The Social Network

Abstract

Just shy of one hundred years ago, in his 1912 novel The Financier, Theodore Dreiser created a nineteenth-century moneyman named Frank Cowperwood. The young Cowperwood was a Progressive Era hustler: where other men made useful things, Cowperwood made his way in the world by buying low and selling high. Others might succumb to the moral constraints of church and public opinion, but not Cowperwood. He followed his appetites where they took him, from the bedroom of his business partner's buxom daughter to the backrooms of Philadelphia's corrupt politicos. As a result, he rose quickly, fell hard, and in the end moved west to Chicago to rise again as the hero of a sequel called The Titan (1914). Dreiser's Cowperwood was such a creature of his time that it is a shock to find him alive and well in our own era, living as an Asperger Syndrome–ish computer programmer named Mark Zuckerberg. The Social Network purports to tell the true story of the founding of one of the most widely used World Wide Web services of all time and, in the best tradition of the corporate exposé, to reveal the personalities behind the business phenomenon. Thanks to the writers Aaron Sorkin (of West Wing fame) and Ben Mezrich (on whose 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook; A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal the film is based), The Social Network does indeed get its facts straight; indeed, it recounts who did what to whom with a grace and a level of narrative invention that most historians can only envy. At the same time, however, the film retails Zuckerberg and the rise of Facebook as emblems of a deeper historical transformation. In Frank Cowperwood's time, endlessly circulating capital transformed an economy built on farming and craft. Now, the film reveals, the ability of computers to amass and distribute information instantly is rewriting the rules of sociability and with them, the parameters of power.