'The Social Network': reviewed by Lawrence Lessig

Reading this review has further improved my opinion of Lawrence Lessig.

For starters, it's not at issue here whether the Winkelvii deserve $65M. The film makes it abundantly clear that they do not. They are simply payed off (at a cost comparable to that of a speeding ticket per one character) for expediency, as Zuckerberg would not appear sympathetic to a jury.

The lawyers are not presented in the film as wise elders. I certainly don't recall them having any better comebacks than the younger characters. If anything, the lawyers are frequently presented as sharks; amoral, chaotic neutral characters who try to glean assets from the younger entrepreneurs at every opportunity.

Lessig goes on to conclude that the real story here is not Zukerberg's drive, that instead the film should really be about platform, the internet itself. But this is not a film about how neat the internet is, whether Lessig thinks it should be or not. It is about Zuckerberg and his dogged ambition. It's about the steps he took to develop and expand his creation into a worldwide phenomenon. Obviously the internet made that possible, but to denigrate the film because the internet itself wasn't its central thematic focus seems obtuse.

He is not a murderer or a saint. Just a dude who wanted to win more than anyone else.

No idea is 100% original and are usually the sum of many great ideas that already existed.

People who didn't take the leap fully just blamed him/sued him instead of trying to build something better. I bet you most of them couldn't if they tried.

It annoys me that in a piece attacking Sorkin for having a cartoon vision of the world, Lessig uses an analogy with a cartoon understanding of the world himself. The British monarch in 1790 did not have court jesters, they were long gone ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jester ).

The Winkelvii, as the movie hilariously calls them, seem indignant not so much that their idea was "stolen" as that the geek refused to know his place, which presumably was to code things up for them in exchange for token equity. They're not bad guys, but they're angry that their skewed view of the world, with them naturally at the top, turns out wrong. The movie does not make it seem like the Zuckerberg character owes these dudes shit or that they could ever in 65 million years have created Facebook. They thought of an exclusive friends website merely because they were steeped in exclusivity to begin with. Only the Zuckerberg character grasps its real power. That's the meaning of the lightbulb moment where a friend asks him about a girl and he suddenly sees "relationship status" as a way for Facebook to address this need.

The Saverin character (marvelously acted, by the way - who is that guy? - his emotional vibrancy is remarkable) is sympathetic but clueless, doggedly trying to turn Facebook into a small business that ekes out a bit of ad revenue. His dream for Facebook is that it be allowed to join the business club the way he personally craves admission into a prestigious student club. His happiest moment is when he gets an executive title; his main frustration that more mid-level ad execs don't throw him a few bones. The movie makes it clear that despite being "the business guy" he has no understanding of the business, whereas the Zuckerberg character grasps it instinctively, spends half the movie trying to explain it to him and finally gives up. On this point I think the movie gets startups right. I was rather astonished by that. The other point on which it gets startups -- and Facebook's significance as a startup -- right is in its emphasis on the founder as CEO. The contrast between Parker as the dot-com era founder who got deposed and Zuckerberg as a new generation of founder who retains control is pretty impressive historical precision on the part of filmmakers who presumably don't know much about startups.

(Incidentally, it also gets technical details right: the references to wget and Emacs in the opening scene made my jaw drop for a moment.)

As for Saverin, the movie consistently implies that he could never have remained part of Facebook, not because Zuckerberg is evil but because the abyss between the two of them is huge. Indeed, the tragic inevitability of their split is the core plot of the movie. (The Winkelvoss twins are mostly comic relief, and boy did those actors nail that.) It does, however, portray Saverin getting screwed out of his Facebook stock and Zuckerberg not doing anything about it; that was perhaps the one evil moment.

Even the Sean Parker character is only half-bad. He's a bad boy, but that's a dramatic device: the movie badly needs some shaking-up by the time Timberlake appears and his character comes with the trickster energy to do it. Beyond that, though, the Sean Parker character is the only one who gets what Zuckerberg is doing, the only one who gives consistently good advice, and the one who acts as a midwife to Facebook's birth as a real startup.

As for the Zuckerberg character, he's portrayed as an intense Asperger type who cares more about his vision than he does other people, but also more than money. The movie flirts with but eventually abandons the idea that he's motivated by petty revenge. His obsession is with making Facebook as big as it can get. I've never seen Zuckerberg as an Aspie type (and thought the actor overdid that aspect, going out of his way to hold the same furrowed expression the entire movie), but the obsession with making something great and refusal to let anything stand in its way are classic entrepreneurial qualities that the movie grants to Zuckerberg fully.

I think Lessig is wrong about the trite moral he thinks the movie is imposing on the story. The movie doesn't advance that interpretation, it vividly portrays some of the characters advancing it. That's totally different. The movie per se isn't concerned with individual characters. Everyone is granted his/her perspective but no one has any absolute status. What it's about is The Social Network, not the online one, the real one.

