A movie that gets it right.
Who are the capitalist folk heroes of our time?
The Social Network is a film that celebrates one of the greats, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
It might seem at first like an impossibly boring story that resists moviemaking, how
Facebook came to be founded and grew, meeting trials along the way and becoming the giant
that it is today.
In fact, it is not only a super exciting and wonderful movie on its own terms, it is probably
the finest movie about free enterprise made in our times.
It gets entrepreneurship in the real world exactly right.
It deals brilliantly with all the important issues from the motivation or drive behind
web startups, it is not necessarily money, and the impossibility of slicing and dicing
The movie comes just in time.
Facebook has been the victim of an increasingly vituperative campaign by the intelligentsia.
It supposedly violates privacy, feeds crazed egoism, destroys lives by tempting people
People who cough up too much information about themselves, wrecks marriages, leads teens
to commit suicide, wastes vast time that people should otherwise be using to enjoy the great
outdoors, ruins the culture by digitizing communication at the expense of real face-to-face
interaction, and wrecks the language by dumbing down the term friend.
Such are the alleged crimes of Facebook, and if you think that the website is guilty, there
There is an easy answer, don't use it.
Facebook is all voluntary, it is also free for everyone.
People, the latest report has 500 million people signed up, but this will grow to 1
billion and beyond, also happen to love it and depend on it.
In fact, it is the most popular website ever.
It has connected people as never before, allowing one person to keep up with the goings on,
There is philosophical significance to the phrase social network.
It echoes a distinction between the economic and political means, as made by Franz Oppenheimer,
The Social Network is shorthand for the vast matrix of communication and exchange that
springs from human volition alone.
It is to society, in that Chudorovian sense, that Facebook owes its energy and orderliness.
As always with free enterprise, it all started with a small idea.
People like to know about others and like others to know about themselves.
The Internet can make this happen.
The film shows how the idea germinated within the microculture of Harvard University as
Zuckerberg experimented with software solutions and gathered ideas from every possible source.
He rendered dreams into code that became a phenom.
The movie nicely illustrates how his entrepreneurship was driven by ideas, tested on a daily and
hourly basis in response to consumer interest and demand, with constant refinements along
the way.
The ideas alone, however, were not enough.
They were given life by technological genius.
They were implemented through deep devotion and even a praiseworthy fanaticism.
The film further shows that while making money and the profit and loss test are the crucial
signs and seals of commercial success, in the long run, the drive for money was not
the fundamental motivation for the creation of Facebook.
Zuckerberg is shown as not caring about money.
He cares about doing something creative, great and path-breaking.
He cares about making a dent in the universe.
When Facebook begins to take flight and really catch on, Zuckerberg is quoted as keenly realizing
that its popularity, its coolness, is its main asset.
He wisely sees that nothing should be done to risk that fundamental asset.
The goal is not making as much money as soon as possible, but entrenching the love that
people have for the thing that Facebook was making available.
This attitude among entrepreneurs is far more common than conventional lore would suggest.
The archetype is of an achievement-obsessed dreamer, not a greed-obsessed calculator.
Another point that is bang on in this movie concerns the most difficult life lesson that
that anyone of singular talent, any dreamer who achieves something wonderful must learn
in life.
We are born into this world believing that success in anything will be met with praise
and acclaim.
We are not often told the truth that we see in this film.
Success is more likely to be met by envy, hate, disparagement, put-downs and loathing,
sometimes from the most unexpected sources.
The successful person in any field, and this is probably true in all times and all places,
will find himself or herself quickly surrounded by wolves, many of them former sheep, seeking
to ruin, wreck and destroy.
Even the grandest achievements are put down as pure luck or credited to others or disparaged
as being not so great.
If there are laws that give the wolves the opportunity to work out their envy, they will
will be employed.
Every entrepreneur must prepare for this, expect it and deal with it.
So it was that Facebook was met with early challenges and hate campaigns and it is no
surprise in the digital age that the initial attack occurred on the issue of intellectual
property.
And here the film makes yet another great contribution.
It shows how irrelevant IP is for business success and how it has become the preferred
slogan of losers and the great excuse for whole classes of people with a bad business
sense.
He stole my idea is the great lie of our time because ideas cannot actually be stolen and
there is no existing idea that is not in debt to some other idea.
The film shows how fellow Harvard students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss had asked Zuckerberg
to write the code for their proposed site, Harvard Connection, which eventually became
Connect U. Zuckerberg had other and more elaborate ideas brewing in his brain.
Once Facebook took off, the Winklevoss twins cried foul and after having failed to crush
Facebook through every other means, eventually sued Zuckerberg for violating their intellectual
for Property, even though the projects shared none of the same code.
There are a few choice lines in the movie.
Zuckerberg is outraged at the idea that he had stolen anything.
The Winklevoss twins still had their idea, it's just that they didn't do anything with
it.
And what if Zuckerberg had indeed relied in part on someone else's notion?
As Zuckerberg is quoted as saying, does a guy who makes a really good chair owe money
to anyone who ever made a chair?
