People are really pretty funny when you think about it.
Take one species of underachieving monkey, expand their cranial cavity and brain mass and a couple of thousand years later, you have Internet Pornography and the Fleshlight. I try not to think about it actually because I find that it somewhat undercuts a lot of the meaning and purpose that I attach to the more lofty or idealised of human endeavours. When we landed on the moon, defeated the Nazis, cured smallpox, eradicated the Zombie Queen of Luxembourg*, I, like many of my similarly deluded counterparts, like to think it was due to a level of intelligence that wasn’t underpinned by a simultaneous need to fling faeces at our enemies, smoosh bananas into our open gobs or masturbate openly.
Of course this is not true. Being a human isn’t being some kind of pure mental overlord white light mind, riding and directing the icky needs and desires of a mulish, obscene body. The truth is that your mind is just as complicit in the fact that your self-concept is intrinsically linked to your success or failure at finding people who will let you sex them up. Your brain is full of little pulsating pleasure hotspots, all of which are directly responsoble for inducing specific behaviour in the mind, which in turn make certain actions seem atractive that when put in the context of the moonlanding or the smallpoxdeath, come off as slightly trivial. Even bestial. Yet we still enslave the same moonlanding producing brains to the task of acheiving these other, baser desires. Because we have to. It’s who we are. Clever monkeys.
A really awesome illustration of this is the existence of Facebook. Another really awesome illustration of this is the story of how Facebook was created. And another another illustration of this story is why someone thought it would even make a good film, cause it did. An awesome one.
Watching The Social Network is Aaron Sorkin’s look into the supposed mind of Mark Zuckerberg, the boygenius** wunderkind** who managed to become the world’s youngest billionaire by inventing the worlds first really real social network. I don’t want to go through the film and comment on everything because I genuinely think that it’s one of those films that you really need to see to enjoy, but there are basic elements I reckon could do with some commenting on.
The movie starts with Zuckerberg attending the elitest of the elite of the American universites Harvard, where he “suffers” daily from an inferiority complex brought on by the insinuated ambivalence of the elite within the elite within the elite to his merely pretty damn elite status. The whole movie then continues to portray Zuckerberg as a vengeful, petty though witty child, making dickhead move after dickhead move. He’s misogonistic, petty, vengeful, racist and anti-simetic yet for some reason there’s this odd attempt to make it seem like it’s a little bit more complex than that, like for some reason we’re encouraged to see things from his side.
There’s the obvious “tortured geniuses play by different rules” argument, and “success brings jealousy”, the problem is that there’s never any real explanation of why it is that Zuckerberg is like this. Other than a lot of interestingly quippy arguments summarising his position “A guy who makes a nice chair doesn’t owe money to everyone who has ever built a chair.†or when talking to a group of his former partners who are suing him for stealing their idea “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook”, as if merely being the smartest guy in the room excuses him from any sort of real responsibility. As the movie progresses he seems to have no real reason to excuse his behaviour, especially when he eventually fucks over his best friend in an ostentatious display of petty assholic dickitude. His absolute obediance to his need to succeed would be a lot less appealing if he was portrayed as a more obviously villainous type of Gordon Gecko success fuck. Yet we’re kind of slightly encourage to give him a by-ball, I guess the real problem here is that there’s a real grey area between fiction and reality, so because he can’t just be seen as a character we’re not able to just trivialise him down to a caricature.
If the movie is accurate, which assumedly for legal reasons it must be, there’s the insinuation that all of the people presently working for Facebook are working for one of today’s greatest class-A meglomaniacs. If however the movie took artistic license with the truth, maybe it’s Aaron Sorkin himself needs that tag thrown his way. It’s also a question that if there wasn’t a real attempt to give Zuckerberg some face that he would have turned his lazers of pettiness on the makers movie, and considering the entire movie charts the fact that he’s the world’s youngest billionaire, it’s not unliklely that Sorkin is at the very least aware that Zuck has enough cash to sue him a little bit.
But regardless of the truth or fiction of the movie, it’s still an interesting examination of the need for social networks, for the drive to connect to others on a social level, to feel that we all have a hand in our own personal branding. And yes, while it is somewhat ironic that The Social Network was created by someone with no friends, it really does say a lot about the low level of principle that we all invest in our social interactions. For me, the message of The Social Network was that people apparently don’t care about people they see as lesser than they are, and they don’t presume to judge other people they see to be doing unique and in America, successful things. That said, the genius of Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t really very genius at all. It was in fact just a realisation that in every person, there’s a little bit of petty, self-involved assholicness. He saw the worst parts of himself in everyone else and realised that he could make money from it. He saw that there was no real difference between the moonlanding and internet pornography, that ultimately life had no meaning. And in my mind it’s that realisation that both made him, and condemned him.
*Read your history books. The REAL ones. Not those revisionist pieces of crap going around.
**Words legally obligatory in every review of The Social Network.
