The Social Network

Good movie… But the nagging question in my mind before and after the movie was “how much of it was actually correct?”.

I believe there is a “good chance” that TSN captured the spirit of the Facebook story. How can we know this? Well, there are key moments that had to researched carefully, and had to be as close to truth as possible. For example the email correspondance between Winklevoss brothers (played by the same actor by the way) and Mark Zuckerberg cannot be faked. There has been a settlement between Winklevoss brothers and Zuckerberg, also between FB CFO Saverin, these are FACTS. Therefore starting from these data points you can project, then you watch videos of Zuckerberg, talking, giving speeches, and you can paint a pretty good picture of the kid. Surely the movie took certain liberties while trying to entertain, but these can be glossed over by the viewer while enjoying the movie.

TSN was fair to its characters. Also, in legal terms the settlement between Winklevoss bros and Zuckerberg has been FAIR in real life. Z. did after all steal their ideas a little; of course without Zuckerberg there would be no Facebook, but without that spark he received from W. brothers, Facebook might not have been Facebook as we know it either.

Overall, the Z. picture coming out TSN is a bright kid who wants to grow his product / creation at all costs. That is commendable. A business card that says “I am CEO bitch” is not that important, really. It’s a joke, I could make a similar joke myself – and you cannot create a whole evil empire image based on this little soundbite. Of course FB needs to be careful about privacy issues, but that is true for every company that handles your information, including credit card companies.

I liked the techno-speak, it’s nice to hear such familiar words in a movie setting (Emacs rules!).

Great acting all around, Eisenberg, Timberlake did a fine job.

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Note: There was an interesting dynamic around “cities” in TSN. As Paul Graham says, “[i]n a hundred subtle ways, [every] city sends you a message”. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money, Boston (or Cambridge) says you should be smarter, Silicon Valley says: you should be more powerful. In TSN we saw a back-and-forth between all the above. FB CFO wanted to remain in NY (money), Zuckerberg did not agree. Zuckerberg “did not care about the money”, and he says at one point in the movie that “people in Harvard were not impressed by money (because the message in Cambridge is about smarts, not money). Shawn Fanning in contrast is all about power. He talks about “bringing down music companies”, wants Facebook to have “more users, reach all continents”.

Eventually Zuckerberg finds himself closer to this and moves to West Coast.