Zuckerberg is flat-out wrong in his assertion that Hollywood doesn't understand people building something just because they like building things. I'm quite sure he's right when it comes to some people in Hollywood, possibly even many of the most powerful people. But I'll bet that what gets a great writer like Aaron Sorkin up in the morning is the same kind of creative impulse that drives hackers. Sorkin is a hacker - just in a different medium.
None of which is to say that Sorkin's portrayal of Zuckerberg is at all accurate. In the West Wing, Sorkin once wrote: "You think I think that an artist's job is to speak the truth [but] an artist's job... is to captivate you for however long we've asked for your attention." I think he's quite right, but it's a heck of a philosophy if you're making a movie about someone still living.
"Creative" people don't all have one type of motivation. I think people in the entertainment business don't usually have quite the same motivations that hackers do. When people in the entertainment business make things, even when they have the purest motives, they do it to affect an audience. Whereas hackers often build things mainly for themselves, just to see if they'll work.
Movies are messages. Hacks are not, necessarily. I think what Mark meant is that people in Hollywood would find it hard to imagine someone building something like Facebook just to see if it would work, rather than to have some effect on its audience, especially considering that one of Facebook's most distinctive features, at least now, is the enormous number of users it has.
There's one wrinkle I see here, speaking as an Aaron Sorkin fanboy.
There's a lot Sorkin does that just shouldn't work. His dialogue is extremely lengthy and, in the case of The West Wing and Sports Night, he completely threw out the idea of using internal (team) conflict to drive the narrative, choosing unity instead. His President of the United States was extraordinarily idealistic and principled, even under fire.
This is a long way of saying I think Sorkin does it this way to amuse himself. He creates things he, himself, would like. He certainly feels an obligation to his audience, as the parent comment mentioned, but overall he writes the characters and dialogue in a way that gives him pleasure.
edit: Even going so far as to inject the idea of taking pleasure from writing things well into his scribe characters: Danny and Casey in Sports Night, Toby, Sam, President Bartlet and Will on the West Wing.
1) The movie isn't for y'all (i.e. SV programmers) - it's for everyone else. How Raiders of the Lost Ark is Spielberg's action-adventure archeology, The Social Network is a Sorkin-banter exercise.
2) Sorkin enjoys writing for intellectual ideology, which is very difficult to position in any form of entertainment. In a way, he's forced to choose personas capable of centering his complex dialog, be it the President of the United States or a 20-something self-made billionaire.
Could the argument be made that Sorkin's style filled a void in the marketplace that was network TV drama in the case of West Wing?
Long, tight, terse dialogue is what the audience interacted with most immediately with West Wing. Sorkin can write, so he does. I would say audiences who appreciated good writing and a different conflict arc to drive the narrative had few other alternatives for that time slot.
I wouldn't chalk all of The West Wing's success with an unusual recipe up to Sorkin. Martin Sheen, IMHO, does an amazing job in his role, which (also IMHO) is pivotal to the recipe, and I can't imagine any other actor pulling it off so well.
But by the nature of a social networking site "seeing if it works" means "seeing if it affects in audience in a way to get them to join".
I'm sure Mark wasn't interested in seeing if he could build the technical aspects of the site. Besides issues of scale and some of the newer programmatic layers, none of it seems like rocket science from the perspective of a developer.
Unlike a hacking project to see if you can make free long distance calls... I think that Facebook is a lot more like the movie than what Woz used to do.
In my experience as a game developer at least, the best entertainers absolutely would play around with ideas and work on projects for their own gratification.
And on the other hand, Facebook succeeding or not is by definition it having an effect on its audience - if people like it enough to keep using it, it'll work. So if anything it's probably more like making a movie than a technical hack.
I think you're drawing a distinction in motivations (audience/no audience) that doesn't really fit. If we're talking about the best of both industries, I think they both work on each type of project.
