I recently saw the movie The Social Network, based loosely on the founding of Facebook.  The story is an ironic one: as screenwriter Aaron Sorkin put it in The New Yorker, “It’s a group of, in one way or another, socially dysfunctional people who created the world’s great social-networking site.”  The movie isn’t intended as a factual account; it is based on known facts, but is a dramatic retelling. 

We first meet Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg), Facebook’s creator, as a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore talking with his then-girlfriend Erica.  He alternately seeks to impress her with his knowledge, yearns for membership in one of Harvard’s final clubs, and shows barely concealed distain towards her.  She breaks up with him, not for his being a geek, she says, but “for being an a–hole.”  Hurt, he goes to his dorm room, gets drunk, writes a nasty blog entry about her, and hacks into the Harvard computer system to create a website inviting Harvard males to rate the comparative attractiveness of Harvard coeds.  The overwhelming response to the site crashes the Harvard server by 4 the next morning.  Mark, it seems, is insensitive, desirous of social acceptance, vengeful, and terribly capable. 

Mark’s escapade with the coed ranking site attracts the attention of Harvard seniors and identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer), who are members of the social elite that Mark aspires to.  They ask Mark to join them in creating a social networking site for Harvard students.  He agrees, then strings them along while he creates his own site (initially called thefacebook) with the financial assistance of his closest friend, Eduardo Saverin (played by Andrew Garfield).  The twins soon learn of the betrayal and, after their attempts to resolve their complaint with Mark and the Harvard authorities fail, they sue.  Eventually, Mark, having fallen under the influence of Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), betrays Eduardo by diluting Eduardo’s shares in the corporation down to almost nothing, and he sues as well.  Much of the movie cuts from the principals and their lawyers sitting in depositions for these lawsuits to the actions being described in the depositions.  The social relationships of these social network builders are irreparably broken.  Mark seems incapable of establishing a meaningful emotional connection with anyone.

The movie suggests that Mark’s main motivation is acceptance by the social elite, especially by members of the final clubs.  As the fledgling Facebook starts to grow, Eduardo but not Mark is selected for possible membership by one of the final clubs.  Mark professes indifference to Eduardo’s acceptance, but there is a strong suggestion that Mark betrays Eduardo over envy.  What makes the movie so dispiriting is that Mark is driven by desire for something without value.  The members of the club to which he aspires are arrogant, condescending towards nonmembers, misogynist, and hedonistic.  Augustine wrote that we are defined by our loves, and that happiness is only possible if the object of our love is conducive to enhancing our well-being.  Even had Mark been accepted in the social circles he aspired to, it seems unlikely that he could have been happy.

I wrote earlier about the modern malaise of loneliness.  I suggested at that time that social networking sites provide only a thin veneer of community and may intensify loneliness.  Similarly, in a Newsweek review of Social Network, Jeremy McCarter suggests “A site that began as a response to modern loneliness looks, after the film, like a record of our own struggle with that condition.”  Our Facebook connections are superficial largely because we have a narcissistic turn when we sign on; that is, we tend to portray ourselves as more clever and important than we are, and we look to others for affirmation of that inflated self.  As portrayed in the film, Mark Zuckerberg certainly is somewhat narcissistic, and we become more like him when we enter his creation.  Narcissism is only part of the story, though. The Zuckerberg of the film has narcissistic elements, but I view him as being more autistic than narcissistic.  I’m not referring to the psychiatric diagnosis of autism but to the original meaning of the term.  My 1966 edition of the American College Dictionary defines autism as “fantasy; introverted thought; daydreaming; marked subjectivity of interpretation.”  Though he wanted acceptance, in the film Mark always took an inward turn; how he imagined the world and recreated it in his mind and in cyberspace was more important to him than how others actually viewed him.  Might not Facebook be autistic in the same sense: each of us creating our own fantasy, each pleased with the world we have made?