Silly Zuckerberg, using common sense in the face of the arcane and mixed-up world of IP.
Another way to put it is a line Zuckerberg uses in the depositions after the lawsuit.
He tells one of the twins, if you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook.
This sounds simple, but it is really all you need to know about the absurdity of such claims.
Who wins and who loses in the marketplace is not arbitrary.
The marketplace tends to separate the talkers from the doers, the dreamers from the risk-takers,
the actors from the mere thinkers.
If you can't create and can't compete, you can always claim a violation of intellectual
property.
Hey, under American law, there is nothing you can't use as the basis of a legal extortion
scheme.
An essential part of entrepreneurship is choosing which idea, among the millions that hit a
person from every direction every day, one is going to use to influence a business venture.
At one point in the film, a student comes up to Zuckerberg and asks him whether he knows
if some particular girl has a boyfriend, and if so, how serious they are.
This gives Mark the idea of permitting users of Facebook to announce their relationship
Status on their individual pages.
The addition of that one feature convinced him that it was time to go live.
The new website was launched soon after.
By the standards of IP, the fellow student who asked him this question has some stake
in the profits of Facebook because that exchange gave rise to a crucial feature of the website.
For that matter, every single user of Facebook has a stake.
By carefully presenting many of the outside influences on Zuckerberg in a series of brilliant
scenes that hit a huge variety of sectors and opinions, the film presents the reality
of how ideas come to be, and shows how IP litigation has become a path for losers – a
racketeering legal route for the resentful to loot the successful.
After all, had Facebook not taken off and been a success, the Winklevoss twins would
would have never imagined themselves to have been victimized at all.
That fact alone shows that there is no real theft involved here.
If someone steals your car, you are a victim whether the robber abandons the car or uses
it to win a NASCAR race.
IP only ends up being an issue when the defendant makes a go of it.
Once any idea becomes a success, you can count on hordes of people to line up and claim that
they had it first.
Sure enough, the twins use the law to extort millions, and who is right and who is wrong
– essential matters of justice – don't even figure into the decision to settle.
Yet again, this is all too realistic.
Especially telling is how the twins imagine how they will destroy Facebook out of resentment
for Zuckerberg's success.
They make no bones about it – they want to wreck it.
So we see how IP ends up creating a moral hazard for the envious to set up barriers
to social and economic progress.
I have no idea about the real-life details of the case, but it is possible that the film
underplays the extent to which Zuckerberg actually did gain valuable influence from
the competitive effort to create the Harvard connection.
And yet, as the film also shows, this is how great ideas come about.
No great idea in this world is created out of nothing, contrary to the myth.
Great ideas result from the interplay of a huge range of influences in all directions.
The winner is the one who makes the commercial reality happen.
Until then, it is all talk.
A second legal issue portrayed in the film concerns Zuckerberg's squabbles with his
best friend, who was named the CFO of Facebook before being squeezed out of the company when
And the top players, among who is another legend, Sean Parker of Napster, concluded
that he wasn't really up to the job.
This case strikes me as a matter of manners and contract, but not intellectual property.
The case was settled out of court.
As Economic Policy Journal pointed out, this film could end up driving millions of young
code-savvy students to become entrepreneurs, and further entice students into the world
of Digital Enterprise.
More than likely, this is not something people will learn in class.
They will learn it from their extracurricular exposure to the fast-moving world of commerce
and from developing an intuition about what really makes people tick and how to tap into
that in the marketplace.
You may not like Facebook, but it has, evidently, improved life for millions of people.
In any case, for decades I've heard the intelligentsia disparage the latest thing, only to find those
same people using that very technology a few years later.
Today's technology bashers are tomorrow's late adopters.
Just the other day, I visited an elderly gentleman, a prominent fiction writer in a retirement
home.
He treats his desktop computer as his lifeline to the world outside, permitting him to keep
Keep up with all his extended family and communicate with friends all over the country.
My mind raced back to a conversation I had with him 17 years ago.
I had asked him what he thought of the internet and email.
There was no web back then.
He said that he regarded these innovations as the end of the world.
He said it with an ominous tone in his voice.
Well, perhaps he was right about that, but it was also the beginning of a new world that
this very person has since learned to love.
So it is with Facebook.
Zuckerberg ended one world and began a new and better one for many millions of people.
The social network shows how the commercial marketplace gave a code geek a chance to
do that and how he did it.
It is a film that celebrates the good guys, ridicules the bad guys, shows the reality
of what any successful person will face, makes the legal system look like the pathetic enemy
of enterprise that it truly is, and provides a tribute to entrepreneurship that is long
overdue.
This film is a glorious success.
Which means, of course, that it is under attack.
A Washington Post reviewer thinks that it doesn't show how private innovation is really
is really just luck of the draw, and it fails to highlight the wonderful essentials of public
infrastructure as provided by government.
Yeah, sure, and this reviewer might back a similar movie called The Government Network,
starring bureaucrats and their defenders at the post, and see how it does at the box office.