Maybe art films are messages, but most Hollywood films are all just following the same masturbatory formula to sell tickets by telling people what they want to hear. The goal is to glorify the complacency of the average American by selling them on the idea that they can get different results by doing the same thing. That's why just about every Hollywood film starts with the main character waking up one day and discovering that he's different than everyone else, and he has some sort of special destiny. No hard work required, you just have to recognize that one big opportunity that only comes once in a lifetime and take it, or whatever other bullshit.
If anything hackers should learn from Hollywood and use the same toolkit to market their startups. Apple does it extremely well, but rarely do I see startups doing a good job at it.
I think it's difficult to separate "see if it would work" from having "some effect on its audience" for something so completely focused on its audience. This isn't a hard disk driver, it's software built around the notion of real people interacting with each other.
I also think in the context of starting a company around it, the motivation is absolutely to have an effect on your audience. After all, your moto is "make something people want" not simply "make something that works."
The few writers in Hollywood that I know will write 50 stories for every one that gets made into a movie/short/etc. Many stories are written down just as experiments or to get an idea out of the system... very similar to how I work as a code hacker.
There are, of course, uncreative money-grubbing people in Hollywood... just like in the tech world.
Both you and Mark need to get off your high horses. You don't build Facebook for yourself, you build it for an audience. Otherwise, it's not Facebook.
Likewise, most people who love making movies do it because they love making it. A lot of those movies never get audiences. Just like a lot of software projects never see the light of day. But some do.
These sorts of careless generalizations are just that, careless, and generalizations. They don't help much, except to spark arguments and debate. I think Mark should have stopped at, "They got X wrong", instead of presuming to know what "Hollywood" does or does not understand.
I feel like Zuckerberg is understandably defensive about the way he was portrayed in the movie. It would freak anyone out to see their character faults displayed and magnified and exploited to drive much of the dramatic content in a full length feature film. The Newark donation, the response in the interviews, it all comes off as defensive to me.
Zuckerberg is a lot of great things but in my opinion he's not entirely aware of how his actions are perceived by others. By that I mean he doesn't seem honest. He says he came out to Stanford in the summer "just to hang out." Why can't he say, "I wanted to build facebook and they have great programmers out here. The weather also kicks ass."? It's hard to believe him sometimes.
But I'll bet that what gets a great writer like Aaron Sorkin up in the morning is the same kind of creative impulse that drives hackers.
Maybe. But maybe writers don't see technical people (like hackers) as creative people. They wouldn't be the only ones. Or maybe they do understand that impulse, but underestimate their audience and assume the audience isn't going to understand the creative impulse.
> Zuckerberg is flat-out wrong in his assertion that Hollywood doesn't understand people building something just because they like building things.
He's not insulting the creative drive of moviemakers, he's lamenting the fact that they choose not to (or cannot) make this drive understandable to the laymen in the context of IT.
(P.S. I love your book! But your justification for CP maps is misleading!)
It's not about making the drive understandable. Everyone understands it in a general sense. Every 'lay' person I've ever met has some hobby they 'geek out' over, as its own reward.
For movies, it's a matter of making the story entertaining for the larger swath of people who (by definition) don't all geek out about the same things.
E.g. I'm a geek. I'm a gamer. I can't even get up the motivation to netflix King of Kong, let alone watch it all the way through. I understand and respect that those guys geek out over Donkey Kong. But that doesn't hold my interest.
Hollywood would have as much luck trying to make people understand the joy of hacking as we hackers have in trying to make people understand privacy and security.
>Everyone understands it in a general sense. Every 'lay' person I've ever met has some hobby they 'geek out' over, as its own reward.
I think you're either wrong here, or are using "geek out" so generally as to make it pretty much meaningless. Playing Halo, drinking fine wines, and whittling figurines are not equivalent to IT creation. Having a passion for those former things does not automatically allow one to appreciate the latter.
Can we stop over-applying the word "hacker" to everything that produces something or other? I know that Graham loves doing that, but it just dilutes the term till it becomes utterly vacuous. Screenwriters are not hackers. There's very, very little commonality.
