? The Social Network is set before Twitter, and before Facebook’s ‘wall’ took off, but was written once both had got off the ground, and the digital future of language is already there in the film’s dialogue. Look no further than the film’s breakneck opening scene, and especially its opening line –  ‘Did you know there are more people with genius IQs living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?’ – a line both startling and arresting in its confidently flippant assertion, its statistical unlikelihood, and above all, the fact that Mark has entirely made it up.

This opening exchange ends with Mara’s Erica saying to Mark that he’ll go through life feeling unpopular, not because he’s a nerd, but because he’s ‘an asshole’. Does the film damn Mark in turn? Not really: by the end, the film seems to suggest Mark’s pose is no more substantial than that, and that he himself is, to a degree, just more damaged goods.

Is this fair? History would suggest no, even if Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, protested that ‘a kid’ like Zuckerberg didn’t deserve such treatment in the film. In truth, though, the film is more ambivalent to Mark and his creation, its own speed summing up its intoxication with Facebook as an idea, even while highlighting its failings at the same time.

In her own ambivalent response to the film, the novelist Zadie Smith highlighted why The Social Network, which topped more than twenty critics polls in 2010, ‘feel[s] more delightful than it probably, objectively, is’. It’s because, for all the ills it depicts, it also shows how Zuckerberg’s generation, even if not ‘making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics’ have instead ‘been doing something else extraordinary. They’ve been making a world’.

Like it or not, as we leave Facebook behind and drift towards the ‘Metaverse’, this is a world Mark helped create, and all of us live in the shadow of this asshole’s image. The Social Network remains a brilliant reflection of how we got there, and where we’re still going now.