Misleading Humanistic Premise

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Because it is the 15th birthday of Facebook, and because that span seems both an extremely short and an extremely long amount of time for Facebook to have existed, I recently rewatched The Social Network, David Fincher’s 2010 film about the founding of the website that would reshape the world.

Here’s one thing that’s striking today about the movie: how efficiently this work of mythmaking, with its claustrophobic settings and taut instrumentals and don’t-go-through-that-door ironies, doubles as a work of horror. In the years that have passed since Mark Zuckerberg built the site that became TheFacebook (from his Harvard dorm room, the myth pretty much requires its contributors to add), the hacker’s ethos, move fast and break things, has steadily hacked its way into people’s lives. So much has been moved. So much has been broken. And The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin and featuring Jesse Eisenberg as the shuffling, shower shoe–wearing founder, anticipated some of the fallout. The movie’s trailer is set to a choral version of Radiohead’s “Creep,” a song that sings of longing and belonging and perfect bodies and perfect souls, and that choice tells you a lot about the lessons espoused by this particular fable.