The Social Network (2010)

1 year ago

The Social Network (2010)

I CAN’T TELL YOU, BUT I KNOW IT’S MINE

by Meaghan O’Connell

The night my team—that’s what we call it sometimes, you know, a team—went to see The Social Network, it was pouring rain. We were all giddy, all of us except my boss, who couldn’t understand why we were so excited.

We stood under our umbrellas and jumped around and postulated about how much we would like it, how true it would feel, if they would actually get any of the technical language right. Peter and Matt and I got there first because we hopped in a cab and the rest of them insisted on walking through the rain. We got to the table, the VIP table, and started to tell them our names. The guys leafed through papers when I said, “Oh, or they could be under David Karp.” They lit up, “Oh, you’re Tumblr?” You’re Tumblr. Yep! I said, and a guy with a highlighter looked at me. “Oh, you’re Meaghan, right? You’re the community manager?” I shrugged. That’s not my title but in this business, or any, the names of our jobs go little in the way of explaining what we do. “Yeah, sure,” I told him, and shook his hand. He said I should come to a community manager breakfast meetup that met every third Thursday, or something like that. I almost told him that Community Manager wasn’t what I did, but instead just nodded and told him to email me. He said, “You’re just meaghan at Tumblr, right?” I said yes without reminding him how I spelled my name. We both knew he would be able to find it easily if he needed to.

We went up the escalators and stood there in our wet shoes, our eyes tired from squinting at computers all day. When the rest of our team joined us, the rest of our entity, our identity, we were all happy together, feeling formidable, peeking around the line to see a table of paper bags we’d be passing on the way in. “Maybe there’s wine in those bags,” we laughed. We didn’t have time to eat before we got there. We were tired and a girl we sort of knew was waving to us, asking if we had ever met I-R-L before. “Hi Tumblr!” she said.

The line moved and the people with the paper bags stopped us. “Do you have phones?” they asked us. They were movie theater people. Of course, we laughed. “Let me see them,” a woman said. We all pulled out our iPhone 4’s, gathered them in the middle of us, like a team handshake. She took them from us. “What?!” we said in funny voices. They asked for our initials and gave us a ticket like you’d get at a bike raffle. I told her “DK” and handed the blue ticket to David without thinking.

I was excited for this movie, and am still excited by it, in the way that I would be for anything that effectively anoints-as-artworthy a phenomenon so present in our lives that it becomes passe to talk about. Sure it seems to have a permanent place in the nightmarish echo chamber of trend pieces and tech news, but no one is writing poetry about Facebook. No one had yet made a movie about Facebook, the thing that has so changed our lives and culture that it is difficult to think about; difficult to think about not as a venture capitalist or as a serial entrepreneur or as a community manager, but difficult to think about as a person who was sitting in a computer lab in Rome the fall of 2004 when her alma mater got Facebook.

It is difficult, or overwhelming, to think about those first few months, approving friend requests and developing behavior that seems so second nature now, so embedded, I can only barely remember the days we sat on our futons, connecting our digital cameras to our Dell computers, uploading photos by batch and tagging our friends, knowing that if we didn’t do it before we all met for brunch in the dining hall we’d be in trouble with our friends.

I remember my school’s actual Face Book, or Dog Book as we called it. I still have it somewhere. Students would flip through it, we’d flip through it, in between taking shots of Malibu rum and calling strangers on our dorm phones, asking them to dances for our roommates. We also spent hours on Hot or Not, and Live Journal, and hours spent wondering about people the way we never have to wonder about people anymore. I saw all of this change in a year.

I wrote Facebook Notes; that was my first blog. Entire relationship dramas were played out via Facebook messages. Nearly all birthday parties still begin and end as Facebook Events. I remember the zombie games and the quizzes and the Gifts—and how you only had one free Gift and who would give you theirs? It all meant so much. The horror of a bad photo of yourself tagged in Facebook. The gravity of your Interests, Hobbies, Religion. I was lapsed Catholic, reinventing the wheel, Joni Mitchell, Annie Hall. Once I faked my birthday just to see who my real friends were—anyone who wrote on my wall on May 13th didn’t really know me, did they?

You met a person at a bar or a party, and you told each other, so cool, to look each other up on Facebook. You didn’t need to be friends to send messages. You could only see their profile if you were in the same network. Notre Dame was mine, and then New York. New York really opened things up. But Notre Dame was where we uploaded our schedules and our photos and joined clubs and started Groups and like the movie says and rightfully asserts—we, we Normals, as the tech world calls us, began for the first time to live our lives online. Yes some of you were doing it already. You hand coded your websites, spent hours drafting blog posts when it felt like you were the only ones. You made it possible for us, though, and although I deleted my account the day they asked me to connect My Parent’s Dating Lives with an actual brand, it all clicked and it all started here, with Facebook.

