Lawrence Lessig Reviews The Social Network 223
Hugh Pickens writes "Lawrence Lessig — author, Harvard law professor, co-founder of Creative Commons — reviews The Social Network in The New Republic. Although Lessig says the movie is an 'intelligent, beautiful, and compelling film,' he adds that as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed because the movie fails to even mention the real magic behind the Facebook story, and while everyone walking out out of the movie will think they understand the genius of the internet, almost none of them will have seen the real ethic of internet creativity that makes success stories like Facebook possible. 'Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a "neutral network," a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform,' writes Lessig. 'And that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders — Zuckerberg and the Internet — working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old world powers to remove the conditions for this success. As "network neutrality" gets bargained away — to add insult to injury, by an administration that was elected with the promise to defend it — the opportunities for the Zuckerbergs of tomorrow will shrink.' Lessig laments that the creators of the movie didn't understand the ethic of Internet creativity and thought that the real story was the invention of Facebook not the platform that made such democratic innovation possible. 'Zuckerberg is a rightful hero of our time,' concludes Lessig. 'As I looked around at the packed theater of teens and twenty-somethings, there was no doubt who was in the right, however geeky and clumsy and sad. That generation will judge this new world. If, that is, we allow that new world to continue to flourish.'"
Has everyone forgotten... (Score:5, Interesting)
Narcissism (Score:2, Interesting)
never under estimate how many went to that movie and "saw" bits of themselves in the various characters, trying to justify their behavior to themselves. From the beyond college student dialog to their dress and the speed it appears they act. Oh yeah, I can see where they found people to go see the film
Zuckerberg hasn't built a free/open platform (Score:5, Interesting)
Facebook may be the next Windows -- a dominant, proprietary platform on which everyone else's apps run. Add the absence of end-user control of the applications and data (including privacy), and it's antithetical to the free, open, and end-user controlled Internet on which it's built. How will the next Zuckerberg build his application? Not so easily, since he'll be dependent on the closed, proprietary systems and data of Facebook, doing only the things that they permit and only when, where, and how they want it.
Mozilla helped save us from a closed, proprietary web browser (one reason Facebook could blossom). With that battle won and a proliferation of browsers and Microsoft adopting open standards, they are struggling a bit to find a mission. I wish they would turn to their attention to the next issue of the open Internet, a free and open social network.
Was Zuckenberg's portrayal supposed to flattering? (Score:5, Interesting)
Zuckenberg was portrayed as a "hero" ?
When I left the movie, I had the impression that Zunkenberg was portrayed as a thieving, condescending, misogynistic, little twerp. He stole everybody else's ideas, idolized a child molesting drug abuser, and betrayed his best (only?) friend. His only redeeming value is that he was a talented programmer.
Not my idea of a hero, but then, I don't idolize Bill Gates either.
Re:"the real magic behind the Facebook story..." (Score:4, Interesting)
Truly insightful. There really isn't anything such as a free lunch. There is always a price paid for it by someone, somewhere. Most people don't realize this because they've been made to believe there is such a thing- and that they don't have to pay anything in. There are things that are worth burning a bit of your privacy on to get something in return. Sadly, many people's thresholds for that sort of thing are kind-of low because they don't know just how valuable it really is.
Re:My concerns about network neutrality. (Score:3, Interesting)
You mean illegal downloads, not "free stuff". Youtube is free last time I checked. Net neutrality has little to do with copyright violations, and everything to do with normal websites.
Imagine that now a new (completely legal) Netflix competitor appears that you actually prefer over Netflix. It has more features, or a better selection of certain movies, or cheaper prices.
Yet, if you try to use it your experience will be shitty (slow streaming, high latency) because Netflix has an established player has the money to pay the ISPs' bribes and prioritize itself over their competitors.
This is lead to a huge barrier on entry for new competitors on established sites, and a general lack of innovation, which is the thing that makes the Internet so great.
What if Yahoo could have paid to keep Google unusable? What if Microsoft could have paid to prioritize traffic from IIS servers over Apache servers? What if Apple could pay to squash great services like Spotify for the iTunes service?
Re:Narcissism (Score:3, Interesting)
Oddly enough given my comment (what's life without some self deprectation?) I actually quite enjoyed some of Ayn Rand's work. Take out the 80-page soliloquy at the end of Atlas and I thought it was a pretty solid book.
The characters are rather outsized and undersized though! Interestingly enough, I read that Rand had intended to include a priest character--a sympathetic character, somebody who was on the side of good, yet sided with the "looters" for misguided reasons. Rand apparently felt the character wasn't believable!
Erm (Score:4, Interesting)
"...(they) thought that the real story was the invention of Facebook..."
Perhaps the makers of the movie knew what their "real story" was, while some internet talking head (hey! I'm "internet famous!") is simply flogging his personal dead horse?
Re:Lawrence Lessig on a soapbox (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a movie...based off a an actual event but injected with LOTS of fiction and creative juicy bits to make the story interesting and dramatic. The movie isn't flawed because it fails to mention the "magic behind the facebook story," as most people watching the movie don't give a shit about that stuff! It would be nonsense that distracts from the movie.
