This time, after a brief obligatory discussion of current events, Daniel and Jack take one of their periodic detours into film discussion to talk about David Fincher's 2010 movie The Social Network about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, and thus of so many of our current problems (not that the film gets that). Links/Notes: Our old podcast about Zodiac, at Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/44059681 Behind the Bastards 3-part episode on Mark Zuckerberg: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-mark-zuckerberg-the-worst-30417725/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-two-mark-zuckerberg-the-worst-30423810/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-three-mark-zuckerberg-the-worst-30429682/
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to each white nationalists, white supremacists, and
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And here we are again with another I don't speak German.
It's episode 72 this time.
And, well, Daniel, hello!
How are you?
Just waiting for Joe Biden to be inaugurated.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was going to say, how's everything over in the coup-frighted states of Trump?
Razor-sharp satire over here on IDSG.
That is a gag nearly worthy of Cody Johnston.
It's nearly as good, yeah.
See, Cody Johnson would have just gone with it, and then, like, it would have been funny because Cody Johnson could clearly have written a better joke, but chose not to.
As opposed to us, who just can't, and then just don't.
But I think Cody really just kind of gets along by pretending he can't write.
Pretending he can write a better joke and then chooses not to.
I think that's, really, we're onto you, Cody.
That's the sign.
That's right, yeah.
Whereas I have the advantage of actually not being able to.
So really, you're more talented than Cody Johnson, I think, is where we're landing.
I think that's the point.
I find that a little implausible.
In all modesty.
Yeah, so Episode 72, and yeah, we're waiting for things to sort themselves out, I suppose, aren't we?
After the big event?
We're waiting for the Trump lawsuits to fizzle out and the coup to fizzle out, I suppose.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's funny, like, last week we recorded our Trump Loses episode, and my thought was, This is going to kind of go nowhere.
It's going to kind of be nothing.
And my feeling is that like most of Twitter is kind of on pins and needles.
At least kind of lefty Twitter, like the people that I'm in contact with really seem to be really worried about this, that Trump is going to manage something, that the Republicans are going to do something.
And I'm not saying don't be worried, but I don't think the thing to worry about is that Donald Trump will be in office in January 2021.
No, no.
Mass violence in the streets.
I think people are very understandably worried about underestimating the potential disaster, aren't they?
Right.
Well, I feel like there is, there is this kind of like Trump's gonna pull it out again, like he's gonna do something, like nothing ever sticks to this guy.
And, you know, I think there's a lot of kind of wishy-washy you can interpret some of the statements that Republican leaders like, you know, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham's going kind of all in, like pushing for Trump, like, no, do your thing, man, you're gonna win in the end.
And certain parts of right-wing media, I mean, there really is this kind of bifurcation in right-wing media around this.
But The people with like law degrees who are in positions of power are kind of treating this as like, yes, Donald Trump can wear his dirty diaper if he chooses to.
We're just going to deal with the mess when he decides to, you know, stop throwing this tantrum.
I don't see this as like kind of a huge huge issue In terms of like the Republican leadership is not really giving this guy any rope.
They're kind of like saying they're Hedging their bets a bit sure, but yeah everybody with any amount of legal knowledge, which I'm not a lawyer but I know enough about like kind of the history of these kind of lawsuits and this kind of like recount stuff and be like You don't come back from behind from like 10,000 votes.
It just doesn't happen.
Like the voting systems are not that inaccurate.
Like it's just Irrational.
So, um, you know.
Yeah.
And he doesn't have any support from the military and doesn't have any support from, you know, kind of, you know, the National Guard or whatever.
Like, if we saw, like, military service members kind of stepping up behind him and saying, like, we will defend the President of the United States against all comers or something like that, that's when it becomes worrisome.
Well, we actually kind of saw the opposite of that, didn't we?
I think the Joint Chiefs actually made a statement, one of them anyway, made a statement, you know, we'll defend the Constitution, which is kind of, fuck off Trump!
Which is actually, like, exactly what you would expect these guys to be.
Like, I mean, granted they have their own weird idiosyncratic kind of view of the Constitution, and defending the Constitution means defending Republican values, but that's not about defending Donald Trump.
What I think we ran into last week was the Republican Party is done with Donald Trump, and they will usher him out the door.
Maybe they'll pat his ass on the way out or whatever, but it's done.
It's done.
Please don't prove me wrong.
I would not like to be proven wrong on this, but I don't think this is as worrisome as some people think it is.
I admit that I'm not like...
you know, super expert on interpreting these people, but I've been following American politics for a while.
And like, I just don't see this as being like the, the, the huge deal.
I think, I think the Republicans are signaling they want him out.
And if the Republicans want him out, he's going to be out.
That's the, he's going to be out.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And none of that is to say that it couldn't have been a huge deal if the election had gone slightly tighter or that, you know, that there won't be very ill effects in American politics because of what Trump is trying to do or any of that, you know, we, We can stipulate all that.
We just don't think Trump's going to stay in office.
It's just not happening.
I think that ultimately what the Republicans are doing right now is they're essentially casting doubt on the idea of mail-in ballots.
Not in the sense of defending Trump, but in the sense of crushing the idea that we can have mail-in ballots in the future.
They're poisoning the well for 2024 and 2028, or even 2022.
Absolutely, yeah.
Because mail-in ballots are bad for Republicans.
Right, and expansion of the franchise is a problem for Republicans.
That's kind of the more big-picture thing.
They're not thinking in terms of, we have to keep Trump in.
If Mitch McConnell keeps the Senate, which It's possible that the two runoff elections run the way we want them to, and there's a 50-50, which is broken by Kamala Harris as VP and therefore President of the Senate.
It's possible that that happens.
But even then, there are some moderate Democrats who will vote with Republicans on anything that's even remotely trying to do something positive.
So, you know, like, but it very much doesn't look like Mitch McConnell's going to keep control of the Senate, in which case, like, everything is dead until at least 2022 regardless, and more likely 2024 or 2026.
It's really nice that you can really only, if you want to make positive change in this country, you have to have an overwhelming landslide election about every 10 years, in which case you get about 18 months to do anything remotely positive.
At the end of which, everything switches back the other way, and all your gains get lost.
That's the Sisyphean task it is to work within the American electoral system.
Democracy inspiring.
Yeah.
No, I mean, the story of Trump and the Republicans was always kind of, you know, oh, God, no.
And then, oh, OK, we have to work with this guy.
How do we use him?
Flail, flail, flail.
Oh, right.
We figured out how to use him.
And now it's right.
He's outlived his usefulness.
So we dump him.
That's that's clearly what's happening.
Right.
Yeah.
No, he's done.
You know, I mean, it is like for, you know, and I, you know, as someone who has a deep respect for sex workers and would not normally use this metaphor, but It's the sort of thing that Trump himself has, you know, allegedly so often done the pump and dump thing with the sex workers in his life.
And it does seem fairly apropos that the Republican Party is essentially
Used him and abused him like they're done with them and some of those stuff I mean there is the sort of hypothesis that you know some of the Moving things around within the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice is ultimately He's trying to set up some kind of arms deal with one of the like Saudi oil princes so that they will pay his They will pay off his debts to Deutsche Bank so that he doesn't go to prison in three years when his taxes are due which
That seems like the fitting epitaph to the Trump presidency, honestly.
Yeah, yeah.
There is a delightful chance that he might end up in prison and or ruined.
We can only hope, can't we?
Right.
Well, not even like ruined and in prison, but just in the sense of his parting shot is essentially to set up this Some kind of unbreakable deal in which the UAE gets like some huge amount of arms, you know, to create more chaos in Middle East and North Africa for the sheer goal of just making sure that Donald Trump actually is able to pay his taxes in a few years.
That just feels so very, you know, the last four years to me that I think that's more likely than, you know, like some, you know, giant vanguardist movement trying to, you know, save Donald Trump from leaving office, you know, some kind of like, overt civil war between factions on january 20th or whatever like that doesn't seem like i think he's going to make the deal and i think ultimately he's going to sulk out and uh like declare victory in some way and um that'll be that so you know yeah yeah
it'll be like coriolanus leaving rome but without the grandeur um yeah so uh i mean apart from anything else the number of americans who think he won is is according to surveys anyway it's quite small you know he's got his far be it from me to downplay the the danger of uh of of his loyal base you know but that i mean he's not he's basically not fooling anyone you know so yeah Right, I mean, well, I think that there's a, I mean, man, there's so much we could get into on this.
Well, the thing about the people that believe him, they don't actually believe him, they just don't care.
They want him in power whether he won or not, that's the thing, isn't it?