Well, both create text at some point. I'll give you that.
Hack is of course applied by practically everyone who uses it to things other than code. The word we're talking about here though is hacker. Which is not just hack with er on the end of it any more than robber is just rob with er on the end of it.
I can see from your other comments today that you might be getting frustrated with this topic and I understand. It's not my intention to draw out some asinine debate over the use of the work hacker and hack.
That said, I can definitely understand why the original poster was assuming you use the word hacker in non-conventional ways. Claiming "one who hacks" is a metaphor for a person who implements innovative and disruptive ideas and then claiming "one who hacks" does not equate to a "hacker" is a bit of a semantic train wreck.
For the record, I've never heard of some one who uses "hacks" in that way to describe anything outside of the traditional "hacker" sense. I personally think it is a clever and interesting way to think of the word, and I also don't understand why anyone would be particular upset about it enough to post a comment.
"claiming "one who hacks" does not equate to a "hacker" is a bit of a semantic train wreck"
No, in standard usage they are not equivalent. "Hack" is used broadly for slightly dubious solutions in programming and other domains, whereas "hacker" is rarely used to refer to anything other than programmers.
"The hacker mind-set is not confined to this software-hacker culture. There are people who apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music — actually, you can find it at the highest levels of any science or art. Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits elsewhere and may call them ‘hackers’ too — and some claim that the hacker nature is really independent of the particular medium the hacker works in. But in the rest of this document we will focus on the skills and attitudes of software hackers, and the traditions of the shared culture that originated the term ‘hacker’."
I don't believe that hacking is or should be confined to programming.
I don't believe that hacking is or should be confined to programming.
That's pretty funny insofar as it (the verb) is precisely the point not in dispute. Also, your quote supports what pg said: "hacker" refers to programmers by default, though non-standard usages are possible.
I don't see how this is even an argument. Pick just about any verb; I just thought of "bake". I baked something the other day. Does that make me a baker?
I baked something the other day. Does that make me a baker?
It means that you baked something.
Now, someone might look at it and say "That thing that gruseom baked is really good. Gruseom has the Baker nature." You might then gain respect from other bakes that you made and people consider you a baker.
I wasn't attempting to argue with pg - Do people only reply to him in order to stir things up? (I think, perhaps, that I've seen this pattern.) I was only throwing in what I consider to be a good definition of the scope of hacking from someone who has written a lot about the hacker culture (esr).
The real reason we started Y Combinator is one probably only a hacker would understand. We did it because it seems such a great hack. There are thousands of smart people who could start companies and don't, and with a relatively small amount of force applied at just the right place, we can spring on the world a stream of new startups that might otherwise not have existed.
Unfortunately, yes. "Hackers and Painters" is a rather famous instance of that particular non-analogy. Given that you've published a book under this title, however, I doubt that there's any point in debating the issue here.
So I'll just say, even if painters and architects are hackers (to which I strongly object, but hey), including screenwriters such as Sorkin goes one or two steps too far. There's a line, and crossing it just makes "hacker" semantically arbitrary.
Further, regardless of the writers' ability to relate to hackers they still need to write stuff that appeals to people. Most people don't enjoy just building things like hackers do.
The writers I know have a pile of unsold or uncompleted scripts and stories. They were experiments, or drafts, or betas (if you like). Often they're working on several things at once, sometimes just with friends for kicks.
They're driven to create also (characters, plots).
I'd say one difference is, it's easy to hold a steady job as a programmer, but as a writer you have to really work the business side. It does change the emphasis sometimes from creating to selling.
It may be that Sorkin understands the need to create things, but he doesn't seem to have identified that in his subject. Instead he's given him only nasty motivations -- most of them about a surly nerd's revenge against the social system.
Sorkin has said that he's more interested in being faithful to an idea and a story, not to the events as they happened.