Yes, it's Hollywood. Don't expect realism. For those of us here in Silicon Valley, the amazing thing was Zuckerman finding, on a low budget, a house in Palo Alto a few blocks from the Stanford campus, with a pool.
There is, after all, plenty of "geek" stuff in the film. The sequence where Zuckerman writes screen scrapers to get all the Harvard house face books into his system even has valid Perl code shown on screen. Lessig has a point, though. It's getting harder to launch something like that as "the Internet" is divided into a series of walled gardens, run by Facebook, Comcast, Apple, and Google. It's not impossible. But there are more "gatekeepers" now.
I looked at Zuckerman's page on Facebook to see if he liked the movie, but he hasn't posted anything yet.
I saw him as neither a hero nor a saint (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the great thing about this movie as a work of art. The characters were complex and no one was a perfect hero or perfect villain. They were real people, real people with real personality issues and real quirks and real greed. I think that's the key thing here.
Mark Zuckerberg - dick, computer geek, had some vision to make something cool
Eric Parker - dick, computer geek, thinks he's awesome but when confronted he scampers like a scared mouse and then uses paranoid delusions to explain what went wrong without owning up to his own mistakes.
Winklevoss twins and that other guy - all dicks, guys with money who think they deserve a hoard of cash because they are good looking, come from money and have high GPAs. And yet their vision was limited basically to a Facebook limited to Harvard and had no real vision for the features to add to it.
Eduardo - not really much of a dick, nice guy, wanted to help, wanted to help run the business, and in the end got screwed despite being the original funder, but compared to everyone else had no real vision, he was just trying to do as he was taught. Nice guy but if he had had his way, Facebook would probably not be nearly as big as it is.
I loved the characters as characters, but the only character I actually liked as a person was Mark's ex-gf. Everyone else was foolish or a dick. And that's what happened here, a bunch of dicks met at one point, soap opera ensues, and because this was such an explosively good idea everyone thinks they deserve a chunk of money. If you think that any of these characters other than the ex-gf is portrayed as a 100% hero or villain, you have a seriously warped and false sense of black and white and you don't belong in the discourse of this movie.
Re:Narcissism (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, and Rand's goal with Atlas Shrugged was to portray 'romantically ideal' heroes and heroines... and I thought it was an all right story, though I could have done without being bludgeoned over the head with her philosophy quite so much - subtle she wasn't. You know you're supposed to hate Jim Taggart, Wesley Mouch, Orren Boyle, et. al. from the moment you meet them in the book, and you know you're supposed to see John Galt, Dagny, and Hank Rearden as heroic from the moment they're introduced. Francisco is slightly more nuanced, but she spends so much time talking about his insane degree of talent & capability that you can't help but see he's also one of the "good guys," and spends most of his time mocking (unsubtly) the people we are told (but do not believe) he spends most of his time around.
I don't think anybody reading Atlas Shrugged would say that the characters in it are particularly amenable to being identified with, though - they are (by design, but still...) outlandishly one-dimensional, almost to the point of monomania. Rand suggests that we SHOULD aspire to be like her heroic characters, but I think it's difficult to say that most of us would see much in them to identify with.
Lawrence Lessig is right! (Score:3, Interesting)
I know I was angry when the Lord of the Ring movies didn't at all explain how Tolkien's orcs and elves were inspired by other stories and folk lore! Where was the explanation of how he created Elvish? These films were completely impossible to enjoy without all this background information that gives context on how it was possible for the books to have been written!
Re:I saw him as neither a hero nor a saint (Score:3, Interesting)
According to the movie, Mark was characterized as a comp sci guy who saw beyond what the Winklevoss twins had in mind. And just so it's understood, the Winklevoss's idea was no revolutionary idea nor was it original. The movie even mentioned Friendster and Myspace and someone (I forget who and how) basically asks how would this be better than those two. The Eric Parker character goes on to elaborate how Facebook "is cool." I think that's what the movie is trying to portray.
I'm not agreeing with these portrayals in reality, simply stating how the movie told the story.
Re:Has everyone forgotten... (Score:2, Interesting)
It does. When I go out, I see 99% of the guys I meet just want to abuse women. They talk about them like they're trash. They lie and cheat. When a girl won't go home with them, they buy them a lot of vodka and then come back bragging about how she passed out and well... can't say no when you're unconscious right?
Just about everyone seems to smoke pot and drink garbage. 25 cent beer, Miller/Coors ... 40s ... they're like "this shit's so horrible but it'll get you fuckin' drunk" why drink it then? I'll drink a belgian beer or microbrew, or sip some good whiskey; I'm not putting back anything that tastes like fizzy piss or rubbing alcohol.
There's a lot of nice girls here. There's a lot of mindless girls too, and some girls that just flaunt their sexuality to abuse stupid guys (sometimes you can't tell who's abusing who...). There's a few nice guys, and a few more really nice girls... the nice girls get abused, and the nice guys get nowhere.
It sucks so bad.