Well, I think the like, it's stolen from me thing.
I think that that's going to be like kind of the core of the Republican base for a long time.
It's also important that he has like 95% approval among Republicans.
So he's going to be a, if he chooses to be, he will be a force within Republican politics for a long time.
So whether whoever kind of comes out to be the standard bearer in 2024 wants to, you know, has to like kiss the Trump ring or whatever, like that's very much up in the air at this point.
You know, I still think the likelihood that he, you know, does some kind of Trump TV, probably with One American News, and maybe with, you know, like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson by his side, is fairly likely.
Although Tucker kind of stabbed him in the back, didn't he?
Tucker came out and said, it's not, you know, we didn't win.
I think a lot of these guys are, I mean, I don't know, there's a lot of hemming and hawing, you know, so we'll see.
Yeah, but American fascism now has a stab-in-the-back myth.
Isn't that lovely?
I mean, to add to all the stab-in-the-back myths it already had.
Right.
I have been thinking a little bit about what a parliamentary system in the US would be like, and as much as we kind of complain about the Electoral College, rightfully so, if you gave me the choice between getting rid of the EC or getting rid of the Senate, I would choose the Senate.
In a heartbeat.
Like, it's terrible as the Electoral College is.
The Senate is far, far worse.
Ideally, we get rid of both.
But it does kind of amuse me, the idea of having a House of Representatives, and then an executive figure.
Like, a House that's very cognizant of the will of the people and is replaced every two years, and then some executive figure.
It's kind of a more—moving towards more of a parliamentary system.
Because ultimately, a lot of the structural problem, even if you accept bourgeois democracy, Well, the structural problem is just that, like, nothing can get done because we have a bicameral legislature, and the Senate will just, like, put a full stop on everything, and it is, like, just kind of structurally 100%, like, you know, dedicated towards Republican dominance, except in years when you get, like, this massive wave of support, in which case you get, like, two extra seats.
It's like, you know, so, you know.
Anyway.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
So moving on from our current nightmare back, I suppose, to at least one of the roots of our current nightmare.
Yeah.
One of the very clear roots of our current nightmare.
Yes.
Yeah, this episode is going to be another one of our periodic film discussion episodes where we stray ever so slightly from our main topic, which is, of course, talking about what terrible people say to each other when they think the rest of us aren't listening, to instead talk about a movie from 2010, I believe, 10 years ago now, fucking hell, called The Social Network, directed by David Fincher, written by Aaron Sorkin.
And it's the story, it stars Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake, bizarrely, and a few other people, including a cameo from... There was definitely going to be an answer around that point.
Yeah, doing fairly well, but then, you know, Sean Parker's not a particularly complex character to play.
And including a cameo, I suppose, from a heartbreakingly young Rooney Mara.
The social network is the story of... And Dakota Johnson, who would go on to be in Fifty Shades of Grey.
I didn't notice her.
Who is she?
She's the young woman who... She's Amelia Ritter.
She's the young woman who introduces Sean Parker to the concept of Facebook.
Oh, is that... She apparently plays the trombone.
That's...
I didn't recognize her.
She's the woman that Aaron Sorkin wrote into the script in her pants so as to make a point about sexist men.
So this is the story of... I apologize.
She's the one with the fine ass.
And we know that because she's almost written to the script as she has a fine ass.
That's pretty much what's on display here.
That's right, yeah.
The point of that scene is to tell us that Sean Parker is a misogynist asshole.
But it's written so that we spend most of the scene staring directly at, I now discover, Dakota Johnson's bottom.
So, another triumph for Meryl Streep in there.
With the word Stanford written across it.
Which is important for plot reasons, I assure you.
Yeah.
It's brilliant scriptwriting.
But this is, as I've now been trying to say for quite some time, for the people who don't know this because they've been living in a cave, it's the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the foundation of Facebook.
And the attendant lawsuits, acrimonious lawsuits, etc.
So, yeah, why are we talking about this, Daniel?
Well, partly just because I didn't see it until recently.
I had meant to see it in theaters when it came out and just never kind of got around to it.
I really liked the original teaser trailer which had the... and it is funny like what 2010 versus 2020 were like in that like I saw the teaser trailer which had these sort of like choral version of Radiohead's Creep and
Alongside kind of images from Facebook and this kind of ideas like the social networking like fad the social network Like it's kind of changed the world and like look at what a connected world we live in and yet It's kind of this like, you know, it comes with its dark side, etc, etc And I always thought that was a really like interesting trailer an interesting choice and I wanted to see the film I was a I've kind of been an on again off again fan of David Fincher I think you and I have talked in the back channel and I've always I
Well, we've done podcasts about two David Fincher movies.
We have, yeah.
We've done Fight Club on this podcast, and we've done Zodiac in another forum.
This is just increasing our reach.
We're just going to transition into becoming a movie podcast.
But only about David Fincher properties.
That's the one thing.
Oh God.
I'll probably put that old episode that we did about Zodiac up on my Patreon, actually, if people want to hear that.
Sure.
Yeah, no, no, yeah, no.
Please, feel free.
It's a good episode.
I'm very happy with that episode, honestly.
So, yeah, people should Tune into your Patreon and listen to us talk about Zodiac.
I find myself, I'm kind of a fan of the Mindhunter TV series.
It's a series, particularly season two, I have some serious reservations about.
But I find that I really like the aesthetic, and even when I find it problematic, I find it interesting.
And I find Fincher's later period style kind of interesting, although I haven't seen a lot of his later movies.
I have yet to see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I have yet to see Gone Girl, and some of the other things.
But I saw this- They're both really bad.
Yeah, well, that's why I haven't seen them, right?
But I saw this and thought, watching it for the first time and thinking,
There's some really I feel like you and I might have an interesting conversation about it And then I sort of forced you to watch it, and I don't know how interesting this conversation is going to be but I guess I guess the kind of the entry point to this for me in terms of that kind of discussing it on the show is the degree to which social networking has both facilitated
The fascist organizing, but has also facilitated our ability to oppose them in a way.
Like, so many of these chuds, like, you find their old Facebook profiles, and that's kind of how doxing works, right?
You know?
Like, the first thing you want to do if you become a Nazi is to immediately delete every, like, mention of yourself on Facebook.
That you can possibly dig down because that's kind of a that's a very easy way that people could find you Okay noted for future reference.
Yeah, please no fascist fascist.
Don't listen to the last 30 seconds of this, you know They all kind of know that I mean it is it is but it is it is kind of a thing And so they all create these like fake Facebook profiles and they kind of go on and they do you know all sorts of things I mean, you know, we talked about like the the Whitmer kidnapping stuff and all that was literally
Planned on Facebook live all these militia groups who haven't learned the lesson the like overt Nazis have learned are literally sitting under their real names and like posting death threats on Facebook and then they get their shit kicked in by either anti-fascists or or you know the feds and so um And and this is like a very like new world.
I feel like I mean, you know, one of the things that's Astonishing.
It was astonishing to me when I first saw the trailer at the time in 2010 was, you know, we're talking about this world of like 2004, which feels like ancient history.
You know, we see these guys like, oh, I get I get on the Facebook, on my laptop, like they don't like this pre smartphone.
And even 2010 was sort of the beginning of the smartphone era, right?
Um, and now we've just kind of moved so much further along this path and the technology has changed and I feel like there are a lot of people listening to the show who are in their, you know, 20s who may not even remember like a world before Facebook in this like weird way, right?
And yet it's like this such a such a slick kind of foundational thing.
That sort of creates this, and I don't know, like, that's kind of why I wanted us to kind of do this, and maybe that feels, you know, ill-thought-out, or maybe like a little bit nebulous, but I thought it would be kind of an interesting conversation.
In part because the movie is actually quite bad at telling the story of the history of Facebook, and I don't know how far you've looked into any of this, but we should definitely discuss that if you have.
I really haven't looked into it at all and I don't know very much about this.
I know sort of the generalities.
I know that Mark Zuckerberg essentially screwed several people in the process of setting up this website and it started from unsavoury motives and that he's gone on to be mountainishly irresponsible and caused havoc essentially in many different parts of the world through... Go on.
Well, we can link to the Behind the Bastards episode about, like, the genocides that Facebook has engendered.
We don't have to cover that.
Robert Evans, friend of the pod, has done that for us.
Yet again, yeah.
But yeah, like, we're just following in Robert Evans's wake, you know, ultimately.
That's all this podcast is.
