David Fincher
The Social Network

Today a large portion of the American elections is being fought over the clash between Twitter and Trump. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, has taken a step back, saying (demonstrating his ignorance of McLuhan) that they provide the container, not the content. In 2010, a film about Facebook seemed like a film about Facebook. Viewed today, it depicts with ruthless clarity the origins of a new era.

An epochal change. Not the Twin Towers, not the financial crisis, perhaps not even the virus. The existential change - which these Harvard students invented more or less with the aim of hooking up or getting back at their exes - is so systematic that today, being inside it, we struggle to see it.

It's everywhere.

The legal disputes, the arguments over stolen ideas, the squabbles over advertising matter little in truth, it’s all background chatter compared to the rebirth this film narrates, in part unknowingly (or knowing, but not entirely understanding the scale of the change: here still only behavioral, today political, epistemological). Like all forms of art, cinema illuminates the world surrounding it and remains as a testament that goes beyond its initial intentions.

It is frightening, it is horrifying, it chills the insides to know that today's world, its perversions, its political distortions, and the way of thinking (or rather not thinking) of billions of people are all degenerated products of the “brilliant” idea of four too-smart and too-introverted teenagers. Perverse in their icy brilliance.

It's a horror film, therefore. The true horror, the kind that doesn’t make you jump ingenuously, but penetrates under your skin slowly, you caress it and can't believe it. The horror that woos you, repulses you a bit but you're terribly attracted to it. An adventure that soars hyperbolically beyond its possibilities of control. It becomes everything, absorbs everything. It is everything. Realizing you are a part of it, powerless, is horrifying.

Looking again at these young adults' misadventures stirs great pity; you can't really envy them. You can't really envy Zuck's 70 billion dollars, not at this price. Paid by him and all of us. A paradigm shift translates into money, but above all, it translates into power. It redraws the power map. And yet, even today, in 2020, dear Mark seems unwilling to realize it. He thinks those Faustian 70 billion come without a cost, a suffocating weight. He’s still a college kid who thinks he can cheat anyone. Without paying.

This new genesis of humanity has its demiurge. Shaping a different homo sapiens is a vile figure, a demon. Absolute evil, the devil. The wickedest villain since Hitler. But also a towering, unreachable figure in his vision, always elusive. A creator god following a new logic, who thoroughly knows human baseness because he frequents it assiduously. Deeply human, and tragically divine. Unwillingly.

A modern Faust who has condemned us all to inexhaustible, multifaceted, immediate knowledge. Yet sterile, falsifying, corrupting reality. The world simplified to fit into a timeline. A platform that to resemble the world has made the world resemble it terribly. Today, truth itself is identified (or is thought to be identified) through an algorithm. Therefore, we cannot help but reflect and be terrified by seeing the origins of all this. The same people we see in the film today decide the algorithms of our daily lives on Instagram and similar platforms. We look at their ideas, we think their ideas. We breathe them.

The dry coldness of the staging, the unsettling music by Trent Reznor, the terrifying performance of Jesse Eisenberg, and the explosive dialogues of Aaron Sorkin, the tight editing. It all contributes to sketching a masterpiece of pure cinema (the kind that looks at the world with painful transparency) that manages incredibly to do “justice,” in 2010 when many implications were unimaginable, to the brilliant perversion from which this new era was born.