Ironically, The Social Network is a film that has gained poignancy because it has aged poorly. The central irony of the film—that the man who linked the world together lost his best friend in the process—has been subsumed by a more sinister, broader narrative. Because in reality, Facebook has done more to divide and alienate us from one another than help. Treating human relationships like a computer algorithm wasn't the brilliant idea we thought it was.
When The Social Network released in theaters 15 years ago, it was commercially successful and critically adored. For starters, it had a crack team behind it. David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club) directed it, Aaron Sorkin (A Few Good Men, Moneyball) wrote it, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (Nine Inch Nails) scored it. The cinematographer, Jeff Cronenweth, drenched Harvard in shadows and drab coloring to represent Mark Zuckerberg's social disconnect, and he flooded Palo Alto with bright coloring and bright lights to represent its shallow, amoral decadence and status-chasing. No one in this movie looks happy.
The film opens with a scene that underlines the main character's joyless ambition. Mark is on a date with his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Erica, talking about himself and his desire to be a person of notoriety and consequence. He's so absorbed in this conversation, about punching a finals club or his inability to row crew, that he misinterprets Erica's question about finals club as an insult and retorts by insulting her class status and education. She breaks up with him and leaves, but not before delivering one of the best putdowns in cinema history:
"You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole."
The film's thesis is that Mark Zuckerberg internalizes his anger towards Erica and in an act of vengeful productivity creates Facemash, a website for comparing the hotness of Harvard girls. That attracts the interest of the Winklevoss twins, a couple of old-money douchebags who enlist him to create Harvard Connect. Mark subsequently creates TheFacebook with his roommate Eduardo Saverin, using the seed of the twins' idea.
For the entire film, we're told, in ways both big and small, that Mark has vision—an ambition that outstrips the pedestrian concerns of his fellow students. The Winklevosses want a social network that could project their Harvard elitism. Eduardo wants to sell ads on the site and courts Madison Avenue as a means of making quick money. It is Mark who realizes, as Sean Parker later states outright, that this million dollar idea could be a billion dollar idea.
But is that the reality of the situation? Back in 2005, as an intern for Complex Magazine, I interviewed Chris Hughes—Mark's roommate, a co-founder of Facebook, and the company's spokesman. At that point, it was still called TheFacebook; it had launched a little over a year prior. It only had 1.8 million users, as opposed to the 3 billion people that use the site today.
According to Hughes, the main concern, at that point, was to get the app up and active at more colleges. But neither he nor the other co-founders had considered the implications of using Facebook as more than a college networking tool; to go broader than that, Hughes claimed, would be outside of their comfort zone. Instead, he discussed a Party RSVP addition to the website, which seems antiquated by today's standards but was innovative at the time. And he discussed the integration of Wirehog, a p2p sharing platform, into TheFacebook. The company would eventually kill that idea in 2006.
The real Mark Zuckerberg, contrary to the Machiavellian schemer that Jesse Eisenberg plays, seems to be in over his head—reacting to the popularity of his app rather than properly guiding it, and paying lip service to the idea of transparency while indulging in anything but. Being adept at computer programming and being adept at the ethics inherent in such a venture are two very, very different things. And history has borne that assessment out—that in a very careless, thoughtless way, Mark has allowed Facebook, with its stated intent "to build community and bring the world closer together," to accomplish the opposite.
It starts with an inconvenient truth: Facebook's algorithm values engagement above all else, no matter its quality. And as a result, the most inflammatory content with incendiary claims, outrageous hyperbole, and ragebait are the ones that get pushed to the top of people's newsfeeds. These are the stories and posts that draw clicks.
In the movie, the characters see "friending" as a sort of gate to the party—that by making the platform invite-only, and by making people's full information only available to other friends, it would create a sense of community and replicate the social atmosphere of the college campus on the Internet. In reality, this limited people's access to viewpoints outside those in their immediate peer groups, which were more likely to match their own than oppose them.
And then there's the real-life Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook allowed data scientists to harvest the user data of 87 million users. Donald Trump's successful 2016 presidential campaign would use this data to target users specifically, with personalized ads that would discourage them to vote. The data was also used to influence African-descent voters in Trinidad and Tobago. Zuckerberg's response to all of this was that he had been deceived, and the data, while obtained legally, was not used in the manner he believed it to be.
It's appropriate that in 2019, a year after the scandal broke, Chris Hughes, who left Facebook in 2007, published an op-ed in the New York Times imploring the federal government to break up his former roommate's company, and taking responsibility for his own carelessness:
"Mark is a good, kind person. But I'm angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. I'm disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections, and empower nationalist leaders. And I'm worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them."
The editorial reads like the musings of a disappointed friend, who believes that a fundamentally good person has been corrupted or shielded from the truth by bad actors. And perhaps, at one point, that was true. But Mark's recent actions have made this interpretation seem generous at best. In the wake of Donald Trump winning the 2024 election, Facebook pivoted to Trumpian concerns. The company axed its fact-checking department and discontinued its programs that supported the hiring and cultivating of black, Latino, and female employees. Zuckerberg complained publicly about the loss of "masculine energy" in corporate suites.
This, along with his appearance on the dais for Trump's second swearing in, cast Facebook in a new, compromised light. The same company that pleaded ignorance on affecting the 2016 election is now carrying water for the returning administration, complicit in the hostile takeover of our institutions. In fact, Peter Thiel, one of Facebook's earliest benefactors (played by Wallace Langham in the film), enabled vice-president J.D. Vance's ascendancy to his current office.
Is it base cowardice on Zuckerberg's part, to simply be where the money is? Or is this the "real," calculated Mark Zuckerberg that's been hidden this whole time?
Today, The Social Network is a snapshot in time, from before we knew how bad shit would get. It is a cautionary tale of not trusting anyone in good faith—especially when that person has the means to skin you, because they probably will. The film, for all its incisiveness, didn't go far enough in its criticism of the techno fascists destroying our country. Who could have possibly foreseen that the Winklevosses, with their country club bourgeois privilege, could have come out of the past decade looking better and preferable to the nerd that screwed them over? Good ol' boy cronyism is quaint compared to the amoral dystopia that Zuckerberg and his ilk are proposing.
Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network, will be writing and directing a companion piece titled The Social Reckoning, about Facebook's negative impacts on its users. Jeremy Strong (Succession) will play Mark Zuckerberg. It's pitch-perfect recasting, from the same actor who brought us such malevolent performances as Kendall Roy and Roy Cohn. To me, it also reads as an admission that this story is ever-evolving. We'll see how the reassessment goes on October 9, 2026, when the film is set to open.
At the end of The Social Network, Marilyn Delpy (Rashida Jones), a member of Mark's legal team, bookends the movie with an inversion of Erica's putdown. "You're not an asshole, Mark. You're just trying so hard to be." So is Zuckerberg an asshole or is he projecting the image of one? Is he breaking things maliciously or is it just that he doesn't know what the hell he's doing? It doesn't matter. It's a meaningless quibble. At the end of the day, the result is one and the same.