Seems kind of ironic, since the movie accuses its "Mark Zuckerberg" of being callous to how reputations can be affected forever by public depictions.
There's not a lot of "let's do this just to do it" going on in Hollywood. Think about it: at it's root level, the film business is FAR more money driven than the tech community at large is (Silicon Valley can be just as nasty as Hollywood, but that's not everyone). Hollywood is structured in such a way that doesn't reward collaboration and sharing (at all) but instead rewards exclusivity and cut throat behavior at every level. There isn't exactly a large and thriving open source film making movement out there. Very few outsiders are breaking into Hollywood in the way they are in the tech world.
>>Silicon Valley can be just as nasty as Hollywood, but that's not everyone.
Hollywood's not everyone. There are thriving filmmaking communities in just about every large city on earth. They don't all have the same mass appeal as Hollywood vehicles, just as small town startups rarely have the same appeal as Silicon Valley companies, but they're there, and they're vibrant. Furthermore, the very definition of avant-garde cinema is, to some degree, "let's do this just do this just to do it".
>>There isn't exactly a large and thriving open source film making movement out there.
It's called independent film, and the number of participants has skyrocketed in the last decade. Sure, they fantasize about it becoming a major hit like Paranormal Activity, just as every startup founder and his iguana fantasizes about being Google. But that doesn't mean they aren't making movies just cos they like making them.
I suspect a person like Sorkin appreciates the drive to "create art" for no other motivation than to create, but I think the disconnect is the failure to recognize a work such as Facebook (or anything IT related) as a work worthy of the same motivation. I think some people see such a work (stripped of all wealth, fame, and power) as about as noble a calling as mowing a lawn. Thus the necessity to juice up that part of The Social Network with drugs, women, and parties.
"Hollywood doesn't understand" means that it can't be conveyed in the Hollywood medium, not that a particular artist in Hollywood doesn't understand it.
It's not that they can't imagine it in Hollywood - they can, but it would just make for a much more boring movie. I think the fact they made a good movie is much more important than accurately portraying how facebook came to be. That's for Zuck's memoirs to explain, some day.
As my grandfather always said: There are no true or false stories, only good ones and bad ones.
I have to wonder if Zuckerberg saw the same movie I did. It was crystal-clear that his character in the movie was motivated by the same Wow, wouldn't it be cool if... impulse that he's saying was absent.
The writer of the movie seems to disagree with you.
Sorkin writes: "It was a revenge stunt, aimed first at the woman who'd most recently broke his heart (who should get some kind of medal for not breaking his head) and then at the entire female population of Harvard."
Now, I'm not saying what did or did not drive Zuckerberg - but Sorkin, who wrote the Zuckerberg character, thought the character was motivated by revenge.
I 100% Agree. There is a difference between "it all started with a revenge stunt" (the lawyer say something like this at the end of the movie) and "I worked all these years motivated by a revenge stunt".
What the typical Hollywood writer doesn't understand is the computer people up north also build things for fun. They understand the idea of doing something for fun, but seem to think it only happens in the film/TV industry.
What most hackers don't understand is that they do in fact have deep-seated psychological motives for all the things they want to build.
I don't know if Sorkin's yarn was even close to reality, or whether Zuck's angst at the time was merely coincidental with the development of FaceSmash. But the motivation for building Facebook or anything else is always more complex than "I thought it would be cool."
Hollywood may have missed the point, but they were right to look for one.
Zuckerbergs comment obviously resonates with the startup-happy audience he was and is facing, so the reaction here as well as there doesn't surprise. But I openly doubt that the history of Facebook rests on nothing but the desire to build cool things. The first prototype? Maybe. But he took it further, much further. It's not necessarily what Sorkin decided it should be. However, I'm willing to bet money that other factors did play a role.
For evidence, just remember that there were lawsuits, that there was drama, that significant amounts of money traded hands before everything became harmonious. Plus, the narration at the beginning of the movie? That is Zuckerberg.
