On 10/15/10 [Oct 15, 10] 3:00 PM, [email protected] wrote:
> Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:32:42 -0400
> From: Louis Proyect<[email protected]>
> Subject: [Pen-l] The Social Network
> To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
> <[email protected]>, Progressive Economics
> <[email protected]>
> Message-ID:<[email protected]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>
> If I had not been a programmer for the past 42 years and a missionary
> for Marxism on the Internet for the past 14, I doubt that I would have
> found ?Social Network? so compelling.
>
> I can see the logic of my NYFCO colleague Armond White who, even more so
> than me, has little use for such over-hyped movies:
>
> Hollywood and the journalism industries?both cowed by the Internet
> breathing down their necks?have perfected a method to curtail individual
> response to movies, thereby dictating widespread enthusiasm for this
> shallowly complicated film. To Fincher and Sorkin, Zuckerberg represents
> a new cultural avatar who (like other snarky Internet avengers) must be
> worshipped, not held to account. They inflate Zuckerberg?s story as a
> ?creation myth? (as one lawyer calls him), the better to concede victory
> to a tycoon of new technology rather than apply normal social or
> professional standards to his hostile relations with people. The Social
> Network sucks up to successful, wealthy young powerbrokers.
>
> Prairie Miller, my other favorite NYFCO colleague who is one of the
> country?s sharpest radical film journalists, wrote:
>
> And while the film is always about brains rather than brawn, The Social
> Network is strictly guy territory with mental bawling providing the main
> action, in a peculiar Harvard essentially sexed up and dumbed down. And
> a main character spouting such an insanely intellectualized rowdy rap
> minus the music, and seemingly psyching himself into a fast forward
> run-on sentence karma of hyper-capitalist high, that any social logic to
> this unfocused infomercial in biopic clothing, falls by the wayside.
>
> Despite my alienation from the main characters, I found the movie to be
> an extraordinary look into the process of software development with a
> scrupulous attention to the technical details. After Mark Zuckerberg
> (Jesse Eisenberg in a superb performance) gets the inspiration for what
> would eventually becomes Facebook as a Harvard, he begins to cobble
> together a web application using the same combination of programming and
> database tools that I use at Columbia University for more mundane tasks,
> like keeping track of the school?s billions of dollars. When I got into
> the profession (a craft, really) 42 years ago, the programmer?s
> workbench was a lot less accessible to the non-professional but with the
> dissemination of personal computers and tools such as spreadsheets,
> html, etc., it becomes a lot easier to identify with the main character
> even if his personality traits are as off-putting as a bucket of phlegm.
>
> full:http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/10/14/the-social-network/
I enjoyed the movie for many of the same reasons as you. Two scenes made
me a bit nostalgic. The scene depicting Zuckerberg's all-night hack,
with friends dropping in and adding moral support, intellectual help,
and sustenance reminded me of late nights at a communal house in
Sommerville I shared mostly MIT with students. The other, when
Zuckerberg "interviews" applicants for intern positions by participating
in a drinking and programming contest reminded me of when I worked at
IBM's Systems Research Institute and my boss tried to convince me I'd do
better programming if I came to work stoned.
Unlike most of the reviewers on slate and other sites, I did not view
the film as a morality play, a creation myth, or an allegory about
social climbing at Harvard. These aspects were so cliched that they
seemed like scenery. Additionally, all of the characters, except perhaps
the unfortunate Saverin, are incredibly unlikeable. This is rare in a
Hollywood film.
Instead, I found it interesting for two reasons. One, it is an unusual
look into a geeky fraction of the "creative" class. Although by no means
an accurate picture of most software development, it does capture some
of the self-absorbing energy of this aspect of the labor process. Also
unusual for the early twenty-first century U.S., it treats intelligence,
rather than muscles or good looks, as the main heroic attribute. The
other reason is how a few smart kids in their twenties came into such
astronomical sums of money. When you think about what they sold --
advertisements in an electronic space for socializing --
overaccumulation and the continuing importance of the sales effort
(Baran and Sweezy were right) are the structural side of a dialectic,
with the film's main characters providing the agency. While many of the
film's details may be exaggerated or untrue, the story about the big
money is not.
Marsh Feldman
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