. . . June
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Zuckerberg: Evil Genius Or Brilliant Classmate?:
Rebecca Davis O'Brien, The Daily Beast
As the movie The Social Network rolls toward theaters, Rebecca O’Brien writes about Zuckerberg’s reputation around Harvard, his fraternity nickname, and why Facebook was such a hit.
Hollywood biopics are often the inverse of political autobiographies: heavy on sex and drugs, light on weighty questions of morality and leadership. If the script leaked online and the trailers are any indication, the new movie The Social Network, which purports to tell the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, will play like a conversation between Hamlet and Joe Francis, as secretly recorded by Richard Nixon. It is paranoid, sleazy, and grim.
As the film tells it, during the winter of 2004, Zuckerberg, a curmudgeonly, craven genius, bristling against authority and embittered by the culture of wealth and privilege that excludes him, creates a social network to impress vapid women and the callow preppies of Harvard’s exclusive, all-male final clubs. The film’s Zuckerberg, as played by Jesse Eisenberg, hates Harvard students, disdains fraternities, and answers to nobody. Zuckerberg, with a kind of mad scientist’s zeal, seeks popularity, profit, and revenge. In the words of the film’s ubiquitous ad campaign, he is “Poet. Prophet. Billionaire.”
That completely misses the point. Zuckerberg is, indisputably, a savant. He has also, by most accounts, broken agreements and rules. After talking to one of Facebook’s co-founders and students who were at Harvard when Zuckerberg and I were classmates, there’s one outstanding question about the creator and CEO of the 500 million-member website that today is valued at somewhere between $24 billion and $32 billion. Zuckberg was an antiauthoritarian who, through some combination of outmaneuvering, technical wizardry, and intuition, became the guy in charge. But can we trust the antiauthoritarian once he becomes the authority?
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