I wanted to see the origin story (alleged or no, what do we care when it comes to things like this?) of this force that so dominates us, like it or not. I wanted it to be treated with appropriate, if not obnoxious, grandiosity. I wanted it to be fun, and thrilling, and new, and over the top. Before the movie started, the editor of Mashable and the actor who played the Winklevoss twins—or Winklevi as Zuckerberg calls them in the movie, and I will henceforth never stop calling them—stood up on stage to welcome us. The Winklevi guy said when he first heard about the movie he thought, “Why the hell is David Fincher making a movie about Facebook? That doesn’t make sense.” We looked at our stickers that said Mashable Rocks!, sitting in our cupholders. We squirmed in our seats, giggling like schoolchildren. They made a movie about a website. It was going to be fun and new and over the top and a real movie. The curtains opened but nothing came on. We all sat in the dark until a Mashable person stood up and made a few embarrassing jokes about Facebook being offline and maybe something about a 404 error. We groaned but still sat there nervous, waiting to see how it would start.

It starts in a bar with a girlfriend, and it starts fast, a tennis match of dialogue, snap snap snap, and that’s the point. Zuckerberg speaks too quickly and doesn’t get it when he offends the girl he’s in love with, when he berates her, when he doesn’t give others the consideration of bullshitting. “Dating you is like dating a stairmaster,” she says to him in the GAP hoodie we all coveted back then, the kind where the letters are patches, sewn on. She tells him he’s an asshole, and he is left with his ego aflail, headed back to the place he can really swing from: his computer.

All of the dialogue is so quick and so Sorkin; snappy bordering on implausible, just the way we want it, lingering in that space where when you hear it you don’t care that it’s too quick to be real: you want to believe.

There is status drama and there is Livejournaling, and drinking, and dancing around in bras—montaged into idyllic college campus scenes, pans of the quad and of crowded dancefloors and cloying manchildren trying to figure out how to be better than everyone else. It is eerily familiar, and sick-making. The word exclusivity is thrown around again and again—I have it in my notes with a circle drawn around the word, as if when uttered they wanted you to pay attention. Yes. A school where everyone, like Zuck says, has 1600 SATs and is rowing in the Olympics and going on to be Bill Gates and you all have the same drive to be the best. How to win at that?

I think why I rooted for Zuckerberg here, if not in life, is that he recognized his own desire for status, saw it within himself, lived it, but knew where others didn’t, that it was universal, that he could take advantage of it, that he was only unique in the way he seized on it. He explains to a friend that the biggest question for everyone in college—Harvard or no—is always, ‘Are you having sex or aren’t you?” And that if, “after all the cake and watermelon, there’s a chance you might get laid or meet a girl,” people would show up.

We know the story, and we know that he was right. So many times he’s right, and that’s what was maybe the most fun to watch. I think this movie is positioned to be about what a terrible person Mark Zuckerberg is but that is not at all how I came away from it. I brought my own opinions about him to the film, but what interested me about this movie more was the opportunity at that moment, and doing whatever you will to pursue it, and how that will fuck you, and how we find ourselves in a time where 19 year olds have ideas that are bigger than they are, caught in a world they themselves worked to create, where your ideas grow up more quickly than you do.

“I was drunk and angry and stupid,” Zuckerberg says in his deposition.

“And blogging,” an attorney offers.

“And blogging.”

The story of how Facebook happened is chopped into scenes of Zuckerberg talking to lawyers. He is getting his comeuppance, and he is made to feel small at every juncture, just as his social network grows beyond conceivability. We, I think, are supposed to decide if he was right all along. Should he have eschewed ethics, thrown them aside again and again, in pursuit of something huge? Who is the butt of what joke? In the final scene he is still in love with his ex girlfriend, suffice it to say, and he is disempowered, made to be like one of us. And he is of course, just like us, for better or worse, but that’s not really how it ended, now is it? And we still don’t know how we feel about all of it. This ain’t Titanic.

Did I like the movie? a reporter had asked me outside the movie theater. We were catching up quickly about all sorts of things but she had to be on some Web 2.0 panel in the morning. I told her I wasn’t sure, but that it was really cool to see. I was unsure what I was supposed to say, as a purported Community Manager—probably that, “Oh, that’s not what it’s really like,” or “Oh, it was all so dramatized and Hollywood-ized,” or, “Wow Justin Timberlake, huh?.” (no but seriously: Justin Timberlake!!!). I don’t remember what I said but what sticks with me now—beyond the laughter and the adrenaline rushes and the tight little back-and-forths, was the sick feeling I had in my stomach; the pervasive, and maybe appropriate, unease. This is how it happens. Just like that.