One of the dangers of online dating and looking for love in Pasadena is that there are a lot of geeks, geeks who laugh at the people working Apple’s Genius Bar, geeks who could make the legions of Geek Squad troopers cry. Some of these super geeks not only do not know how to make romantic overtures, sometimes they do understand how to conduct themselves in more common aspects of love such as friendship. This is all readily apparent in director David Fincher’s “The Social Network.”
Of course, by this time, you should know that the movie is about a few men at Harvard, including one Mark Zuckerberg. Written by Aaron Sorkin (based on a book by Ben Mezrich), this is a story of success in a questionable business, but failure in almost all other departments.
According to the movie, Zuckerberg was initially drunk and angry when he began his precursor to Facebook. If you think a woman scorned is a force to be reckoned with; a programming geek is even more dangerous and deadly in this technologically advanced world.
People in a certain Escondido neighborhood where one unemployed software engineer (George Djura Jakubec) made his house into a bomb factory are well aware that geeks with a grudge can appear to be mild-mannered. Zuckerberg is not mild-mannered. He is a geek gone wild.
In the movie, Zuckerberg’s reaction to rejection is posting personal and physical insults to the woman who spurned his egotism to his blog, and after considering comparing all women to animals, he decides it would be more fun to let the campus play “hot or not” with women who belonged to different student dorms.
According to Wikipedia, the original Facemash paired two photos of either men or women and not just women, but the movie quickly establishes that Zuckerberg is a bit of a chauvinist pig. Yet the aggravated geek does catch the attention of three fellow students: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra. The three hire Zuckerberg to work as a programmer for their website Harvard Connection.
Instead of working on their site, Zuckerberg goes to his friend Saverin and asks for money to help develop a site. With Saverin’s money and connections, they build TheFacebook which eventually becomes Facebook.
Saverin and Zuckerberg go on to meet with Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) and Zuckerberg is seduced by Parker’s charisma, style and way with women. Parker eventually becomes the first president of Facebook as Saverin is pushed out with his name taken off as co-founder of the company.
The film is framed by Saverin and Zuckerberg’s testimony in two different lawsuits (Saverin against Zuckerberg and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra against Zuckerberg) –both of which would settle out of court.
By the time the lawsuits were being settled, Parker was out of the picture. In the movie, it was a one-night party with some drugs. In real life it was a three-night party and drugs. Parker still has shares in the company. Saverin’s shares were restored and his name, re-instated in the masthead as a co-founder.
Zuckerberg in real life, does have a girlfriend, Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg offered her a job at Facebook in 2004 and reportedly has been dating her since 2005. If you want to try your own “hot or not” you can see Zuckerberg beside his girlfriend.
The movie doesn’t bring Chan into the picture although Zuckerberg and his only friend, Eduardo Saverin, do hook up with two Asian American women–Facebook groupies who quickly give the guys oral sex. Saverin eventually decides that his girlfriend is crazy–which is what groupies would have to be by definition. Whether the real-life Chan is crazy or not remains to be seen.
According to “The New Yorker” the producer of this movie, Scott Rudin, did attempt to get Zuckerberg’s side of the story, but was “rebuffed.”
Mezrich did interview Saverin for his book, and there is all that legal data and some leaks to the media–some of which make this movie portrayal of Zuckerberg much kinder than it could have been. Saverin, who unlike Zuckerberg, did not drop out of Harvard and graduated magna cum laude with a degree in economics, has commented publicly on the movie for CNBC. The movie also downplays the business smarts of the golden boy twins.
Just how nasty was Zuckerberg? Silicon Alley Insider got a hold of IMs sent while Zuckerberg was at Harvard. In preparation for the litigation defense against Winklevosses and Narendra, the Facebook legal team looked at the IMs at the offices of Jim Breyer (Accel Partners) in early 2006. How did Zuckerberg decide to deal with the twins?
ZUCK: yea i’m going to fuck them
ZUCK: probably in the year
ZUCK: *ear
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don’t know why
ZUCK: they “trust me”
ZUCK: dumb fucks
Zuckerberg doesn’t sound like a good Samaritan. Is it really a good idea to look at your consumers/customers as “dumb fucks”? Some of these privacy issues have come back to bite Zuckerberg or perhaps having those drunken all-night hacking sessions weren’t such a good idea. Because of lax privacy and security issues, photos posted on Facebook have been used for such things as advertising in other countries, or in Zuckerberg’s case, to show the world what his girlfriend looks like.
What’s perhaps most telling is that most of Zuckerberg’s close friends have left Facebook. Zuckerberg is considered the youngest billionaire and was recently named Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year.” His girlfriend is now a medical student and has recently moved in with him.
The movie is a fascinating and entertaining portrayal of an anti-social geek who has changed the way we socialize. Perhaps socialization should be a required course for geeks or something like charm school at least. But then again, the geeks who need it most, might not even take the class. Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. When one reads Saverin’s response to the movie and begins to think of the business model of Facebook, particularly if you’ve been involved in dot-coms that are now dot-gones, one might consider Zuckerberg’s decision to leave Harvard an unwise move.
What lessons can we learn from “The Social Network” between the gray area of fact and fiction? That talented men (and women) who have anger management problems can change the world, but not without some casualties. Friends of a technological genius–recognized or not–might want to excuse anti-social behavior but that should come with the caveat: Beware of Geeks bearing gifts.
Age of the Geek 