But now what I found, you know, doing kind of the due diligence on this and kind of looking into the history of the podcast, like there are kind of the history of the movie and the history is the the movie is built on a book written by this guy, Ben Mesrich. like there are kind of the history of the movie Now, Ben Mesrich, you probably don't know, but he kind of came to fame by writing a book called Bringing Down the House, the unstudied story of six MIT students who took Vegas for millions.
This got made into a movie a year or two later called 21, which in which all of the East Asian kids who were MIT students who got really good at playing card games and who won a bunch of money in Las Vegas got turned into Lily White kids who did a much more which in which all of the East Asian kids who were MIT students who got really but
Bringing Down the House is very well known for not just the movie taking liberties with the story in the book, but the book being almost entirely fictionalized.
And if I tell you that Ben Mezrich has written, and I counted from his list of works on Wikipedia, 14 books since that one was published 18 years ago, if I tell you that, then you may understand the amount of research and diligence that goes into the writing of these books.
And you may get the sense that perhaps Ben Mezrich writing The Accidental Billionaires, which became the basis of The Social Network, Was telling a fucking lie.
Right.
You might get that sense.
I do get that sense, yeah.
Yeah, so the two sort of like motivating things that you kind of get out of the film in terms of like Mark Zuckerberg's, the reason he created Facebook was there's this girl, Erica Albright, who rejected him and who is, I don't know, like we can talk about what you think her motivation or his motivation around her is, I've seen people kind of say that they think that, you know, he was obsessed with her and in love with her and he did all this out of love for her.
I interpret, like, the version in the movie to be something like he was obsessed with her because she rejected him and he was obsessed with retaining her as an object as opposed to her as a person um i don't know we can talk about that but that's the first motivation and the second i don't i don't know that that's what the movie thinks but that's how i would read somebody behaving like that sure sure so So what do you think the movie thinks about Erica Albright?
Or about Zuckerberg's feelings towards Albright?
See, for me, there's a very key line towards the end when the young woman who is a... I'm not quite sure what she is.
She's a trainee lawyer or something?
She's a young lawyer.
She's Rashida Jones, who is great in Parks and Recreation.
Anyway, continue.
I have no idea if she's a real person or not, I assume not.
Right.
She's been sort of having these unofficial conversations with Mark Zuckerberg off at the side, in the margins of these ongoing legal proceedings.
And at the very end, she says to him, she gives a line of dialogue, a sort of parting shot as she's leaving.
The line of dialogue is, you're not an asshole, Mark.
You're just trying so hard to be an asshole.
Now, I find that line of dialogue completely inexplicable.
I have no idea what that's even supposed to mean.
What could that even mean?
And, I mean, apart from anything else, if you're the sort of person that acts like an asshole because you're trying to be an asshole, then Guess what that makes you, you know?
It's like that old thing about, you know, twelve people sit down at a table, eleven of them are Nazis, what's the twelfth one?
A Nazi.
That's Tim Poole.
Tim Poole is the twelfth one.
Tim Poole, yeah, that's what I should have said.
The twelfth one is Baldy McDickface.
But yeah, I just find that line of dialogue completely inexplicable and Aaron Sorkin is obviously convinced that it's terribly meaningful because it's like the moment when the film kind of gives you its It's thesis statement just before it ends.
And I think that's just meaningless bullshit.
And I think it's like that kind of faux clever that Sorkin is like really good at.
Is that like him like creating here?
No, you're not an asshole.
You're just really trying so hard to be.
And yet, like everything that we've seen from Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, and I think in a very fine performance, I think he Got an Academy Award nomination for it.
You and I sometimes disagree on whether we agree performances are good, but I like Jesse Eisenberg in this.
I think he's doing the job he's asked to do.
He is a complete asshole from the beginning to the end of the film.
But it's clear to me that the film doesn't think that, or at least the film thinks it's more complicated than that in some way.
So I think the film is asking us with that final shot where he's asked to friend Erica on Facebook, you know, irony of ironies, and he's refreshing the page to see if she's responded yet.
We're meant to see something sad in that.
We're meant to see yearning of the perpetual outsider, the geek that never fit in, that wanted to.
You know, I don't think the movie's quite saying that he's a victim and he's sympathetic, and if only Erica had given him a chance, everything would have been fine.
I don't think it's actually saying that.
But I think it is kind of saying that, kind of under its breath, you know?
No, no, no, it is.
It's rejecting that, but also showing us that at the same time.
It's trying to have its cake and eat it.
So, the question of Erica...
As I say, my interpretation of somebody who would act like that to her, about her, and then still be fixated on her years later, it would be what you said.
It would be, you know, this one got away from my control.
This one rejected me.
This one made me feel bad.
I want to control it.
I want to, you know, I want to own it after all.
I want to win in the end.
But I'm not convinced that the film shares that analysis.
I think the film kind of depicts it, but also disavows it.
Well, I feel like there's a kind of a differentiation here between sort of like writing and direction in a way and that like I feel like Sorkin has a particular angle he's kind of taking on this material and Fincher through his kind of like heartless direction.
Um, sort of sort of brings it in sort of a slightly different direction.
I feel like Sorkin is wanting to tell us that Mark Zuckerberg is kind of this cool guy doing cool things who maybe like fucked some people over, but those people like were mostly assholes anyway.
And he's kind of bringing in Rashida Jones, his character, um, who is named, sorry, we will, uh, we will name her if I can, uh, find the, uh, you know, look at me, uh, completely unprepared.
Marilyn Delpy is the character's name, and I have no idea if she was a real lawyer here, but Rashida Jones was Quincy Jones's daughter, believe it or not.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, yeah.
She does her job.
She is incredibly charming.
She comes in.
And she, her whole job is to humanize Mark Zuckerberg, to treat him, you know, to make him a person in the eyes of the audience, because she's the one, like, kind of very sympathetic person during this kind of like series of lawsuits, etc, etc.
But, you know, in the end, what she gives is, you know, again, the summation of like, you're not an asshole, you're just trying really hard to be one.
And if we treat that as authorial voice, if we treat Sorkin's line as, this is the point of the film, then the film doesn't work at all.
Because the film has been giving you one version of Mark Zuckerberg, and then suddenly we're being told at the end, like, no, no, no, you've just been trying to be an asshole this whole time.
And yet we've seen no sense of empathy from Zuckerberg at any time.
During any point in this film like it's completely is completely self-focused is completely built on like building this thing which is we know now is going to be this kind of terrible thing for the world but even if we took Facebook is this like kind of towering achievement of technology that's going to.
Bring in this utopia or whatever.
Zuckerberg is still kind of like behaving completely as an asshole.
So, you know, I think the best way to read that is like Rashida Jones is just, you know, cementing with him and it's actually a counterpoint to the actual, you know, like kind of point of the film.
I kind of do death of the author in this moment just to sort of like salvage any slight bit of respect I might have had for the film.
It's interesting that in previous discussions about Fincher movies, we've talked about this exact thing.
We've talked about the intention of the writers and the intention of the directors, or the approach, the respective approaches.
Respective approaches, I should say, not reproaches, unless there's controversy in the making of a film I don't know about.
That as well, I'm sure.
But we've talked about tonal mismatches between writing and direction with Fincher movies before.
And, funnily enough, I do think the film does kind of join up the trying to be an asshole thing because a recurrent theme throughout the movie is the idea that Mark is jealous, particularly of Eduardo.
There's this hint all the way through that Mark, you know, he fucks over Eduardo in the end.
Fundamentally because he's jealous of Eduardo, because Eduardo fit in.
Eduardo was the guy that got into the club, whatever it was, I don't know, the stupid Harvard club.
And that he's, you know, Mark is, because the film does this fucking dreadful trite thing where it kind of makes Sean Parker Mark's shoulder devil and Eduardo into Mark's shoulder angel, you know?
And, of course, he gets led astray.
That's what the film seems to say.
He gets led astray by Sean Parker.
You know, Eduardo represents the brighter path of capitalism and privilege.
And Sean Parker is the bad version.
As bad as Sean Parker is, just to be clear.
Um, if you remember, there was a story a few years ago of a, uh, adventure tech, uh, guy who, um, had a wedding in a Redwood forest and destroyed various, um, trees, like protected trees in this forest.
And then like paid a fine of $20,000 or whatever as a way of like saying, Oh, I'm sorry.
I oopsied and destroyed it.
some like priceless trees, some priceless piece of nature.
Well, that was Sean Parker.
That was Sean Parker.
Yeah.
He wants to have a Lord of the Rings themed wedding.
So he Isengards a forest.
Right.
Exactly.
Very apropos in a weird way.
I like that.
I like that.
It's also really interesting that he starts Napster back in the late 90s, I think 1999, as this sort of like, oh, we're going to file share.