I'm pretty sure even the first prototype had much deeper psychological meaning than what's being presented. Heck, I was in a college at the time too and I think I know fairly well why so many guys tried to do their versions of "face book".
"We just like to build things" excuse sounded so lame it's unbelievable it came from a person who supposedly studied psychology.
Agreed; maybe the point is that Hollywood seems disproportionately interested in explaining the urge to create (especially when the ambitions are grand) as sublimated need for intimacy.
This may be in part because Citizen Kane casts a long shadow on Hollywood film, e.g. over The Social Network & There Will Be Blood.
I do appreciate the rarer films where ambition seems substantially driven by a person's interest in problems, tools, and intrinsic desire to create or innovate: e.g. The Fountainhead (better than the book), Ratatouille.
While the motivation for Facebook was probably over-dramatized, I don't think you can support for even a second the idea that Hollywood (whatever that is) doesn't understand the joy of building things for their own sake.
After all, even the line "If you build it, they will come" is from a movie.
That wasn't about building things for its own sake, though, that was about building things in order to hang out with some ghostly baseball players.
(Or something; I haven't actually seen the movie but I gather that's what it's about.)
Doing something for its own sake (also known as doing something for the hell of it) may be a realistic reason for doing things in the real world, but it doesn't make much of a story. Drama is all about motivation, and about characters striving after the things they want, and if your character does things for no other motivation than "Meh, I was bored and I kinda felt like it, and it was sorta fun" then it's a dull story.
I've got a story for you. Kevin Costner is a corn farmer, and one day he gets up and said "Y'know what? I think I'll build a baseball field in my cornfield". A few weeks later he's finished, and he says "Well, that was fun". Good story? I don't think so.
Yes, but not by "dreams" in the abstract sense of something you wish will happen, but by actual dreams, in the fantasy sense of something talking to you in your sleep.
Or maybe one as a metaphor for the other. Still, it's not a great example.
I'm struggling to think of examples of movies where characters really are motivated by doing stuff just for the hell of it. The only example I've got so far is the Joker from The Dark Knight. His motivation throughout is exactly what Zuckerberg described -- doing things because he can and because it would be interesting to try. It's not exactly a positive portrayal, though.
Right, that's my point. He was motivated by a dream of bring dead baseball players back to play baseball in a cornfield. An actual dream. It's about as tenuous a motivation as a movie could actually have.
I agree that building things is its own motivation for many hackers but I also know many who have other motivations. One of my friends, for instance, has a borderline irrational desire to be more successful than his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend. Another is motivated purely by money and is now working in the finance industry.
To say that Hollywood "got it wrong" can only be true in this specific context. While it may or may not have been the case with MZ, there are certainly hackers that are motivated to work on significant projects in order to be accepted by girls or organizations, as the movie portrays.
Mark Zuckerberg is quite young, and has a movie made about himself and his life's work, so I would not expect him to be objective about this. My strong opinion, considering myself hacker and filmmaker, is that both activities share the same motivation, which is exactly creating things. The process might differ in some ways, but when I create a software or a movie, I am driven by a similar passion.
I cannot imagine a movie director or writer not being fully in love with the material he or she is developing. They usually live and sleep with it, it affects their personal life very much, so it is not really something you can pretend to enjoy. If you do pretend, that shows, and you usually end up with a bad movie.
I'd advice to watch this charlie rose interview of Sorkin and Fincher: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11223 . At one point, they mention they tried to talk to Mark, in order to have a counter opinion from the one expressed in the 'accidental billionaire' book, but he turned down the offer. I am sure Sorkin, while aiming to be very entertaining, wished he could stay as close to reality as possible.
Someone on HN linked to to a piece that stated Sorkin preferred good drama over the truth when it really came down to it which resulted in disagreements between him and Fincher (who supposedly wanted the truth first and foremost). And based off my own bias views of both guys, I find this to be most believeable.
