'The Social Network' Was Right About Facebook All Along

In 2010, Facebook was having a pretty good year. It was good because it was still mbadive and had a balloon valuation of $ 23 billion. Facebook was also facing backlash over violating users' privacy, but it was nothing like the public lashings the company faces now. Not all on the up-and-up, but not all bad.

Then, on October 1, The Social Network cam out. It was an at times blistering, two-hour version of Facebook's original story, and all the double-crossing and lawsuits that followed. It's a very popular movie, and it's much more popular than ever. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' careers as film composers, and it painted a less-than-flattering picture of cofounder Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg ). It has been suggested that haunting billboards at the time suggested a portrayal of the dark side of the founding of your favorite new social media site.

Was it true? Eh … maybe? At the time, Zuckerberg called it fictional (and later "hurtful") and the company's PR team ran some countermeasures in the lead-up to its release without ever really attacking the movie itself. David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin created the thing from the whole world. But there have been, clearly, dramatic flourishes, the least of which is the fact that Sorkin writes. Instead, The Social Network were, so many of these films are, an amalgamation of truths, fiction woven together from fact.

Now, almost a decade later and 15 years into the life of Facebook, I think I've realized something: The Social Network was right. Not necessarily historically accurate-only the people who were in the room know-their-truth-it's about its messages: tech boom gave an enormous amount of power to people who'd never touched it before.

More than any of those overarching themes, when reminded of The Social Network, I always think of Erica Albright (Rooney Mara), the woman (fictional) Zuckerberg called a "bitch" on his LiveJournal and then confronted in a restaurant a few months after their breakup. "The internet's not written in pencil, Mark," she says when reminded of the slight. "It's written in ink." In 2010, that seemed like a bad-smart Sorkin-ism. Today, the Cambridge Analytica and fake news is so dusty and the fact that Facebook gets you wrong. The "move fast and break things" mantra might have felt like fun in the early days of the future, but the company was more successful, the problems became bigger and more difficult. Facebook could not just erase what it could not repair. Their mistakes were logged.

The Social Network is something of a decoder ring for popular opinion about Facebook at any given time. Watch it in 2010 and it might be much more than anything. Watch it today, it seems like the company got off light. In an essay for The Verge just two years ago, Kaitlyn Tiffany pointed to Zuckerberg's political ambitions and platitudes about connection and lack of culpability for the ramifications of it The Social Network in 2017 is also weird, disorienting, gag-inducing, and full of unintentional laughs … it feels like a relic, has a naive movie with quaint, softball reviews of Mark Zuckerberg and his creation. "

Late last year, Jim Rutenberg, writing for The New York Times, straight-up declared, "The Facebook Movie Told Us What We Needed to Know About Mark Zuckerberg." Discussing Facebook's potential role in Russian election tampering in the US and chaos in Myanmar, Rutenberg said, "The film's portrayal of the budding tech magnate has somebody more interested in growing up than it could be hurt by it has stood the test of time . … Watching the origin story unfolded by stadium seated eight years ago, I thought I was watching a series of hard lessons and I was thinking about a 19-year-old cam of age. a pattern that has become all too familiar. "

Put simply, the movie is a Rosetta Stone. If you want to translate how you or anyone else is feeling about Facebook, turn on The Social Network and chronicle the reactions.

Like many great works of fiction, Fincher and Sorkin's movie did not, or at least not, aged poorly. It might seem a little naive now, but the lessons, the takeaways, are the same. It says a lot about the state of the world then; it says a lot about the state of the world now. Some of this is due to the fact that the filmmakers The Social Network a hero's Journey 2.0, and those stories are timeless. In that look, it will always be a good movie-at Citizen Kane for a different kind of media mogul. (Movie nerds, I'll see you in the comments below.) More than that, those stories "need a devil, Rashida Jones, points out to a member of the board of directors, in this film, whether or not you agree Facebook's CEO is that villain depends largely on how you feel about Facebook's CEO, bitch.

This, of course, points to another fact about Facebook: It will always be conflated with Mark Zuckerberg. As the site is public, it is about the opinion of the company, and vice versa. As Facebook has grown in recent years, Zuck is the one who bears the brunt. He's the one who has made a good impression before Saturday Night Live skits, the one investors want to remove as chairman in troubled times. Yet, folks do not know much about Zuckerberg personally, not really. "Like Facebook," Scott Brown wrote in a piece about The Social Network for WIRED, "the unreadable public Zuck is a fascinatingly content-free platform, a cipher that avid minds can not help but fill with their own interests and obsessions." Sorkin and Fincher built on that, giving the CEO a persona

Prior to its release in 2010, The Social Network Radiohead's "Creep" by the Belgian women's choir Scala and Kolacny Brothers. It's not really easy to see the movie with the movie's catchphrase, "You do not get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies. "(500MillionFriends.com is currently for sale, BTW, and Facebook now has so many more users than that.) At the time, it was a sharp observation about the relationships sacrificed in the making of a relationship-building website. key in 2019,,, to to created created created created created "" "" "" "" "" "" "" "" "" "" "".

More Great WIRED Stories