This is sort of like ideologically libertarian.
We're all going to break the backs of the record companies.
And then a few years later, he essentially starts investing in Spotify, which completely crushes the backs of the actual musical artists by giving them a penance as opposed to what they would have gotten from an album sale, and gives all that money to the record companies instead.
And so, like, you know...
I think the record companies are really happy about where they ended up, you know, 20 years down the line, as opposed to where they thought they were going to be in 2002.
Yeah, it turns out that the people who owned the Capitol won that battle in the end, you know.
There's even a line in which he says, hey, you want to buy a tower of records, you know, to Eduardo.
When Eduardo's like, hey, we need to monetize this and kind of do a thing.
And Eduardo is seeing this kind of like the thing of the past.
And it's like, well, you lost your lawsuit, right?
That's sort of Eduardo's thing.
And Sean Parker kind of gives the answer, like, well, yeah, but do you want to buy a record company?
And, you know, in the context of the film, it's sort of portrayed as, like, well, I won some kind of ideological or technological battle.
I made something cool that people are going to like.
But really what happened was, like, we just, like, crushed all the middlemen and gave all the money to the people who were already at the top.
So, yeah.
You can listen to I Don't Speak German on Spotify, by the way.
Please, I mean, you know, hey, whatever.
We don't make any money off of, I mean, you know, like subscribe to my Patreon, support me directly.
No record executive gets any money from my Patreon, for sure.
I wonder if they found a way to monetize us on Spotify.
That would be interesting.
It may very well be that there's more money being made by the record executives or by Spotify by monetizing whatever ads they're showing to people than we make based on our Patreon donations.
That would be a, that would, that would be horrifying.
But anyway, so, uh, so, uh, just to get back to the kind of very beginning, like sort of the focus of, I mean, I love, I love how kind of having this like kind of, kind of, uh, uh, freewheeling conversation. I love how kind of having this like kind of, But there are kind of two basic things that the film tells us that Mark Zuckerberg was doing when he created Facebook.
And those two things were getting back at Erica Albright, and like he's kind of obsessed with her, As a person or as a partner or as an object or whatever.
And the other thing was he really wanted to get into a final club and prove his worth as like a person in terms of like kind of getting out there in terms of larger society.
And there are two things that you learn universally by understanding anything about Mark Zuckerberg when he was 19 years old at Harvard in January 2004.
And those two things were, he had no interest at all in getting into a final club.
There was not, in any sense, he didn't give a shit.
The other thing was, not only did Erica Albright not exist, but the woman who becomes his wife, Priscilla Chan, he met during his sophomore year at Harvard.
And who is now, who is currently his wife, 16 years later, and who has been his partner during the whole time.
Guess who is not in the film?
Priscilla Chan.
Which tells you a lot about the way the film treats women, just without even seeing the film.
That she's not in the film, you know.
Yeah.
Well, the women that are in the film aren't in the film, you know.
Right, yeah.
Well, the other thing is that this woman, Erica Albright, or this girl Erica Albright, and I mean, Ruby Mara does a great job, I think, in her performance there.
It's a very thankless role, but she does a lot with it.
This woman does not exist.
I didn't know that, but I guessed it.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, so the thing that really kind of, I think the thing that kind of sinks me in the film and the thing that I really enjoy on an aesthetic level is that kind of first 20 minutes or so when he's like kind of designing face mesh and kind of doing the like the coding and downloading pictures and sort of like that whole like it's, it's this very hacker aesthetic which Frankly, it brings me back to my teenage years in a weird way.
I was never going to ever design Facebook.
I'm not that good at it, but if you look at the images of Jesse Eisenberg downloading pictures from the various house Facebooks at the beginning of the film, And then you look at my two-monitor setup where I'm downloading Nazi podcasts.
They look very similar.
I kind of had this moment where I was re-watching the film on my phone, like sitting on my laptop, while downloading Nazi shit, and I was kind of looking over and going like, oh god.
I feel really embarrassed right now.
It was a personal moment.
I think you're doing yourself a heavy disservice, to be honest.
Well, granted that there's a lot more social utility in archiving the things that terrible people say versus, you know, downloading photos from various college houses so that you can design a website that pits them against each other.
Granted, the moral authority of the two The two objects are very different.
But I did kind of have a moment of self-realization in the sense of like, maybe part of why I like this film is that I kind of just recognize a certain personality type.
Anyway, I did not go to Harvard.
I do not know how to do the systems problems that he does in the film.
I'm not a computer scientist.
That's not what I do for a living.
I learned very early in my life that I was not a coder and moved on and did chemistry instead.
But, you know, anyway.
But Erica Albright, so a lot of the text of the LiveJournal post that he's posting at the beginning of the film are actually real.
They're actually taken from his actual LiveJournal, and it's all kind of documented in the original book and in some other places.
It's hard to find the actual text.
I don't think that the full LiveJournal has been archived anywhere, but one of the few names that's changed is this name, Erica Albright.
And in the original text, the name was Jessica Alona.
And it does say Jessica Alona is a bitch.
And then he goes on to talk about farm animals and he needs to get his mind off fur, et cetera, et cetera.
Jessica Alona has never been publicly identified as a person.
We don't have a name to connect to her.
No journalist has ever tracked her down.
I don't know to what degree people have tried to track her down.
But there is a website.
This woman, Jessica Alona, has a website where she kind of talks about herself and her history with Facebook.
And the story of the real... It's another Shakespeare parallel.
It's like the Dark Lady.
Who is she?
Or Beethoven's Immortal Beloved.
No, no, no, just assuming that because we don't have any confirmation of this, because we don't have any kind of like connection to like, because none of this is confirmed, and we don't know who she is, and we don't have any kind of like biographical details.
I kind of have to take her at her word at this point.
I will link to her website at this point.
She makes some claims that I find improbable.
Like she claims that the Facebook logo is like because her name is Jessica Alona and like the J and the A is sort of like an upside down F and then like the A is like sort of an F and an upside down J. Like she kind of does this thing of like saying that The Facebook logo itself is kind of like based on her avatar at the time, which I find really improbable.
Like, I don't believe that.
And if you read her kind of rantings, it does kind of feel like someone who is maybe exaggerating and maybe has like a skewed perspective on things.
And this is why I can't like kind of get on board with this.
But if you kind of squint through to look at the big picture, it's I was a friend of Mark Zuckerberg's in 2003.
I was the one who told him that, like, the Facebook.com and Facebook.com were open registration.
I told him that you could register those for cheap.
I helped him, you know, at the time I was helping him do the thing.
We were friends until 2005 and then she's very vague about like they had a falling out in 2005 and she wanted to be completely disconnected from it and she stayed off of social media for years and years until now she has this like Jessica Alona profile which is like I was the unsung kind of hero of Facebook, et cetera, et cetera.
And I would love for someone in like tech journalism to find this woman and talk.
I would love to actually get like the real story of this, but it has nothing to do with the story of Erica Albright in the film, right?
No.
And the idea that, like, there was this female friend of Mark Zuckerberg who was hanging around and who was helping him out at the time.
And also, like, a lot of his friends at the time kind of say he was gregarious.
He was a friendly guy.
Like, he's not like this kind of, like, stuck-in-the-mud loner sitting off in the corner kind of coding all the time and being, like, really, quote-unquote, autistic.
You know, disaffected.
Like, the portrayal of Jesse Eisenberg's performance doesn't really give you who Mark Zuckerberg was in 2004 or whatever.
There is this kind of deep disconnection there as well.
And so, the film is sort of like, it's a tone piece about what it might have been to create a social network in 2004 as opposed to an actual history of Facebook, despite the fact that it tells It uses the actual incidents of the history of Facebook in very real ways.
I found a really amusing anecdote where Zuckerberg saw the film and said, they did so much research, every shirt and hoodie that I wear in the film is one that I actually owned at the time.
Which just tells you everything you need to know about what attention to detail means for David Fincher, which is we tracked down photos of Mark Zuckerberg.
We spent months tracking down every item of clothing that he might have worn, and we meticulously matched it to what we could do in the film so that there was never a time in which he's wearing a hoodie that he wouldn't have actually worn in real life.
But we also completely rewrote the history of Facebook and mangled the motivations of everything that actually happened in the actual history to tell a different story.
This really is incredibly reminiscent of our Zodiac conversation.
It is, it is, isn't it?
Yeah, hey, sign on to Jack's Patreon for that one, I guess.
And really, the old podcast, Wrong With Authority, generally.
Listeners, before we started this, we used to do a podcast with the two of us and a couple of other amazing guys.