The script was very subtle and managed to portray a multitude of motivations and justifications for more than one character. From what I could tell, it never said impressing a girl was the motivation for creating Facebook, and it portrayed Zuckerberg as someone who cared more about building stuff than he cared about relationships or money. Certainly it did make the (separate) implication that his handling of people/relationships/partnerships may be a source of regret as he matures as a person beyond 'I'm CEO, bitch.'
Zuckerberg's point is that Hollywood screenwriters don't understand that hackers are motivated by creating things for the sake of creating things. I find this very strange because screenwriters are themselves supposed to be creative people. Their failure to recognize a creative impulse in hackers says something, but I don't know what.
A Hollywood blockbuster is written by a screenwriting team who use formulae and focus group feedback to make a saleable product. They're unionized and it is just an assembly line job.
Not that there aren't creative writers, mind. But those guys are making arthouse flicks, not working for Jerry Bruckheimer.
You know, screenwriters study and obsess over motivations and why people do things as much as a hacker studies and obsesses over how a particular system works.
Sorkin is one of the very best in the world at what he does. Top 5 or 10, easy, and he has been in that league for well over a decade now.
Perhaps the character in the film is more complex than people here are portraying him to be.
That's a charismatic performance. It's an important choice of words how he says "we in silicon valley"... it really gets the audience on side.
But I think he's disingenuous, and I think he's been coached. The way he pitches this; it's as if, when he was building facebook, he was like a hobby botanist marvelling at a new flower he'd discovered in his favourite meadow. That the entire exercise was just about the thrill of creation and discovery.
You only have to watch the "new" section of HN for a day to see that most hackers are acutely aware of the monetary potential of their creations, and in some cases far more interested in the glamour of being an entrepreneur than the thrill and art of creating software.
I'm not saying that the two are mutually exclusive - I certainly work very passionately on things I believe in and aspire to make millions of dollars as a result, but I think in this video clip Zuck is doing a little Hollywood framing of his own.
The money is a rationalization. Its approval that many of us seek. Otherwise why tell people about it? Even evangelize about the pet project? Its a social need.
Movies does not reflect how the movie-makers understand the world.
When movies show computers searching for fingerprints by displaying a series of fingerprints in rapid succession on-screen, it is not because the movie-makers actually thinks that databases works like that. It is because it is an effective way of telling that piece of story.
Movies reflect how the movie-makers believe that a story can be told most effectively. And they have quite a lot of experience in this field.
Dramatic storytelling requires that the protagonist has a motivation to reach a goal. "For the fun of it" is not a dramatically effective motivation, since it does not drive the story towards a climax where the goal is reached - or lost forever.
Meanwhile, after seeing the movie, someone else concluded not only that Zuckerberg's main motivation was building something with his mind but that he enjoyed literally nothing but coding (to put it mildly) :
I'm just going to say that having seen the movie I'm personally impressed with how well Zuckerberg is handling responses to what must be an incredibly surreal experience in the public.
His personal technical abilities and the relative accuracies/inaccuracies of a major Hollywood movie aside.
I can't imagine it being particularly fun. Kudos for laughing at it.
Agree totally. I realized early on that some of us are just born to build. Everything else, including making money is just secondary.
For some of us the biggest part of our happiness is dependent on the meaning that we seek through our work, and more importantly, anything less than building something isnt meaning enough.
I haven't seen the movie, but I'm a bit confused by these comments. Zuckerberg signed a contract and did work for the sake of the contract, then later branching out. I don't see how you can ascribe his motives to be purely creative. Perhaps, I have missed some fact in this?
The movie claims that Zuckerberg created the primordial version of facebook after getting dumped and subsequently drunk. He stole a bunch of images and created a "hot or not" thing called FaceSmash. This supposedly set him on the path towards creating facebook.
The weakest part of the whole film was at the end when it shows Zuckerberg alone, pitiful, refreshing his facebook page hoping his long lost ex would be his "friend" on facebook. I'm one of those people who feels insulted when filmmakers pull overt, lazy stunts like that.
