Has anyone in human history inspired more visceral disgust than Mark Zuckerberg? Hard to imagine. I know I used to get a shudder down my spine every time I saw him on TV, being upbraided by some kind of congressional subcommittee. Look at this uncanny demon, white as death, covered in a thin liquid sheen, with his big watery eyes like an uncomprehending animal, his blank inhuman face, his halting and inarticulate speech, and his sinister, gangly form, which didn’t seem to stand up on its own feet so much as it drooped down from the neck, as if he were being hung up on invisible hooks. This is not a human being but an ungainly meat puppet, a shell for some slithering being. Which made sense, really. Only a creature like Mark Zuckerberg could have redefined what social life means for an entire generation in the way he did. Instead of something that happened by itself, out in the world, Zuckerberg turned it into a series of countable numbers. Friend counts, likes and shares. Every time you choose not to go out in the evening and just sit at home instead scrolling on your phone, a little bit of your human life force escapes out into the aether, and somewhere, the thing living inside Mark Zuckerberg feeds.
There’s a good film to be made about how Zuckerberg turned into the devourer of souls, and how the fun social network that lets you keep in touch with your friends turned into an inescapable hellpit that turns everyone who ventures inside incurably mad. Unfortunately, The Social Reckoning is not that film. It’s not even really a film about Zuckerberg. Jeremy Strong is excellent as the imperiously unlikeable CEO, but he’s basically wasted in this film: almost all his scenes take place in a series of flash-forwards that could be comfortably excised without really changing anything. Aaron Sorkin wants to show us Facebook’s fall from grace but because he lacks imagination he’s resorted to a deeply boring readymade Hollywood plot.
This is the story of Jeff Horwitz, an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal who teamed up with a disgruntled Facebook employee – Frances Haugen, played by a nervy, nerdy Mikey Madison – to produce his 2021 Facebook Files revelations. This isn’t very dramatic, but Sorkin does his best. He tries to inject a bit of eros by having Haugen turn up at Horwitz’s hotel room disguised as a call girl. But all the tension has to stay implicit. A journalist like Horwitz wouldn’t actually sleep with his source. That would be unethical.
Haugen is upset because she thinks the company she works for is cynically allowing its product to turn people into right-wing extremists. An old friend had been a good progressive, active in all the right causes; later we see her racially abusing a bunch of cops by the side of the road, and posting the footage to Facebook where it predictably goes viral. The whole film is intercut with scenes of the 6 January riots: maniacs hoisting Confederate flags, secretly puppeteered by the algorithm. The message, more or less, is that Facebook is bad because it failed to censor enough. It should have done more to stamp out disinformation. It should put in more safeguards against cyberbullying. There is a version of this website that’s perfectly fine and healthy, but evil Mark Zuckerberg gave us the evil version instead, because all he cares about is profit.
This is the kind of story that appeals to Aaron Sorkin types: all his films tend to culminate in some kind of big legal hearing, where truth and righteousness inevitably prevail. I’m not so sure it’s true, though. Maybe there’s no good version of social media. Maybe some kind of madness is inevitable whenever you try to turn all human interaction into something that takes place through seven inches of glass. It doesn’t just affect conservatives: everyone who spends too much time on their phone, whatever their political leanings, ends up with a big rectangular hole burned directly into their brain. You could make a film about this but it couldn’t be a sedate, plodding legal drama. It would have to be something lurid and deranged because the world we live in is an insane one populated by demons.
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