It was a podcast about movies and movies about history and the history they're about.
And this is bringing back strong memories of doing Wrong With Authority.
And I think that was part of the impulse, was like, hey, let's kind of do the Wrong With Authority episode, you know, about this.
Because, you know, I find it fascinating, but also, like, again, I do think that all of this kind of connects through it.
Because when we're talking about this sort of, like, online birth of fashions, and we're talking about sort of the birth of the alt-right, we're talking about these kind of insular communities, we're talking about people who
Live on social media and there is this kind of early again that early like first 20 minutes in which The big the big Final club is bringing in all the girls on buses who are all gonna like stand on tables and get naked Which I Have seen I did kind of look through and I found like interviews with people who are members of the club who are like Oh, no, no.
No, it wasn't like that.
It was I mean, it wasn't quite that raunchy Like, you know, and the girls weren't that hot.
Like, that's sort of the angle that these guys gave.
Which is, yeah, no, congratulations, guys.
You've convinced me.
Clearly, you've convinced me.
But we get this kind of parallel between this kind of, like, party that these guys are having Yeah.
in the kind of like the exclusive club, the secret seminar, if you will.
Yeah.
And then versus, you know, Zuckerberg kind of sitting in his dorm room and coding this website.
And then like the people who aren't invited in the club get to do the hot or not thing with the FaceMash website.
Right.
And this idea that we've kind of – that the people who feel left out of the exclusive club gravitate to the internet in some way.
It's the tragedy of the incels, isn't it?
It is, it is.
They're excluded from the hot women dancing on tables, so they have no choice but to be misogynists on the internet.
Right, right.
They can't be misogynist in real life, because they don't have the wealth and access to power.
And so instead, they're going to be misogynist on the internet.
And, you know, like, yeah, like, there is a real kind of, like, kind of, social connection there there is a real kind of through line to the way that like social media has sort of like i don't want to say created but has exacerbated this kind of problem because i was on the internet in the 90s i was on the internet before social media existed and all this stuff happened but it was definitely sort of
uh you know driven into overdrive by the process of um social media sort of making it happen and we know from history that like GoiTalkLive, you know, those guys met each other on Facebook.
They met each other in, you know, internet discussion forums about politics.
The guys from the Daily Shoah, they all met each other in Facebook discussion groups about politics on Facebook.
Like, you know, we spent a lot of time thinking about Twitter.
At least I spent a lot of time kind of thinking.
I spent a lot of my time on Twitter, you know, in my free time when I choose to be on Twitter.
That's my kind of chosen, like, social media site.
And we give it like an outsized importance to its actual size.
Like Twitter is worth something like $4 billion or something like that.
Like that's its valuation.
It's a massive, massive company, but Facebook is worth like $550 billion, right?
Yeah.
Facebook is like over a hundred times as large as Twitter in terms of its valuation, in terms of its like actual stock share, in terms of its actual user base.
Twitter is important because like every journalist has to be on Twitter in terms of like sharing their content.
In terms of like having that, they're part of like the conversation, right?
But Facebook reaches everybody.
There are more Facebook accounts than there are people on the planet.
And so whatever happens at Facebook is by its nature important, right?
And so I find, again, the film is interesting because like the way it's kind of portrayed, like the lawsuits happening in like kind of 2007 and 2008, where it's like, we are building things.
That you and no one in your ilk could ever imagine, right?
And then, like, kind of in the background, I'm like, we created Farmville, motherfucker!
We've got a game where your grandma can go on and build a farm!
And we're going to make you sit there and play it for 12 hours a day, because you can't stop playing it.
That's slightly anachronistic.
Farmville wasn't a thing until about 2010.
But like, you know, it is like, you know, the film kind of sells.
Facebook is like, we have this exclusivity.
We're cool.
We're doing this thing.
We're building something that no one has ever built.
And then just a few years later, it becomes, yeah, this is just the next version of America online.
And also, like, creates genocides around the world.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the film gives Zuckerberg that little speech where he says, you know, 10% of my brain is sat at this table being bored and the other 90% is off doing things that none of you are capable of.
He gets his version of the Alec Baldwin, I am God speech from whatever that movie's called.
Is it a stream measures?
Oh, God, what was that movie called?
Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman, 90s.
I saw it at the cinema.
It's a good thriller.
It's, um, Malice.
Is that the one where he's at Malice?
Malice, that's it.
Extreme measures is a Hugh Grant, I think.
Yeah, that's the one where Gene Hackman is sort of harvesting organs from homeless people or something.
We really are going to transition into a movie podcast, aren't we?
Anyway, yeah.
I mean, I'm just agreeing with you.
You know, I mean, Twitter dominates the media conversation so much, because as you say, all the media people are on Twitter because they kind of have to be, and it's that sphere.
And of course, therefore, Twitter gets this enormous outsized importance attached to it by everyone, in fairness.
But, you know, the media will respond to criticism.
Media figures will say something transphobic and they'll respond to the criticism they get as Stalinist censorship, you know, because that's where they live.
But for every... and there's, don't get me wrong, there's plenty of foolish people on the left on Twitter.
But, you know, for every foolish person on the left... I'm one of them.
It's fine.
Well, yeah, me too.
But for every one of us foolish lefty on Twitter, there's a hundred grandmas on Facebook learning about conspiracy theories.
I mean, QAnon is on Twitter, but it's not like QAnon was...
Like it became a thing on Facebook.
And that's because of like specific policies that Facebook has enabled.
You know, one of the things we haven't mentioned is Peter Thiel did not make his billions off of PayPal.
Like he got wealthy off of PayPal.
He made millions off of PayPal.
He became a venture capitalist off of PayPal.
And then he invested in Facebook.
In 2005.
And that's where he became a billionaire.
And even now, he is as important as Peter Thiel is in terms of like, because he is so ideologically motivated, and because he is so powerful in the venture capital space, and because he has positioned himself as being uniquely evil, right?
He's worth a few billion dollars, I think like two or three billion dollars, whereas Zuckerberg is worth A hundred and, like, a hundred billion, a hundred and three billion dollars?
Insanely, yeah.
Right.
Liz is, like, I think the fourth wealthiest person on the planet, right?
And that's purely based on, like, kind of maintaining, you know, kind of ownership of Facebook.
Yeah.
And, yeah, I mean, it's, it is, like, a lot of these guys kind of got on early on and just kind of became billionaires.
You know, ironically enough, The most recent book that this guy, Mezrich, who wrote the book that became The Social Network, his most recent book, and I'm going to, sorry, just check the title here, make sure, it's called Bitcoin Billionaires, A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption.
It was published in 2019.
It's the story of the Winklevoss twins who got deeply into Bitcoin.
The Winklevi, yeah.
And finally became billionaires off of their investment in Bitcoin.
Oh good, I'm so relieved, you know, because the film made me.
And there's even an article I found in like Forbes or something that he wrote, that Mezrich wrote, where he's like, I just saw the Winklevi as, you know, as like the school bullies, as like the kids chasing Daniel LaRusso around in The Karate Kid.
And they're just the 80s bullies because that's the kid I was and that's all I ever saw at that time.
But now I see what actual heroes they really were at the time because they ended up investing in Bitcoin, which is going to be the great new thing of the future.
And please go read David Girard to show you how terrible all that is.
Yeah.
Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain.
Brilliant book.
David Girard.
Oh yes, oh yes.
I've invited him to come on the show, but he won't with Sully himself with our name apparently.
He's better than we are, he's better than we are.
He's been busy.
He published his second book, Libra Shrugged, which I have not read yet, but I assume is at least as good as Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain.
Go check that out.
Anyway, so, you know, basically in case you were worried about the fate of any like actual person who's in the social network who may not have like kind of gotten their due and may have like kind of gone on to, you know, they all became billionaires.
As I say, I'm very relieved to hear that the Winklevi made their blockchain billions because I was worried about them, you know, because they come off really, really badly in the film.
Poor, poor guys.
They all became venture capitalists.
They all founded hedge funds.
They all founded companies.
They are all working in Silicon Valley.
They all have more money than you and I will never see in our lives.
They are all actively engaged in destroying the world.
They're destroying the world.
Yeah, they're destroying the world.
It is funny how like, you know, like Eduardo Saverin, like you kind of read about him and it's kind of like, oh, he's got like philanthropic things and he's doing like kind of a work sharing, you know, company.
You know, like it's kind of like, well, you know, on the scale of these things, it's probably fine.
But then, you know, somewhere in the background, it's like, and then there's this army of Chinese coders who is like being like whipped from behind, you know, or something, you know, there's, there's some evil being perpetuated somewhere, you know, because it's fucking Silicon Valley.
