The Social Network: How to Make Friends and Influence People

Lately, I've been pretty depressed with movie news that I hear. Too many movies that are in development seem to be remakes or licenses of properties that were once popular and have a lot of nostalgia value (see: Transformers, G.I. Joe). Various kids cartoons are being adapted for the big screen into wholly brainless films (click on this at your own risk) and M. Night Shyamalan's list film was a live-action adaptation of the first season of an animated TV show. Now even board games are being adapted into films (I admit that Clue was a pretty great movie, but its more the exception to the rule that things without plots tend not to be good movies). So suffice it to say that I was not that excited when I heard that a "Facebook movie" was getting made. Then I saw this:



I had forgotten that Facebook had been the subject of some interesting intellectual property battles. I am training to be an IP lawyer, so the trailer really got to me (copyrights are my preferred area, and I never thought I'd ever hear anyone refer to copyright infringement in such a fear-inducing tone), but even if I weren't, the promise of "corporate" espionage and backstabbing over what would become one of the most defining elements of the decade was enough to completely change my outlook on the film. The more I learned, the more interested I got, and when the overwhelmingly positive reviews began popping up, I remembered why one can't judge a movie's abstract premise (a "Facebook movie" can be so many things, so one cannot possibly judge it on that descriptor alone).

The Social Network succeeded on every level; the story was riveting (made more so by the fact that it is true, or at least Hollywood true), the directing and structure was very well done, and the cast was amazing (I never thought that I would ever be creeped out/terrified by Jesse Eisenberg or be forced to take Justin Timberlake seriously as an actor). The film told the story of how a man with few friends and no social skills became a billionaire for creating a social networking website in which users have turned the word "friend" into a verb to describe the act of "acquiring" "friends." Eisenberg played Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, as a cold, selfish, and emotionally stunted man who's contempt for everyone around him, even his friends, was a manifestation of his barely masked envy.

The film was done as a frame narrative, and is probably the only one that I can think of which had two frames. We see the events of the founding of Facebook and rise of Facebook, Inc. as visualizations of testimony given at two depositions for two separate lawsuits, both of which feature Zuckerberg as a defendant. In one, the plaintiffs were three of Zuckerberg's fellow Harvard students who had hired Zuckerberg to program a Harvard-only social networking site which may or may not have also been intended as a dating site. In the other, the plaintiff was Eduardo Saverin, the original CFO and co-founder of Facebook and, until Zuckerberg betrayed him, Zuckerberg's best friend. Throughout each deposition, Zuckerberg makes glib and insulting comments to the plaintiffs and their lawyers, believing (or at least convincing himself) that they are all just jealous of his intelligence, ingenuity, and success.

The Saverin suit is much more emotional, as the two parties were once good friends (although the film portrayed it in a fairly one-sided manner, with Saverin giving unconditional friendship to a man who tried to undercut Saverin's success due to the resulting envy) and it was clear that what Zuckerberg did was wrong and vile. In creating Facebook, Zuckerberg created the idea (potentially) and programmed the site while Saverin financed the project and acted as CFO and business manager. However, the two had a hard time agreeing on the direction of how the site would earn money. Eventually, they met Sean Parker, the unstable/slimy creator of Napster. Parker charmed Zuckerberg into bringing him into the company in a role that made Saverin redundant. Eventually, Zuckerberg and Parker forced Saverin out in an extremely cruel and sneaky manner (note to fellow law students/lawyers: did Saverin's comment about his belief that the Facebook lawyer was his lawyer, thus contributing to him not having the contracts reviewed by independent counsel make you think that the Facebook lawyer potentially violated his ethical duties?).

The other lawsuit was intriguing to me on a much different level. The three other students believed that Zuckerberg stole their intellectual property when he created a social networking site (that initially only allowed people with harvard.edu email addresses to join) after agreeing to build a Harvard-exclusive social networking site for them. As far as I can remember, the film never explicitly told us what laws the students sued under, but the students kept stating that Zuckerberg violated copyright law in stealing their idea. This intrigued me as a law student focused on copyrights and trademarks because ideas are not protected by copyrights, only expressions of ideas are (yes, I know, that is a little confusing; for this instance, all you need to know is that, until the students had a working social networking site, Zuckerberg could not be liable for using the idea of a Harvard-only networking site because (1) there are many ways to execute that idea, and (2) one group of people should not be able to hold a monopoly on an idea). Zuckerberg did have access to the students' computer code, which, if he used in building Facebook, WOULD be copyright infringement, because code is an expression of an idea, but Zuckerberg vehemently denied using any of their code. The students clearly could state that Zuckerberg violated an oral contract with them and caused them to detrimentally rely on further promises he made in emails to them, but the copyright claim is much more interesting because it is more ambiguous.

