Watching Movies - For The Love Of Money
On The Social Network & The Failed Capitalist Dreams Of The Millennial Generation
Author’s note: Spoilers for The Social Network
I. Intriguing Possibilities
“You’ve got to find what you love…Don’t settle…Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” – Steve Jobs, 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. I remember those words recirculating around the time of Steve Jobs’ death. Drake was a month away from dropping Take Care, Game of Thrones had just finished its first season and everybody was doing the Dougie.
The Cambridge Dictionary defines being hungry as “having a strong wish or desire for something” and being foolish as “not showing good judgment”. Together, these words seem like a toxic combination primed to fail upon impact but for a generation of graduates reeling from the effects of one of the worst recessions in economic history, it was a call to arms. It was an excuse to throw caution to the wind, to “move fast and break things”, to dream of a better world created in our image. This was the zeitgeist that The Social Network captured and contributed to.
Released in 2010, The Social Network is a quasi-biographical courtroom drama that doubled as a thesis statement for the millennial generation. Through its charismatic trio of Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg, Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker and Andrew Garfield’s Eduardo Saverin, The Social Network predicted the world that was about to come. It foretold the rise of technocratic ‘a*******’ with both an inferiority and God complex. It glorified their ambitions and mocked their insecurities. While some aspects of the film aged better than others, it still holds up as a prescient look into our current digital climate.
Most importantly, The Social Network reshaped the myth of The American Dream for Web 2.0. It made Mark Zuckerberg’s drive towards creating a billion-dollar company relatable and tricked us into believing that we could do it too – all we needed was an idea, a laptop and a willingness to wear casual attire at all times. The buzzy IPOs of companies like Twitter, Snapchat and Alibaba during the mid-2010s did little to dissuade us from chasing this improbable possibility, a perfect time to be young and foolish.
II. A Familiar Taste
“When I went to college, we were intrigued by the rock stars…Now we’re intrigued with the techies.” – Bob Lefsetz, The Social Network, The Lefsetz Letter
One of the criticisms often made about the millennial generation is our fixation with celebrities. This is no different from the baby boomers enjoying ‘free love’ in the sixties or Generation X wanting their MTV in the eighties. However, what may rankle older generations is the blatant commercialism in millennials’ desire to hang out with the rich and famous.
From Billy McFarland to Caroline Calloway, the glamorous underbelly of the techno-billionaire is the plucky influencer, the swindler with a thousand dollar smile and over one hundred thousand followers. As Zadie Smith pointed out in her seminal essay ‘Generation Why?’, “Generation Facebook’s obsession with this type of ‘celebrity lifestyle’ is more than familiar. It’s pitiful, it pains us, and we recognize it.” We want to be the life of the party and we want there to be proof of it. This is why phrases like ‘do it for the vine’ became so prevalent in 2014, why teenagers across the country tried to recreate their own ‘Project X’ party after the film released in 2012, why a mention on Forbes magazine is a better predictor of jail time than an appearance on a Noisey documentary. It’s not enough to be successful but to be so successful that people are forced to either love us or hate us.
Enter Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker. The avatar of millennial vices. The Mephistopheles of technocapitalism. The Wolf of Menlo Park in ‘f*** you’ flip-flops. In hindsight, it’s no surprise that Eisenberg’s Mark easily succumbed to Timberlake’s charm. Here was a guy fully in tune with his id and telling others that it was a good thing. That being a nerd pays off. That it’s time for the old guard to bow down to the new kids on the block. For anybody with a less than stellar social life in high school, Timberlake’s Victoria’s Secret parable might as well have been The Sermon on the Mount.
III. The Gentle Hum of Anxiety
“I don’t know why. They ‘trust me’. Dumb f****”. – Mark Zuckerberg
“Be careful what you wish for” goes the old adage. “I can’t believe this app is free” goes another.
But nothing in life is free, especially social media. Instead of money, we gave these corporations our information and all we got in return was a pale imitation of our personhood.
Looking back at the 2010s, it’s easy to see how naïve we were. We may not have believed in institutions but we still believed in ourselves. Regimes were ‘toppled’ through the power of Facebook, multimillion-dollar careers were created through the power of Facebook, elections were won through the power of Facebook. But how could we have known that the same tool we used to rattle autocracies would later destabilize democracies. The same tool we used to build our self-esteem would soon destroy it. The same tool we used to bring ourselves together would eventually tear us apart.
The worst bit about living in the future is that you can’t change the past that led to it. Like the ancient Greek myth, our tech billionaires took the fire of the Internet and used it to create weapons of mass distraction. They profited from our privacy and gave us products overwhelmed by targeted advertising and flawed algorithms. We are Eduardo, a bunch of millennials too eager to sign the dotted line not knowing that it would subsequently be used against us at a moment’s notice, another set of pawns ready to be sacrificed at the altar of late-stage capitalism.
Further Reading
[1] Anne Helen Petersen, How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation, BuzzFeed News
[2] Yoh Phillips, Do It For The Vine: The New American Dream, DJBooth
[3] Zadie Smith, Generation Why?, The New York Review of Books
[4] Joel Stein, Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation, TIME
Further Watching
[1] Andrew Saladino, The Social Network - Ten Years Later, The Royal Ocean Film Society
[2] Maia Wyman, Can We Still Enjoy The Social Network?, Broey Deschanel
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Yours Truly,
John Noire
"When I went to college, we were intrigued by the rock stars…Now we’re intrigued with the techies.”