The Business of The Social Network
Writing in Forbes, John Tamny says:
Due to Thiel’s delayed consumption of $500,000, billions of dollars of wealth are and will be created thanks to his relative parsimony. In that case, when readers hear economists say the rich should hand over their money to the government so that it can be spent, they should remember the wealth wrought by Facebook’s rise and how very stimulative the hoarding ways of the rich actually are.
The film can also be seen as an (again, unconscious) vision of how much entrepreneurs can accomplish without regulatory authorities impeding their progress. Early in the film, Zuckerberg runs afoul of the local political class — the Harvard bureaucracy — who are offended when he invents a website that allows users to rate one another’s attractiveness. Sorkin frames this episode as one of privacy invasion and crass misogyny (in reality, Zuckerberg’s site included images of both sexes; in the movie, it’s only women who are held up for inspection) and is clearly on the side of a Harvard committee that meets specifically to scold Zuckerberg.
But Zuckerberg dismisses the feckless finger-wagging of these clueless twerps, and the audience will too. On this and many other occasions, he is the smartest guy in the room. No one ever said business is about playing nice.
An even better scene later in the movie finds Zuckerberg’s business rivals, the Winklevoss twins, who have up to this point prided themselves on a code of self-reliance, abandoning their principles and begging for intervention at the office of then-Harvard president Larry Summers. Summers — who is as rude as Zuckerberg in the film — gives them the brush-off, telling them that their disputes aren’t worthy of his time and that they should fight their own battles.
Sorkin may not realize this, but if his beloved liberal president and associated business-harassers and job-killers of The West Wing had such a hands-off attitude toward the corporations they see as evil, the creation of wealth and jobs in this country would be as fast-paced and exciting as The Social Network.
Aaron Sorkin is a tremendously intelligent man and a highly skilled writer.
You really think all those examples are “may not realize,” “oops” and “unconscious” depictions?
He’s giving you a wink and a nod. Just as Mamet was giving you a wink and a nod and a “say no more.”
I just hope you haven’t damaged the career of one of America’s finest conservative dramatists.
This guy sounds a lot like a NYC asshole to me. Human beings live in societies (family, religion, race, religion, culture, language) in which members are defined by acceptance of common goals and values. Those who refuse to accept these values are, by definition, non-members of the society. Read “The Jungle Book”. Living ‘Without the Law’ is not a good plan in the long-term. Ayn Rand was a freak, who refused to be bound by any social values in her personal life. Whatever her stated philosophy, she shared the typical Leftist’s view of human nature as being non-existant. In fact, her elevation of the individual’s (especially her own) ‘right’ to unrestricted freedom is not juvenile, but infantile. This is Hobbe’s life in the State of Nature — solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. If you could find 5% of any population willing to live according to a Randian prescription, I’d be amazed. But the reason Randians need to be removed from America isn’t their personality defect, but the fact that they spend every waking minute trying to destroy the society around them. We tolerate beneficial bacteria in our guts, but E. coli we have to eliminate with meds, because they are dangerous to our health. The Enlightenment’s error as regards Human Nature leads to idiocies such as ‘the marketplace of ideas’ where Truth will magically prevail based on lively purely-rational debate. How low does your IQ have to be before you can believe that? The Global Warming goombahs have to support their theory by claiming the the Medieval Climatic Optimum (now known as the Medieval Warm Period, for propaganda reasons), which is recorded in historical records all over Europe as well as by archeological digs in Greenland (get it? Greenland!), did not occur. Are these frauds being laughed out of respectable scientific societies? How about social scientists who claim that differences in intelligence do not exist and that IQ tests are meaningless?
Based on your real-life (sorry to introduce that ugly term) observation, does this conform to your experience? How about those who claim their are no non-superficial differences between men and women — that all observed differences are culturally determined? Even as a thought-exercise, I can’t figure out how anyone could believe this (and modern brain-science disproves it anyway). Reason is a valuable tool that men can use in achieving their goals and avoiding trouble, but those goals are determined by emotions. Why those Enlightenment types thought living as robots would be a good thing, I don’t get; but it doesn’t ultimately matter, because Homo sapiens is not born as a tabula rasa, and will not exist as a reasoning machine.
Was that a satire?
Yes, and this kid accomplished all that without any Federal grants, bailouts, incentives (like “Cash for Clunkers”), special Federal laws being passed, or any new Federal regulations being imposed. And he certainly didn’t need any union workers. Funny how well the free market works when you leave it alone.
Maybe that’s why Sorkin thought he was the villain.
I enjoyed Social Network, and liked Zuckerberg’s character. True, getting along with such a person would be almost impossible, but he has accomplished a very useful platform for socializing.
Even the legal situation puts Zuckerberg on the side of the angels. His final step of paying off the Winklevoss brothers, and his ‘best friend’ was because it was safer for him than going to a jury trial (think Conrad Black!)
I didn’t get why Eduardo ‘deserved’ such a huge slice of Facebook; going his way would have limited Facebook’s future to a few American universities. Also, knowing a couple of algorithms had nothing to do with creating Facebook. And, this great Harvard business major signed a pile of legal documents without his own lawyers (’cause he was Zuckerberg’s ‘only’ friend??)
The Napster guy, on the other hand, may have been a drug addled loon with a taste for interns, but he hooked Zuckerburg up with the Paypal guy and got real financing started with $500,000. So, even if the guy was fired for drug stuff, he completely deserves his 7% slice of Facebook (in my opinion, based on the movie).
Zuckerberg’s confrontation with the lawyers was great: so, if someone makes a great chair, does he then owe money to every other chairmaker?
And I am not a youth. But I was in business for a long time, and understand that you don’t whine when you screw up!!!
I hate to break it to the craven Mr. Boot, but Mssr.s Sorkin, Fincher and Rudin are without a doubt aware of every single implication built into their work. It’s just that they wouldn’t necessarily articulate those implications in the thoroughly twerpy, I-heart-Ayn-Rand terms you choose. But hey, man, if it helps your head, you go right on thinking you’ve discovered that magic subtext. You won’t profit from it the way that its creators have, but given your philosophy I don’t suppose you’ll complain about it, right?
I did not care very much for this film so I will hit the key points of my afterthoughts….
I just finished watching The Social Network at my local cineplex, and I was greatly disappointed. At first, I did not want to see the movie because I truly had no interest in seeing how facebook came into being. But each trailer I watched made me believe more and more that this was a movie about friends, greed, betrayal, and facebook was only a backdrop of these emotional complexities. I should have stuck with my gut instincts. A good portion of this movie is filmed in an office with our main characters accompanied by their lawyers. We (the audience) were well aware of the betrayal between the characters long before we cared about them. Why should we care about them turning their backs on one another if Fincher never gave us a reason to care about his characters in the first place. This movie was about friends, greed, and betrayal, which are great themes for any movie but not if we don’t care. I also didn’t care for the fact that half of the movie was set in an office of uncharismatic characters going through litigation. It was well written and the dialogue was great, but for a movie about humans and the social experience, I feel it lacked any emotion. I believe this movie could have been great. The cast was great. It had what seemed to be a great script. The one thing it was missing was a director to bring it all together and make me feel any sort of emotion for his cast. Im sorry, David Fincher. If you’re movie The Social Network friend requests me, I’d ignore it. It’s time to put on Fight Club so I can remind myself what you’re capable of.
The old movie the “Front Page” had a very similar origein by a leftist that wanted to critizixe the media for not walking in lock step. They remade that movie three times. I hope this movie has a simalar history.