Anyway, sorry for boring you with all the law talk. Eisenberg showed a new side to his standard character (like Michael Cera, Jesse Eisenberg tends to play one sort of character; unlike Cera, Eisenberg's hasn't gotten tiresome yet) of awkward intellectual. His Zuckerberg was brimming with cruelty and contempt for everyone around him. His facial expressions alone were enough to make me cringe with discomfort, but when he opened his mouth to speak to people who were supposedly his friends (most notably Saverin and his girlfriend), everything that came out was extremely cruel and angry.

Finally, the movie also did a good job showing how this website has come to affect, and in many ways, dominate our lives, even as the main story of the film was not about the website, but the story behind the website. This ranged from some of Zuckerberg's inspirations for elements of the site (notably the conversation that was responsible for Relationship Status) to the effects of using "Facebook" and "friend" as verbs to describe using the site. The "You didn't update your relationship status" scene was a little over-the-top, partly because that scenario is mocked so often. But, sadly, it is mocked because people DO put a lot of stock into whether a relationship is "Facebook official." As I said earlier, the most significant shift in how we socialize made in the last decade was the work of someone who, according to this film, barely had 5 friends, let alone 500 million. Talk about irony.

Up next: In Baltimore, everything is connected...

P.S.
Seeing as how Facebook shows friends in common and used to have options related to friend degrees (friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends), I find a certain aspect of my viewing of the movie amusing. I saw it with three other people, one of whom attended Harvard at the same time as Zuckerberg and told us about the night he invented Facemash, a sort of precursor to Facebook. And all three of the people I saw it with know one of the people portrayed in the movie (for privacy purposes, I will not say who or how). Very interesting...

The Wire: In the Garden Of...

Before I'd even seen one frame of The Wire, I had heard from nearly every source I respect that if it isn't the greatest TV show ever created, it is certainly one of the top five. The AV Club named it the best show of the decade, and I can't think of a single person who has spoken poorly of it. The show had a lot to live up to, almost too much. It would be nearly impossible for anything to live up to the hype that has been given to The Wire. And yet, somehow, it succeeded.

At first glance, The Wire appears to be yet another cop show. We watch as the police try to catch the gangsters and drug dealers so that the prosecutors can try them for their crimes. But it was so much more. Even if the show never expanded beyond the police station and the drug dealers, The Wire wouldn't have been just another cop show. For one thing, instead of being a procedural, in which a new case is introduced and solved each week, The Wire followed a single case in its first season. Other cases were referenced or briefly glimpsed, but the purpose of showing these other cases was to show that the police are often overworked and that crimes are often connected. The police were also not the black and white characters that they are on my shows, but fully realized people who have their own motives, desires, faults, strengths, and skills. A "good cop," like Jimmy McNulty, still does things that are "wrong," like breaking the chain of command, getting drunk far too regularly, and putting his kids in danger by having them tail a suspect. A "bad cop," like Bill Rawls, isn't a double agent for the criminals, doesn't engage in police brutality, and doesn't act irrationally for the sake of the plot. Furthermore, the show gave just as much screen time to the criminals, revealing that they (for the most part) are just as human and flawed as the cops (I almost wrote "law-abiding characters," but just because someone on the show isn't a drug dealer or gang member doesn't mean that he or she never violates the law).

But the show did expand beyond the police and the drug dealers, examining other institutions in the city of Baltimore (although most of these institutions were in some way related to either the police or the gangs) and showing us how each and every group is flawed or broken in its own way. From the docks, where the local stevedores union assists in importing heroin into the country in exchange for money to use in political lobbying, to the local government, where promises are never kept because partisan politics and a focus on staying in office/ascending the political ladder rather than helping the citizens, to the school system, which has become nothing more than a training ground for future drug dealers, to the news media, which is more focused on winning awards and increasing profits than accurately reporting and reporting on stories that actually matter, The Wire depicts a city that is broken beyond repair, run by people who would sooner continue doing what has been done to maintain an agreed-upon illusion than do anything meaningful or worthwhile. The few who do try and make a change for the better are usually rewarded for their efforts with death, demotion, or public shaming.

