Phil W. Bayles

Or: How I Learned The Social Network is Surprisingly Prescient

Can you believe that The Social Network came out 10 years ago?

I revisited it this weekend, and what a film it is. David Fincher’s cold, detached direction makes the creation of Facebook feel as terrifying as the killing sprees in Zodiac or Seven, backed up by an ominous thrum of a score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg is somehow simultaneously towering and tiny, constantly reminding us that beneath this titan of tech beats the heart of a lonely, angry young man.

And the screenplay – my God, the screenplay. I’ve been an unabashed fan of Aaron Sorkin ever since my parents first introduced me to The West Wing, but The Social Network is his crowning achievement. From the opening scene, in which Zuckerberg is so busy obsessing about Harvard’s prestigious Final Clubs that he doesn’t realise his girlfriend is breaking up with him, every line crackles like fireworks and flows like smooth jazz. It’s the kind of writing I aspire to produce, and on my good days I get about a quarter of the way there.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to view The Social Network as somehow prophetic; an origin story for a modern-day supervillain. Of course, there’s no way that Fincher and Sorkin could have known exactly what Facebook would morph into, or the catastrophic change it would wreak on our personal lives, the course of human history or even the concept of truth. Even the brilliant tagline from the poster – “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies” – seems hopelessly quaint now that nearly a third of all human beings on the planet are signed up. But looking back now, a decade since its release, I think The Social Network got one key thing right about Mark Zuckerberg, and Sean Parker, and Eduardo Saverin, and everyone else involved in the creation of Facebook.

None of them has a clue what they’re doing.

Maybe that’s just a side effect of getting older, and realising that nobody really knows what they’re doing. I was 17 when I first saw The Social Network ; back then there was nothing cooler to me than the idea of a bunch of nerds like me, hunched over keyboards, revolutionising the world and sticking it to everyone who used to put them down. Looking back, it’s clear that they were just angry young men, writing snide bullshit in dark rooms. It seems obvious when you remember David Fincher also directed Fight Club; a film explicitly decrying toxic masculinity, which the idiots of the internet have mistaken for an instruction manual. 

The thing I keep coming back to is the business cards. At the end of the film, Zuckerberg is given a set of business cards with the message “I’m CEO, bitch” – an idea put in his head by former Napster founder Sean Parker (played with Mephistophelian glee by Justin Timberlake). Parker makes it sound like such a badass line, but the cards themselves look hopelessly juvenile: a child’s idea of grown-up behaviour.

I was certain that Fincher and Sorkin had made up that detail for the movie. It feels like a reference to the recurring line in Fight Club – “I am Jack’s broken heart”, “I am Jack’s cold sweat”, “I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.” But no – the cards really existed. That, I think, tells you everything you need to know about Mark Zuckerberg.

He isn’t Blofeld – he’s barely even Doctor Evil. He woke up one day to realise that he’d somehow attracted a crowd by doing something cool, and had to figure out where that crowd was going so that he could lead them. His platform has become a haven for misinformation, hate speech and privacy leaks, often exacerbated by artificial intelligence of Facebook’s design, and his only solution is to somehow create more AI to combat it. Even when he’s stuck in a hole, he can’t put down the shovel.

When Robert Oppenheimer saw the first atom bomb detonate in 1945 he’s said to have quoted a piece of Hindu scripture: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It’s hard to know if Mark Zuckerberg ever had a similar moment of epiphany about the raw power of his creation, but if he had, he probably would’ve quoted Fight Club: “I am Jack’s smirking revenge.”