I went to this movie grudgingly and left surprised by how bad I didn't find it. Guess I shouldn't be, since David Fincher is my favorite working director (or would be if I could forget the execrable Benjamin Button); as Bob Mondello said on NPR the other night, I'd pay to watch him direct the phone book. Beyond that, the acting is unusually good all the way down to the cameos (except the Zuckerberg actor is too monotone). Where I really disagree with Lessig is about the writing, which he loved and which to me was ok-with-awful-bits: it's smart the way that "smartass" is smart and has way too many TV zingers. (Even those, though, were toned down from the script that was leaked. That horribly contrived line everyone was quoting a few months ago where a girl tells Zuckerberg that girls will always hate him because he's an asshole, I'm happy to report, never made it into the film. [<-- edit: oops! wrong!] Fincher has taste.)

This doesn't ring true to me. It is the lack of true freedom on the Internet that makes Facebook such an enormous success. If ISPs allowed users to connect to the Internet without any restrictions, it's quite possible they would be running the equivalent of web/mail/chat servers on their home computers, and a true social network might have evolved. As it is, such innovation is restricted to a much smaller group of individuals whose entrepreneurial motivations will impose even more restrictions on users (for example, web sites are springing up that require Facebook authentication, totally eliminating the choice to opt out of Facebook).

Success is not the sole measure of heroism. Private enterprise is not the sole source of stifling regulation. Let's find a better hero of Internet-based entrepreneurial spirit and wildly successful efforts to get ahead of the curve (such as Paul Graham, oddly enough), and let's not minimize the efforts of government to screw over the openness of the Internet by chalking it all up to caving in to corporate interests.

Last I checked, corporate interests had little benefit to gain from granting the Executive branch of US government the power to "shut down" the Internet, for instance.

Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret? Absolutely not. Did he steal any other “property”? Absolutely not—the code for Facebook was his, and the “idea” of a social network is not a patent. It wasn’t justice that gave the twins $65 million; it was the fear of a random and inefficient system of law.

If we take Lessig's factual assertions about the originality of the code as face value, it still seems as if Zuckerberg ripped off a lot of ideas that were shared in confidence, and repeatedly deceived the originators of those ideas into thinking that he was working diligently on their behalf.

I can't understand Lessig's criticism of the system as stated. It is not as if these ideas were found by Zuckerberg on a Usenet forum or overheard on the bus, and the Winkelvoss twins then went after him with an army of copyright lawyers; some sort of proposal was followed by some sort of agreement, and Zuckerberg was given access to the fundamentals of a business plan and the existing work product of two other programmers. Perhaps Zuckerberg had already had a vision for Facebook and simply accelerated his schedule in order to get it to market first; but if so, one wonders why he was wasting time on taking meetings for programming jobs.

What does Lessig consider the twins should have done instead? Would he be on their side if they had drafted a proper contract, NDAs, and stamped everything they ever put on paper with the words 'Property of ConnectU, hands off'? Or is it that he doesn't consider their idea sufficiently distinctive to be protectable by the legal system? Because he never articulates quite what he means, I'm left with the impression that Lessig considers the commons to extend to any exchange of an incomplete or unrealized idea, without regard for the context in which that exchange takes place. By this interpretation, the notion of a 'gentleman's agreement' is obsolete, what you own is limited to what you can control, and any lapse in total secrecy is your loss to bear.

Indeed, I saw this view expressed repeatedly during the fuss over the iPhone prototype earlier this year. Many considered the finder of the device the new owner, regardless of his legal obligations and his knowledge of exactly who had lost it. The value the finder, and subsequently Gizmodo, sought to derive from their possession of it stemmed from the very confidentiality and general unavailability of such prototypes. But many considered possession to be fully equivalent to ownership (on a moral if not a legal level), conferring the right to exploit what one possessed to the fullest extent possible. Quite why legal technicalities of a search warrant issued shortly afterwards should have offended their sensibilities so greatly, I can't say - they certainly weren't bothered by any statutory considerations, so it must have been to do with some inexcusable lapse of style by the police.

If we are not bound to respect each other's property or confidence by anything less than our full contractual agreement, does Lessig then see progress as the outcome of an arms race between zero-sum competitors? Why should I not steal his car if he steps out of it and leaves his keys in the ignition, and place the blame upon 'the system' if Lessig summons a policeman to his aid? The value of his car stems from its current configuration as a vehicle, and Lessig is arguing that designs do not belong to anyone in particular. the materials which make up the car - some steel, rubber and various kinds of plastic - are mere commodities, and at most I have laid hands upon some junk which just happens to be organized into the shape of a vehicle at present. If I drive it away and wrap it around a tree, what has Lessig lost? With enough time and ingenuity, he could reassemble the wreckage into a working automobile: others have done no less, so why does he feel entitled to have his idea of a car actualized at someone else's expense, just because it existed independently in the recent past?

You don’t even have to possess Zuckerberg’s technical genius to develop your own idea for the Internet today. Websites across the developing world deliver high quality coding to complement the very best ideas from anywhere.

Unless, of course, they decide to launch against you as a competitor instead, in which case you had best resign yourself to basking in the reflections of their glory.

Given the midnight byline on the post, I cannot help wondering if this was written with the assistance of a post-premiere cocktail. I hardly feel he would ignore such gaping holes in any counter-argument.