(This is a post about my decision to leave Facebook. I’ve been requested to note that this contains Spoilers if you have not seen The Social Network but intend to. If you are interested, please check out www.rallywho.com, a project that I have been working on which I hope will serve as a fun and useful tool for helping me get together with my friends in the real world. Thanks for reading.)
Last night, against all better judgement, I watched The Social Network. I knew I wasn’t going to like it. I knew it was going to make me angry. Or jealous. Or bitter. Or lustful. Or confused. But I didn’t know it was going to make me all of these things. And then some.
The end credits started rolling and the first thing I thought was: wait, I don’t get it. What was this movie about? It’s not about The Zuck, what he has done, the successes and failures that he has had in building one of the world’s most influential companies. It is also not about Facebook, a company which we can all agree has in one way or another altered our fundamental daily interactions, to a greater or lesser degree. So what, maybe is it about?
A guy, who tries really hard to be an asshole, burns all his bridges, steals intellectual property, and then becomes successful albeit slightly lonely. Maybe.
Again, I don’t get it. Is my heart supposed to go out to a man who we are left watching refresh a facebook page to see what he is missing? As if we don’t all do that anyway? Oh, I know, I’m supposed to feel bad that he has to pay money to settle with the guys he stole the idea from or fucked out of their rightful stake? No, that’s not it either…
Maybe I just can’t get over the fact that he has several billion dollars in his pocket by the end of the film. It is a violation of all those playwriting principles; I have no empathy for him, you can’t write a story about people who are too rich or too beautiful. Because there’s no such thing.
And the rest of it. It is stereotype against stereotype: the nerd, the VC-savy-techno-partier, the timid well meaning business partner/friend, the bitch girlfriend, the ruthless vc; the real story, I suspect, is so much much more interesting.
Lastly, something about the cult of personality infusing the whole Facebook phenomenon seems to me to be somewhat of a distraction in thinking about what is really happening. This shouldn’t be a story about Mark Zuckerberg. He’s not a genius, evil or otherwise. This should be a story about the systems in place that ruthlessly capitalize ideas. There are lots of people at Facebook making very important decisions about online privacy policies, the open vs. the closed internet, and the way VC’s invest and then take profit throughout the market. Focusing on Mark Zuckerberg is a distraction from that system. Something much more interesting, and to me, scary, is happening.
Facebook Relationships Visualized By Paul Butler, via Mashable
This is amazing! But Scary. And I want to know what it all means. And after The Social Network, I wasn’t any closer to figuring it out. I went to bed steaming about all this and in the middle of the night woke up and read this fantastic article in the New York Review of Books, Generation Why? by Zadie Smith. I think she nails it. The movie misses an angle which is much more thrilling and also much more vital.
Watching this movie, even though you know Sorkin wants your disapproval, you can’t help feel a little swell of pride in this 2.0 generation. They’ve spent a decade being berated for not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics. Turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been doing something else extraordinary. They’ve been making a world.
That’s a god damn story! The internet has transformatively altered how we process and control our worlds to the point where the people who truly understand and manipulate the technology and culture behind the internet have the ability to create their own worlds, their own worlds to fill the voids in the real one they’re living in.
As I followed Zadie Smith through the essay, I continued to think that she was really onto something. Until I got to the last part, here reproduced in full:
Toussaint was writing in 1985, in France. In France philosophy seems to come before technology; here in the Anglo-American world we race ahead with technology and hope the ideas will look after themselves. Finally, it’s the idea of Facebook that disappoints. If it were a genuinely interesting interface, built for these genuinely different 2.0 kids to live in, well, that would be something. It’s not that. It’s the wild west of the Internet tamed to fit the suburban fantasies of a suburban soul. Lanier:
These designs came together very recently, and there’s a haphazard, accidental quality to them. Resist the easy grooves they guide you into. If you love a medium made of software, there’s a danger that you will become entrapped in someone else’s recent careless thoughts. Struggle against that!
Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?
The last defense of every Facebook addict is: but it helps me keep in contact with people who are far away! Well, e-mail and Skype do that, too, and they have the added advantage of not forcing you to interface with the mind of Mark Zuckerberg—but, well, you know. We all know. If we really wanted to write to these faraway people, or see them, we would. What we actually want to do is the bare minimum, just like any nineteen-year-old college boy who’d rather be doing something else, or nothing.
At my screening, when a character in the film mentioned the early blog platform LiveJournal (still popular in Russia), the audience laughed. I can’t imagine life without files but I can just about imagine a time when Facebook will seem as comically obsolete as LiveJournal. In this sense, The Social Network is not a cruel portrait of any particular real-world person called “Mark Zuckerberg.” It’s a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore.
from Generation Why by Zadie Smith as published in the New York Review of Books
Wow.
I finished that last line, looked up at the ceiling and felt dirty.
I’ve always had a love/hate with Facebook and I have struggled to find the appropriate way of framing the discussion in my own mind. Until now. I got up, out of bed, walked downstairs and deleted my facebook account. Permanently. Now, if only I can avoid logging into the site for 14 days, either intentionally or by accident, it will be gone.
I went up, went to sleep, and have only felt the slightest pang of remorse since. Writing this little post has also been rather a bit of fun, and maybe The Social Network was a worthwhile film for me afterall. And maybe we can all avoid getting trapped in another easy groove. Maybe we can understand our technology platforms from a new perspective. I’d really like to share this epiphany with my friends.
Hmm… now, how do I do that again? I guess I’ll tweet it. And can someone else share it on Facebook for me?
(Update: Great comments on this post from the great community at Hacker News – very interesting to see everyone’s thoughts, thanks! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2115814 )
(Update 2: I wanted to make sure that people knew the extended quote was from the Zadie Smith essay, so I updated it with another link in addition to the one I had originally included. Thanks again for the response, it’s been really interesting to read everyone’s comments.)