Social Network Two: Kino inbound?
Sorkin could inadvertently create pro-technology propaganda
A film or a television show has ‘made it’ once it inspires a visible trend in wider society. The character of Gordon Gekko in Wall Street (1987) changed office fashions in the United States as more young men went for slicked back hair and suspenders. ‘The Rachel’, taken from Jennifer Aniston’s haircut in Friends (1994), became almost universal in the 1990s and it still remains one of the most popular women’s haircuts. The popularity of Matrix (1999) led to a sudden surge in young men wearing very small sunglasses, a look which is now associated with the accursed neverending ‘Y2K’ trend.
The changes are not always just in clothing or fashion. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) can be credited in part for the growth of memestocks and retail investing more widely. Malcom Tucker in the Thick of It created a generation of politicians and special advisers who made a performance of being aggressive and vituperative - a development which aggravated Armando Ianucci so much that he said:
“I stopped doing The Thick of It because politicians were seeing it as some sort of training manual rather than a warning…I thought they no longer saw it as something to be embarrassed about, they saw it as something to admire, so I had failed totally and should stop.”
The piece of media where inadvertent cargo-culting is both most amusing, and most profoundly important is Aaron Sorkin’s masterpiece The Social Network (2011). The film, which charts the early years of Facebook, inspired a generation of young men and a few women to adopt the aesthetics of ‘Tech’, which Sorkin created through the character of Mark Zuckerberg as played by Jesse Eisenberg.
If you want to understand why the people in and around ‘Looking for Growth’ make a point of dressing badly and being performatively autistic, you must understand that The Social Network came out when they were still at university. They could not replicate the other assets that made the real life Mark Zuckerberg successful - his coding ability, and the fact that he was a student at Harvard. But they can wear a hoody and talk about the need to ‘move fast and break things’, even if that takes the practical form of picking up litter on behalf of the local council. CF Dominic Cummings, a humanities bluffer turned Steve Hsu enthusiast wearing an OpenAI t-shirt for his first day in No.10.
