Being Mark Zuckerberg (the review from over a year ago)
Not a review of The Social Network but a review of being Team Zuckerberg
26
JAN
I already know The Social Network is the sharpest movie I’ve seen since Rocket Science — an easy claim if Ashton Kutcher is periodically wedged in your film repertoire. Accidental Billionaires, the book on which the movie was based, is very little like the movie, because it is Mark Zuckerberg on mute.
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Mark Zuckerberg is now the world’s youngest billionaire, worth upwards of six billion and the respect of those before him in the line of techno-succession. Bill Gates was delivering a Harvard talk in one of the telling scenes of David Fincher’s interpretation of Accidental Billionaires. The celluloid Mark Zuckerberg, a triumph of cutting banter, was listening intently as Gates discussed writing BASIC and tinkering with 8080 processors. Then a couple of would-be groupies, an Asian girl and her friend, tap Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield I am stalking your Facebook page), Facebook’s original investor, and ask to be introduced to Mark Zuckerberg.
The scene depicts the collegiate commonness of today’s most lucrative start-ups; the commonness that allowed Ben Mezrich to plumb Facebook as an idea back to campus sex and accident of circumstance. It was a fat stake to make The Social Network an elaboration of Balzac’s timeless aphorism, but Mezrich was the first to exempt Zuckerberg from crime (or as his words in Accidental billionaires go “not as much as a college prank”) behind his fortune today. Of course, the irony of Mark Zuckerberg’s isolation while founding the biggest social networking site is not lost on wry audiences and film critics. But both the movie and the book are sensationalized accounts, striking at the raw nerve we call morals. It’s a nice parable of friendship and initiation into the Harvard legacy of greatness mingled with nappy coed concerns, but it was judgmental as far as biographies go, one in whose writing Zuckerberg did not participate, in fact. The real-life Zuckerberg had refused Mezrich two cents on the biography of his own product; there’s no reason his billion-dollar fortune should dispense more for his own defense.
I sound like I am about to create a Mark Zuckerberg fan page on Facebook. You can’t argue past hearsay; Tyler Winklevoss must have been close to bashing his own head in with his oar coming to terms with this. “There had been no contract, no paperwork, nothing but a handshake here and there,” described p. 103 of Mezrich’s book of the Winklevosses’ transaction with Zuckerberg to put Facebook into code. So there’s virtually no point defending the guy against allegations of idea theft, especially as, by Time magazine’s account of its Person of the Year, Zuck himself sponsored a special screening of The Social Network for all Facebook employees. You could almost see him chuckling a “socially awkward” chuckle (“socially autistic” in Divya Narendra terms in Accidental Billionaires) or watching with mock concern like his courtroom version in the movie, played by actor Jesse Eisenberg with the pointed cynicism an autistic genius could not have affected. Eduardo Saverin chose to humor the portrayals the way Zuckerberg did — he watched the movie and did not raise a ruckus.
Zuckerberg’s legal standoff with the Winklevosses and Eduardo Saverin looks like dinner table cattyness, mediated by the type of lawyers who would bother with intellectual property disputes over post-its. Former chief White House economist and U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers crops up in the movie toting dismissive airs over the Winklevosses’ fixation for the only good idea they have had so far — quite understandable if you’re meant to be an Olympian. He’s the wagging finger that tells all of us to chill, the not unwise, if not facile voice that suggests we might do better finding the whole thing silly. Facebook is worth 25 billion dollars, and us tireless users may have cared less about its founder and even less about the people running after its money. We may have joined it out of pure enjoyment; inventors invent creatures and machines and Facebook doesn’t seem to fall under either of those. I’ve known people with a love/hate relationship with it. Both movie and book speak as if Facebook was the mere product of hormones. In one of the incongruencies between the two accounts Mark Zuckerberg gets dumped by a certain Erica Albright in the opening scene, pushing him toward anti-social ideas like creating a campus-leaked program that compares the hotness of random female coeds. It was the furious hobby that would program his destiny.
So it’s easy to downplay the importance of the book and the movie for me, despite the latter’s sharp, entertaining banter, because I don’t frikkin care who else lays claim to having thought of Facebook first. But The Social Network’s condescending Mark Zuckerberg is the exact troutslap to the Winklevosses’ infantile bitterness. Truth be told, the Winklevosses come off as the types groomed for elite bureaucracy and old school entrepreneurship, where thinking is separate from doing and doing means firing capital away. Genius can’t be expected to honor such division of labor, because geniuses put things into fruition by toil, obsession and sleeplessness — and perhaps the gifts of autism, as some “normal” people who haven’t invented anything would claim. Geniuses know what they’re creating; dull hacks anticipate profits before the product even comes alive. Movie Mark makes this clear during his legal battles; that ultimate trump line that also diluted the Winklevoss sympathies of The Social Network’s many reviewers: ”If you could have invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook.”
The Economist calls “partly fair” to this line, when the magazine should have been first to uphold this almost as law knowing the rapid turnover of IT. The first to get the product out there wins. Besides, the triumph of Facebook isn’t as much in the idea as in the way it is constructed. The real-time progression of interactions and the things you could do with it have overthrown MySpace and Friendster, whose platforms also rested on the same idea the Winklevosses and Narendra spent two years trying to package as unique and exclusive. Zuckerberg knew how to be different and how to live with the times; Saverin was as much from the old block as the Winklevosses were. He couldn’t have known the significance of relocating to Palo Alto if the Google guys had hosted their own frat initiation there. Which leaves us to the last cliche about geniuses: they are in step, if not often ahead of the times. And they think alike, attesting to the initial meeting of the minds between Zuckerberg and Sean Parker, Napster founder, also one of those geeks who angered the establishment and got rewarded with fame and perks, if not fortune.
So the morals I got from The Social Network have nothing to do with loyalty, honor or how not to squander your potential like Sean Parker did. It certainly taught me the tricky downsides of doing business with friends. Bless Saverin and his seed capital, but he did make potentially fatal decisions and waver on the vision. The Social Network teaches you a bit of history on how to get a brilliant thing done today and how the genuine geeks would do it. The hustling score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross reminds us that something spine-tinglishly urgent was moving The Social Network, and it was no less the Information Age deadline, the NOW or the millisecond before it.
The geeks are alright; they are not the manic-eyed creeps like the bomb detonators in the employ of jihads and stealthy imperialists. These are geeks in sweatshirts, flipflops and boardshorts ziplining from chimneys, tossing about among the foolish party of prurient, status-mongering Ivy Leaguers and about as preoccupied with girls as Mick Jagger or Tiger Woods. To say that a thin line separates them from coolness is a flawed imagery. As far as I know, I owe geeks my whole life, if for the simple measure of keeping microwave ovens working and evolving, keeping me nourished. Now they dominate every Forbes list of richest men, their underground coolness breaking surface and reducing frat men to shrivels of a pre-Information Age culture. That was a time Awesome was but a boil in the guts triggered by flickering things on TV, like the sparkling teeth of superstars and idols. Appearances lost their sheen during the Internet Age. The Winklevosses and Saverin were obsessed about how they would look if they made money off Facebook; Mark Zuckerberg was the only one capable of bringing it online. To write a proper story about Mark Zuckerberg is to write about the exact things he did as a geek and how his geekyness matches the geeky times after Bill Gates’ and the Google guys’ era. The story is not how dysfunctional and desperate for dates geeks are. That would still be pandering to appearances. Movie and book, no matter how nicely done, did not help me in this Information Age understand the complex mind of Mark Zuckerberg.