So, you know, like, yeah.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah.
There is, I mean, without the slightest bit of sympathy for the Winklevai, there is kind of a really unpleasant recurring noise in the movie which kind of, it kind of repeatedly mocks them, or rather the characters in the film that represent them, for sort of always coming in second, you know?
You have this entire sequence where they're rowing, you get this long boring sequence where you watch a rowing match for some fucking reason, Which was not actually a real thing that happened, by the way.
That was completely invented for the film.
Anyway, continue.
Okay.
Fine.
Again, you've broken my heart.
I really wish that was true.
I actually would like the Winklevide didn't always get second place.
It would, in my nerdy, beta, gamma, cuck heart, it would really make me happy to know that the Winklevide always lost.
This is the thing.
Because if that's true about the real ones, good.
I think that's funny.
And I hope it burns them.
I really do.
Because fuck those people.
And everybody liked them.
But in the movie, it's unpleasant.
Because you get this thing where they come in second in their rowing race, and they come in second when it comes to Facebook.
And then you get this very dry, ironic thing with the little blurb at the end where it tells you what happened after the movie ends.
And they say they went to the Olympics.
Pause.
And then the next bit of text comes up, they came in sixth, you know, and it's like, I mean, as I say, you know, Winklevii, fuck them.
I don't care.
I hope they're miserable about always losing.
But in the movie, it just takes on this horrible sort of smug gloating quality of, you know, these people are just losers.
They're just born losers, you know.
And I find the whole sort of winners versus losers view of life just inherently repellent.
So when the movie does that I just say, oh fuck you.
Well, it is very much in that like, kind of the thing that we talked about with, with Eric Weinstein, where he sees himself as kind of like kept out of the secret halls of society, because there's a secret seminar that he didn't get to go to.
And like, he secretly, you know, kind of part in like, despite the fact that I was 29 years old, and I got a PhD from Harvard, and I got hired by A hedge fund to be a money manager and I became a quant early in the day and now I work for you know one of the person who I at least publicly proclaimed to be one of the most brilliant people on earth managing money.
And, like, meet billionaires and hobnob with all these important people, but, like, I'm not, like, actually recognized as one of the best people in the world.
And therefore, shouldn't you feel bad for me?
Right?
You know?
Yeah.
And it is kind of the same phenomenon.
And that's so, like, kind of the Harvard thing.
Like, I don't know.
Like, we spend Particularly if you look into, like, people arguing about, like, IQ.
I mean, I've been re-listening to some old Sam Harris stuff recently for various reasons, and I re-listened to, like, his Charles Murray interview, and I re-listened to the Ezra Klein interview, just to kind of wet my whistle, to just refresh myself on that, right?
And, you know, we spend so much time in this conversation talking about, like, Well, Ivy League colleges, like, how do they do their admissions, and should they base it on, like, this pure meritocracy, or should, like, you know, and this whole kind of woke culture, and woke scolds, and all this, you know, sort of like, you know, affirmative action, and, you know, equity versus equality, and all this kind of, like, nonsense, right?
All this entire thing.
When the actual answer is, the problem is, That there are universities at which admission to that university basically gives you access to this world in which you will be enormously more successful in life than if you get into the next tier or third tier or fourth tier university, right?
Yeah, just by existing from then on, yeah.
I went to a directional state university, and I have a STEM degree, which is a perfectly fine degree.
I did a lot of work to get this degree.
I am very happy with my education.
I have no doubt that if I went to Harvard or MIT, I would have learned more about chemistry in my four years in university than I learned at directional state university.
But not to the degree that, like, going to Harvard or MIT means that I am suddenly on the fast track to grad school and a junior track, you know, university job.
You don't, like, you don't graduate from Harvard because you're literally, like, the single best person in the world at the thing that you're doing.
You get into Harvard because you lucked into getting into Harvard for a variety of reasons, and then access to the resources at Harvard gives you this, like, huge leg up over, like, everyone else, ultimately.
And so the problem isn't we need to change the structure of Harvard so that it's admitting more people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The issue is we need to destroy the institution of Harvard and MIT and Princeton, etc., until those resources are more equally distributed among all of us.
And if that's not possible, if we can't distribute those resources, then we need to – I mean, Again, it's one of those things where I would, like, if you asked me how do you do admissions to Harvard, you take, like, the most, like, you take, like, the lowest Everybody who got a C- and above, you take the top 2,000 people in that middle grade.
You get a C- and higher, you sort everybody by that range, and then you just take all those people, and they will do a perfectly fine job running the country in 20 years, much more so than the super rich people who actually get into it now.
If we have to have a Harvard, that's the way I'd do it, is take the most mediocre students you can find.
That's the answer.
Yeah, no, again I want to emphasize I'm not sympathizing with the Winklevosses or anybody basically who feels hard done by from a position of privilege.
I just find that refrain in the movie just inherently repellent, this sort of gloating smugness about losing.
And it's another instance, I think, of the movie kind of wanting to have its cake and eat it, you know?
It wants to both disapprove of Mark Zuckerberg when he does things like that, when he fucks over his friend or fucks over the Winklevosses, but at the same time kind of go, yeah, but it's kind of cool, isn't it, when he does that?
Isn't it kind of cool?
Isn't he kind of cool?
It feels weird that it's kind of taking me until now to really kind of put you really kind of put this in words there is a there is a like revenge of the nerds kind of aspect yes and um yeah you know i assume you've seen revenge of the nerds at some point in your um in your life i've seen i know i've seen it once i have a very vague memory of it i kind of grew up It's kind of one of those, like, if you're an American poindexter, it is, it is kind of, if you were an American poindexter in the 80s and 90s, it was kind of part of your DNA, right?
You know?
And then to come back to it later, and it's like, there's a lot of rape in this.
And there's a lot, like, the, like, the nerds in this, the nerds, the quote-unquote nerds, are, like, deeply misogynistic and are, like, if anything, even worse than the fucking jocks, or at least, You know, kind of attractive and kind of cool and seem to be able to get laid based on the fact that people actually consent to having sex with them.
Women want to sleep with them, yeah.
Right.
As opposed to the nerds who are literally planting cameras and sharing them publicly and all that.
and all that sort of like nonsense.
But the film, but the social network definitely kind of engages in that same kind of thing.
It's like, well, yeah, you got in second because you aren't as cool as our Poindexter, as our Mark Zuckerberg over there, Jesse Eisenberg.
He's the real cool guy because he's designing Facebook.
And Zynga is going to want to give him a billion dollars one day.
It's going to be a thing.
It's going to be a thing.
We're going to do Farmville.
We're going to do Farmville.
We're going to create – we're going to do genocide in Myanmar.
Did the Winklevii ever do a genocide in Myanmar?
No, clearly not.
Clearly not.
No.
Clearly not.
No.
Yeah, because they might have been, you know, captains of the rowing team and jocks and good looking and everything.
But, you know, Mark was a nerd and girls didn't like him and he was all alone and he couldn't get into the club.
But he was so smart and he won in the end.
Yeah, it's really toxic.
I mean, it's been said before, but it's really fucking toxic, that stuff.
What's important is knowing Emacs.
If you know Emacs in college, that's the way that you know that you're awesome.
And you're a good person, ultimately.
Yeah, I mean, again, this feeds into so much of the incel kind of stuff, but also kind of the nerd stuff.
And look, I know Emacs.
Very related.
I spent some time learning Emacs a few years ago.
It's a thing.
I use Pyco.
Sorry, nerd talk here.
I use Pyco as my text editor of choice.
I don't even know what these words mean.
And the notes for this podcast are written in Gedit because I run Debian on my… Just granting my tiny bit of nerd cred that I get here, which is not a ton of nerd cred, but enough to be the guy.
But it is this phenomenon of... I don't know, there's a line from Ender's Game, which Jessica Alona describes as her favorite book on her website, but there's a line in which Ender Ender says to himself, he didn't like his brother Peter, who was the abusive older brother in that book.
He didn't like Peter's, or Bonzo's, it might have been Bonzo's method, the strong against the weak, but he also didn't like the smart against the stupid, which was Ender's thing, because he's the smartest kid who ever lived, according to the book.
And the book goes on to say, like, no, no, it's actually fine that Ender is the smartest kid.
Like, that's actually, he should win all the battles.
He should be the ruler of the world because, you know, he's the smartest.
Yeah.
But I remember being in high school and reading that and kind of thinking, like, no, look, the smart should actually, like, that's actually the way things should be.
You know, I'm smarter, and so therefore I should be in charge, you know, clearly.
