Ten years have passed since David Fincher combined his ruminations on the rot at the core of human progress with Aaron Sorkin’s sharp, hyper-articulate dialogue to create one of the most prescient films of the decade, The Social Network. In 2010, the ethics of online privacy, intellectual property, and internet misogyny loomed large in our collective consciousness, and yet since then they have become inescapable. Gamergate, the rise of meme culture, presidential twitter wars, social media algorithms, online piracy – the 2010’s have been defined by our desperate efforts to connect more with the world, and our utter failure in doing so.
The irony of this is present in Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of a young Mark Zuckerberg, who by the end of the film is left refreshing his Facebook page over and over, hoping that his ex-girlfriend will eventually accept his friend request. The same ex-girlfriend he denigrated in the very first scene, and whose break up with him inspired the site FaceMash, which pitted college girls against each other in polls to assess who was the most attractive. Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg craves connection, and so he goes about creating the thing that should theoretically help that. Only it doesn’t. Friends turn to enemies, acquaintances turn to enemies, and the Zuckerberg we are left with is the person that Facebook has made its most active users into – a lonely, emotionally unequipped addict.
Fincher’s direction remains coldly detached from its narrative, examining each scene in the perceptive way its protagonist might logically deconstruct regular social interactions, choosing to analyse and extract the meaning from every word and pause. We move between two timelines – Zuckerberg’s past, as he is on the verge of launching one of the largest and most influential companies in the world, and the present, where he is facing two separate lawsuits. One from the Winklevoss twins, from whom he stole the concept, and one from his friend Eduardo Saverin, who was pushed out of the business that he had a hand in making. These are the corporate ramifications of Zuckerberg’s actions, but Fincher realises that the consequences that truly matter are far more personal. One by one Mark’s betrayals are revealed, but his face remains stoic, apparently unaffected. He doesn’t let us in on how much these broken relationships mean to him, but Fincher’s calm control of the camera tells us everything we need to know.
The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal of 2018 forced us to re-evaluate how much personal information we are willing to hand over to a corporation that uses it as a mere commodity, and yet despite these revelations, many of us continue to engage with it every day. Facebook isn’t just an item we use, but something that has become ultimately inseparable from how we communicate, read news, play games, flirt, stalk, organise events, entertain ourselves, and are marketed to. While considering the grand scale of it all, it is easy to forget how small its origins were.
Though The Social Network is clearly not meant to be a factual account of Zuckerberg’s rise to head Facebook, it does sketch out the minds and personalities that have such great control over our private data. When Zuckerberg’s ex-girlfriend accuses him of writing his “snide bullshit from a dark room, because that’s what the angry do nowadays”, things start to fall into place. Trolling was around long before Facebook, but online spaces gave it a platform, and in return this bitter rage and isolation fuelled the internet’s evolution. Maybe in 2010 we might have thought The Social Network was going a little hard on Zuckerberg. Given what we know now, maybe it didn’t go hard enough.