Perhaps the two examples that illustrate these points the best are "stat juking" and Hamsterdam. Characters like Cedric Daniels, Bunny Colvin, and Tommy Carcetti often used the phrase "juking the stats" to refer to the practice of manipulating police crime statistics to make it appear as if the police department were effective, when in reality, no positive change had actually occurred. Constantly arresting corner dealers makes it look like many dealers are being taken off the street, but for every dealer that is taken off the streets (usually to be released quickly), two more take his place. Because the crime statistics don't account for this factor, this kind of police work, which focuses on quick, short-term tactics, has come to dominate the city, and most police officers know this. The way to get promoted is to have the best stats, which causes the crime situation to actually become worse. No one tries to make a difference by building a case against the kingpins (except for Daniels and his team, who place a wiretap on one of Baltimore's most powerful drug lords, hence the series title). Daniels and Colvin (both high-ranking police officers), and Carcetti (a politician) dislike the practice, but are basically forced to stick with it for various reasons. Daniels and Colvin face retribution for not keeping good stats. Carcetti attempts to change the police department's way of thinking, but he is constrained by his own political aspirations, and when push comes to shove, he chooses his own future over actually making a difference and keeping his campaign promises.

Hamsterdam embodies the idea that those who try to make a difference for the better ultimately pay a high price for their good intentions and initiative. Colvin had the crazy idea that the police were supposed to protect the people rather than wage war against drug dealers. He theorized that one reason people no longer trust the police is that, in a culture in which crime is treated as a war, the innocent bystanders are inevitably casualties of the war; if the police's mission is to defeat the enemy (drug dealers), then the enemy will exact retribution upon those in their midst who give aid to the police. In addition, because crime is treated as a war, the police use harsh tactics to defeat the drug dealers, which can spill over and affect citizens (example: Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski, a police officer who would eventually redeem himself for this horrific act, blinded a young boy when the boy refused to answer his questions). The citizens are so afraid of the drug dealers that the incentive to give information to the police, having a safer community, is outweighed by fear of what will happen to them and anger against the police for the tactics they use. So Colvin tried to make his district safe for the citizens again and engender trust for the police, whose job it would be to serve and protect, rather than bust heads. Thus, Hamsterdam was born.

Through Hamsterdam, Colvin essentially legalized drugs in his district (the name came from one drug dealer's mispronunciation of "Amsterdam"). Colvin found blocks comprised of vacant houses, tied markers around their boundaries, and had his officers round up all the drug dealers they could find and deposit them in those areas, known as "free zones." Colvin then told the dealers that they would be free to openly sell drugs in the free zones as long as they refrained from using violence and forced buyers to use the drugs there as well (by telling them that anyone leaving with drugs would be arrested). Anyone caught selling/using drugs outside the free zone would get busted and ruin things for everyone else, as Colvin would immediately close down the free zones and arrest all remaining dealers/users. There were two effects: First, the free zones became even bigger hellholes than they already were, as they were populated by nothing but junkies and dealers. Second, the rest of Colvin's district saw a vast reduction in crime. Actual reductions, not false reductions due to manipulated statistics. People started to lose their fear of living there and began trusting the police. Colvin achieved his goal.

But everything came crashing down when the rest of the police department and city hall learned about what had happened. Despite the overall positive effect that Hamsterdam had upon Colvin's district, it was only seen as a horrible (and certainly illegal) action of a rogue police commander. To endorse Hamsterdam would be political suicide and would probably lead to a substantial loss in federal and state funding. So Colvin was forced to retire. But not only that, his superiors in the department blackmailed him into doing so at a lower rank, and thus causing him to receive a lower pension. And if that weren't enough, one superior went the extra step by informing Colvin's new employer of his role in Hamsterdam, thus causing Colvin to lose his new job before starting.

The Wire is a very cynical and pessimistic show, but it is also an extremely intelligent show. All actions have consequences, and there is no such thing as a happy ending, but not because of the cynicism. It's because things never end. When an investigation comes to a close, there is fallout; arresting one person, even a kingpin, simply opens the way for someone to take the arrested person's place. And the end of an investigation does not mean that the person who is arrested will be convicted.

Up next: Social studies...