And that's a really dangerous place to be, right?
That's a really dangerous...
Mm-hmm.
And that was absolutely given to me by the pop culture that I consumed, you know, when I was 15 or whatever.
Right.
And this film sells that version of reality.
And this film was made like 10 years ago, you know.
That sort of attitude, if you don't learn more about the world and grow up, that's how you get to the point where you're hanging on every word that, you know, from the from the Weinsteins and listening to Sam Harris's podcast and nodding along when they're talking about IQ.
That's how you get there.
Well, and you start to think, well, no, I have a high, you know, clearly I have a high IQ.
I know enough to know what an allele is and I can know what a, what a gene locus is.
And therefore, um, you know, I know all I need to know about biology and therefore clearly IQ is a valid concept.
And, you know, like it, it is just kind of like the way that it's kind of online discourse in this way that this kind of ideology festers.
And I think in some sense, and you can, I apologize.
You know, in some sense, The Socialist Project is saying, like, you're actually not that special.
Show some solidarity with the other people who, you know, toil and suffer and die with you.
And learn to be a better person by, you know, acknowledging your own weaknesses, because you do, you are not as special as you think you are, you know, like, and I feel like that's a lesson that, yeah, sorry to, I'm not trying to make like, this isn't like personal confession time, but that's a lesson I as a teenager had to learn, right?
I feel like that's the lesson that, again, the media kind of tries to teach us if you're that kind of kid, right?
And I feel like that's where a lot of the kind of online fascists kind of come from.
Yeah, no, totally.
And, you know, at a slightly lower register of evil, you know, I was... Ben Shapiro was having a sort of mini Twitter meltdown recently about... At a lower level of evil than my...
Battle with my own internal demons as a teenager is Ben Shapiro.
Thank you, Jack.
I appreciate that.
At a slightly lower level of evil than the fascists, Daniel.
Oh, okay, okay, okay.
Is of course what I meant.
Yeah, you know, there's this thing about forgiving student debt, and Ben, poor little Ben, he's having his sort of semi-meltdown online, and he tweeted something about how, oh, this is rewarding the aristocracy, you know, because... Right.
Loads of people have already paid their student debt off and you're going to let the next lot off.
That's like a break to the people who've already got money enough to be going to higher education and running up these debts in the first place.
And of course Ben, as usual, is nakedly, blatantly just an ideologue and a grifter.
What he's actually doing is perfectly clear.
And, you know, as I... He paid no attention, of course, but I tweeted back to him, you know, that's bullshit because making education non-financially ruinous is how you get rid, in principle anyway, I'm not saying the Biden administration is going to do this, sadly, but it's in principle how you get rid of educational aristocracies.
But it's that sort of elitism of Ben's defended and couched in terms of meritocracy and anti-elitism.
And this movie is soaked in that.
And I do agree with you that the sort of opposition to that is foundational to the moral aspect of socialism.
And it's not even just necessarily a moral thing, it's just pointing out that on a technical level, just the labour that is done just to physically keep the world going, it contributes more to the functioning of the planet and the continued survival and reproduction of human society.
Than, you know, the few people around who've got 250 plus IQs.
In the scheme of things, they don't contribute much value at all.
And there's a lovely Stephen Jay Gould quote, which I'm sure you're familiar with, which is, you know, it's something like... I'm less interested in the folds of Einstein's brain than in the brains that were of equal quality, that never got to become as prominent because they were like poor people in the Global South.
Which is a mangling of the quote, but I think the one you're reaching for.
That's it, yeah.
And Engles says something similar somewhere.
I've never been able to find it again.
I read it ages ago and I can't remember what text it's in, but Engles says something similar somewhere about how, you know, the Socialist Project isn't about promising that everybody is going to be a genius painter or a genius artist or a genius philosopher, but it's about saying that
Those people who can do that and in principle, you know That's probably a great deal more than than we're led to think should be able to whereas at the moment the state of the world You know, it's it stops people it takes potential away from people and I love that that is that is a very important aspect of my politics no, absolutely, and I would like to You kind of wrap up the episode I mean I I Paul I was hoping you would have like really like you would really like a
I hate this movie and we could like really get into a fire about this, but... Oh, I did.
I hated it.
But mostly I found it boring, to be honest.
Right, right.
Which is, you know, like hating it because you find it boring is a different thing than hating it because you've got a big list of notes to go through, which, you know, it's kind of like, you know, it's fine.
I think this is a worthwhile kind of change of pace a little bit.
But what I... kind of wrapping up the episode, what I find...
Interesting is like, like the problem, like the promise of Facebook, right?
Like when I joined Facebook, I joined Facebook and, um, I joined Facebook, sorry, giving away some personal details, which, you know, like, hey, come, I guess I'm going to get doxxed or whatever.
I joined Facebook in 2007 because this girl I met online in another space said, oh, I have photos of myself on Facebook, and if you join Facebook, then you can see them.
And I was like, oh, well, cool.
And then, so I got to join Facebook.
I thought you had to be a college student to join Facebook.
It's like, oh, no, no, you can just join now.
And I'm like, okay, cool.
And this is, you know, summer 2007.
And, uh, so my very first photos on Facebook were like, you know, like kind of dating profile pics, right?
Of like, you know, like this is, this is how we use social media now.
Um, and apparently also like the Harvard connection or the ConnectU, which it became, which the Winklevoss twins were working on, was much more of a dating site than it was kind of a social media site.
That's a polite way of putting it, I believe.
The movie also kind of really like kind of, you know, like plays with this idea of like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg had this clear idea about what he wanted Facebook to be.
And like Facebook has clearly been a mishmash of things throughout its entire history.
And the whole thing was just kind of connecting people.
But that's why I joined Facebook in 2007.
And like I had, you know, a long period of, you know, really enjoying my time on Facebook.
It's, you know, you join and you're like, oh, I can meet other – I can hook up with other people who were in my high school.
I can catch up with people who, you know, I haven't seen in years.
People in my hometown who I really cared about when I was 15 years old.
And maybe, you know, maybe we still have things in common and you connect with people.
And there was a real kind of like at least an implied promise of that, right?
And that's not ersatz.
There's a real kind of thing there of like, hey, wouldn't it be nice if we had a service that would let us do that and to actually like connect us in like kind of a real and authentic way?
And a lot of the problem with these kind of social media sites, and this isn't unique to Facebook, although it's most prominent on Facebook, but Twitter is the same way, is that it's then built into this kind of algorithmic structure which encourages this intense engagement.
You know, the kind of the endless scroll in which you just can't ever look away because there's always something else going on, and it engages our kind of worst impulses because it's built towards this idea of engagement so that we can give advertisers more information so that we can then – so that Facebook can and it engages our kind of worst impulses because it's built towards this idea of engagement so Yeah, and sell our data, yeah.
The other thing is that Facebook completely destroyed, I mean Facebook
Primarily but also Google and Twitter is that a bit like Facebook and Google really first and second, you know big first and then like kind of lower second Completely destroyed the news industry as we knew it because suddenly you couldn't sell ads on In a newspaper, you can sell ads on a website Everything went through Facebook, you know, they did the whole pivot to video thing and so like every like website was trying to do video for a long time and
They fired a bunch of people who were writing text and suddenly hired a bunch of video producers, and it turned out they were lying about the amount of revenue they were actually getting through the video.
Again, see the Behind the Bastards triple episode for the lowdown on this, as with many other things.
Exactly, exactly.
And Robert Evans went through that personally.
He was personally involved with that.
Cody Johnston, who I was giving some shade to at the beginning of the episode.
Uh, literally, they started their current, you know, YouTube show after Cracked.com was crushed by the fact that they had put all this money into pivoting to video when they had a perfectly workable business model except Facebook was just fucking lying to them, you know?
And so Facebook has had like enormous like impact upon like our media environment and our social environment, etc.
And it's because it's like this black box because it's fed by this kind of capitalist impulse.
But if we were to, you know, put these things under democratic control and say we all get to sort of have a say and it's all kind of this open source thing and we all get to have like some kind of like communal way of judging what should and shouldn't be here and how we deal with these problems.
Social media could be a net positive thing, right?
Like, it could be, like, a really interesting idea.
And we have seen, like, Mastodon and some of the things that have, like, certainly, you know, kind of less negative aspects.
I mean, you know, one of the things, one of the jokes that I see people make is, like, you know, Myspace, you know, Tom never asked for your information.
Tom just wanted to be your first friend.
He was fine if you took him off his list.
He didn't care.
And then ultimately what he did was he made a couple billion dollars and then he sold out to Yahoo and then he just fucked off and he's off doing his own thing and he doesn't care anymore.