Sorkin hates the idea of facebook. He thinks the whole idea of a social network is a lie and he may be right. He thinks people who use facebook are wasting their time. I saw that on Colbert I think.
I applaud Sorkin's candor. Not too many people say what they think these days, but I felt like he was insulting the audience with that last scene, saying, essentially, "You people do this too, and you're pitiful." He didn't have to show us what was on Zuckerberg's screen. Most people could have guessed what he was doing without seeing the screen. Sorkin decided to show the screen so people would have no doubts about what was happening. I'm reasonably certain Zuckerberg was not actually doing that during his deposition.
It was called Facemash, and the idea behind it (according to the movie) was that comparisons were more 'turing' than arbitrary scores as used on "hot or not."
The characters' motives as presented in the movie might be fabrication or speculation (depending on your view of the true story) but they still make for a better and more tense story (imho).
Facemash makes more sense I think I was misled by another comment I read, thanks.
To an uneducated observer (that would be me and I cautiously assume most of the girls being compared on Facemash back then) girls were being evaluated on their physical appearance. That is not a noble pursuit.
I completely agree with you about the motives of the characters in the movie being ultimately for the movie. I think a lot of people in this discussion are reading way too much into Sorkin and Zuckerberg.
Anyone who seriously thinks Zuckerberg made facebook because he got dumped by a girl doesn't deserve acknowledgment. It was a mistake for Zuckerberg to even bring this up.
> To an uneducated observer girls were being evaluated on their physical appearance. That is not a noble pursuit.
Yeah, that's right. It was the execution that was referred to as 'Turing' rather than the notion that they were being compared by a metric other than looks. (I'm sorry if I'm being redundant here.)
This is a reference to the Turing test, whereby, an observer holds conversations simultaneously with a human and computer counterpart over a network. The observer must attempt to identify the computer from the two conversations purely from the responses given. So it's the idea of putting two things side-by-side and choosing the more desirable... as opposed to simply assigning a number which is a little more arbitrary.
I suppose on one hand he saw an idea that would become an instant success due to the simplicity of execution.
Did anyone else see that movie and feel that this had been portrayed? The Zuckerberg in the movie obviously wanted to be part of the social group, but I also got that 'building' vibe. Maybe it is just because I compared the entire movie to The Fountainhead.
Yeah I got that from the movie too. It definitely illustrated that Mark had mixed motivations in creating Facebook, but generally it seemed to portray "building stuff" as an outlet to whatever more primordial drives (fear, angst, excitement, desire for power, status, etc.) were behind the action.
the movie wasn't about reality, it was about the exaggerated reality from court depositions, qualified by counter-arguments. Made me think of Rashomon.
Could MZ have done more damage control since the release of the social network? He's given away hundreds of millions of dollars and done myriad interviews since then. This is at least the most direct he's been about why he's around so much in the public eye. But really, come on, it's a movie.
For most regular people, it's the first time they ever hear about Mark Zuckerberg, who apparently is the guy running the site they spend all day using and posting personal stuff to. And the guy who runs the site they use to interact with their friends and share their photos has done some quite nasty stuff in the past, like mashing face photos together etc etc.
When I went to see the movie, the whole cinema was dumbfounded when the credits appeared and it was revealed that facebook is somehow currently worth 25 billion USD. People in general don't know anything about facebook.
But I'm sure that didn't stop Jack and Jill from liking each other's statuses once they got home from the cinema to tell the world that they had just seen the movie. I don't think it really affected anyone, at least not Facebook's main demographic.
None of which is to say that Sorkin's portrayal of Zuckerberg is at all accurate. In the West Wing, Sorkin once wrote: "You think I think that an artist's job is to speak the truth [but] an artist's job... is to captivate you for however long we've asked for your attention." I think he's quite right, but it's a heck of a philosophy if you're making a movie about someone still living.