And you know what?
Be like Tom.
When that's the good version, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Then I think there is some truth there.
I think there is some, like, there is a reality there.
Mark Zuckerberg, like, the version we see in the film is like, I was spurned by this girl, and I was spurned by these clubs, and so suddenly I needed to, like, I wanted to be better than all of them.
But the real version was, he had this kind of idealistic idea, and he wanted to connect the world, and he wanted to be in charge of it.
And he wants to be fucking Caesar, which that's why he cuts his hair the way he does, in case, like, he literally cuts his hair the way he does, because he wants to be Caesar.
I think we've talked about this on the show before.
No, he actually, if you look at him, he actually looks like, you know, classical busts of Caligula.
He really does.
And he does that intentionally.
That's what he wants to look like.
Deliberately, yeah.
And so, he wants to rule the world, ultimately.
We need to take that from him.
Stop him!
Because he's getting there.
This is the problem.
Yeah, he's very close to it.
And not just Zuckerberg, but Bezos and all these other guys.
We need to destroy the system that makes this possible, etc.
But the idea of social media isn't a bad one.
It's just It needs to be divorced from the capitalist impulse.
There are big debates in Marxist theory about whether capitalist technology is just inherently capitalist and not usable by socialism, or whether, in the more traditional view, you can take over the development of the productive forces, the technology and the machinery, etc., developed by capitalism, and you can take it over and immediately adapt it to To socialism, you know, if you establish socialism.
And these are interesting, complex debates, and as usual, you know, the truth falls somewhere in the middle.
But yeah, I mean, one of the, you know, there's a lot of, there's a lot, I mean, because social media is sort of now trying, in many ways, half-heartedly and ham-fistedly to do something about some of the negative effects, like the proliferation of fascism and cult and conspiracy theory stuff, like QAnon.
It's trying in places to do something about that, and there's a lot of debate about, you know, is it okay to deprive people of their Twitter account, their Facebook account, etc., now that these things are starting, social media is starting to look like public utility?
And it's always been kind of obvious to me that, well, the basic solution here, obviously it's complicated and there would be complexities, but the basic solution here is to say, yes, these things are now utilities, and we do with them what we do with utilities in my worldview, which is we basically nationalise them.
Not meaning, in the old sense, but we put them under collective democratic workers' control, you know, democratic control of users as well.
And, you know, this is one of the great things about, potentially great things about late capitalism, is the concentration and centralization of capital is leading to all these massively centralized things like Amazon and Walmart and Facebook, etc.
We just take them.
We just take them over and take them under our collective democratic control.
We've got huge problems instantly solved.
Amazon is the one that I really want to just take.
I feel like that's the one where any reasonable society would look at Amazon and go, great system you have there.
What if we don't make people pee in bottles and pay people more and just make that democratically controlled?
And that's just a part of the postal system now.
I've joked about this in the past, and obviously it's a joke, so it's a lot more complicated than this.
But basically, you take Amazon and you put it under collective democratic control of workers and users, and instead of money, people buy things and sell things with labour hours.
You've basically got socialism.
Yeah, no, agreed.
Just take the top people.
Well, weird to say this in a podcast about Nazis.
The parasites, which I don't mean the Jews, I mean the capitalists.
Always mean the capitalists here.
Not the same thing.
You take the people at the top who aren't actually producing anything, who are just, quote unquote, making decisions.
You put those decisions in democratic control of the users and the people working there.
Amazon would be a lot better place for all of us who use it or don't.
And you buy something that took 10 labour hours to produce with 10 hours of labour that you contributed to society and the law of value is eliminated and great, capitalism's gone.
Thing of the past.
And then we can start decelerating growth that's literally destroying the planet's ability to sustain human life.
And wouldn't that be nice?
How many hours do I get for recording this podcast is the question?
Well, I mean, this is one of the things that we would collectively and democratically decide, but I would like to think that stuff like this would qualify as socially worthwhile.
You know, creative stuff like this would qualify as socially worthwhile work that society would say, yeah, this is worth however long it takes to do it.
Yeah, this is worth that many labor hours.
Great.
I'm a millionaire.
We're good.
Awesome.
It's fine.
Not really, sorry.
I'm trying to do a joke.
I don't mean that like, Jack was literally giving me the cross-eye.
I could see him, even though his camera isn't on.
He was about to get very angry at me.
So yeah, we should wrap up.
Yeah, because I'm a humorless dogmatist, as we know.
That's how we know you're a Marxist.
Exactly.
Yeah, same thing.
OK, so that was episode 72.
You know what's... 72 isn't cool.
You know what's cool?
73.
And that'll be the next episode.
And that will be, I think, the plan is for that to be the first of a... is it a two-part or a three-part about recently deceased Tom Metzger?
So here's the plan, and this is something that I think Jack and I have been kind of quietly hinting at from from for a while now is that I think this show is going to go biweekly by which I mean every other week unless unless I don't have a day job in which case it will go twice a week and And then you need to support me when that happens because, you know.
But the plan is to sort of like, I'd like to do some more writing and do some more thinking and spend some more time doing things that aren't following Nazis.
And we've been doing this, we've done 72, we'll have done like 75 or 76 episodes by the end of two years.
And I think that's a, you know, 76 out of 104 is a pretty good ratio, right?
Um, so, um, I think we need to go every other week just to make sure that the quality goes up.
But I think we're also going to try to do instead of doing like one hour episodes trying to do like an hour and a half to two hour episodes.
So.
Yeah, you still get kind of, you know, like, you know, we'll go more in depth.
But the plan is for the next two episodes to be Tom Metzger, who was the guy who founded the white Aryan resistance who recently died and who was the racist Nazi guy who.
Actually had black friends in the Louis Thoreau and the Nazis documentary and I think we're gonna start our first Tom Metzger episode talking about that documentary I've got to go dig through a bunch of archives and kind of like start planning But I think I think kind of starting with that that documentary is the way we're gonna we're gonna do this.
So Next week we're gonna start our next episode.
Pardon me.
Yeah, we're gonna start talking about Tom Metzger who One time interact with him on Twitter, basically as an attempt to intimidate me after I made fun of him.
And now he's dead.
So, you know, take of that as you will.
So it'll be our respectful obituary for... No, I'm gonna totally make fun of this guy.
He's a shithead, you know.
He is important because he is arguably I'm the very first person to share white nationalist literature on the internet, back in 1983 or 84.
Ah, so an internet pioneer, very much like Mark Zuckerberg.
I mean, in some ways more important than Mark Zuckerberg!
And that's actually, that's actually true.
So, um, uh, yeah.
Yeah.
So we're going to start talking about, uh, combat scare in the next episode.
And so this, this is a, this is an important one.
I've been kind of not knowing how to get it.
I still don't know quite how to approach this.
And that's why we haven't done it till now, but he is a hugely important figure who has just been completely off the radar for the last decade for complicated reasons.
But he is a really important figure and we will talk about him in the next couple episodes, so look forward to that.
Excellent, yeah.
And as Daniel says, we're going to go fortnightly, bi-weekly if you want to put it that way.
I don't think in practice it's going to amount to that much less material because a lot of the time we produce like three episodes a month anyway.
And I think you will have noticed that the episode length has been creeping up lately.
We've been doing more two hour, hour 45 episodes.
So I think if we do like two episodes a month and they're now, you know, as a standard they're an hour and a half long at least, I don't think you're going to actually be getting much less than you're getting now.
And it is going to allow us to pace ourselves a bit, and Daniel obviously does most of the actual work, so he needs that.
It also allows us to jump in with brief 30-minute episodes of a news brief, if we need to do that, and not to make that an official episode.
So we're looking to change the format.
I also really am trying to start writing and probably publishing, do some kind of blog or a sub-stack or something, starting in the new year.
But to kind of put this more on paper and to expand to a larger audience.
So it's not that I'm trying to step away from the work.
It's more that I'm trying to sort of like control, more than I'm trying to kind of focus in different directions going forward.
So believe me, I'm not leaving this work.
This is kind of the passion at this point.
And I think everyone who listens, who shares, etc., and in particular the Patreon supporters who, you know, without you, I don't think this thing would keep happening.
So thank you to both mine and Jack's Patreon supporters.
Absolutely, yeah.
In a difficult year for everybody, you guys have been our heroes.
But also, as Daniel says, people that just listen and talk about us and recommend us and share us.
That is great, too.
OK, that was Episode 72.
Thanks for listening once again, and we'll see you fairly soon for Episode 73.
See, I'm good at maths.
Bye!
That was I Don't Speak German.
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