Naomi Fry: This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Nomi Fry.
Vinson Cunningham: I'm Vinson Cunningham. And
Alex Schwartz: I'm Alex Schwartz. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Well, welcome back everyone to Movie Month on Critics at Large.
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah.
Naomi Fry: the popcorn.
Alex Schwartz: Please do, and take a comfortable seat, and think back with me, if you would, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, to 2010. Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4.
Naomi Fry: Were we ever so young? That's
Alex Schwartz: what I'm wondering.
Vinson Cunningham: Four, wow.
Alex Schwartz: "Time Magazine's" Person of the Year was not a celebrity or influential political leader, it was Mark Zuckerberg.
Naomi Fry: Which seemed hopeful at the time- Yeah ... is the point
Alex Schwartz: The Arab Spring movement was about to start, setting off a new wave of optimism about the internet And almost exactly 16 years ago to this day, The Social Network opened in theaters
        CLIP TK: The Social Network
The Social Network was about a young Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, who wound up creating one of the most influential websites of all time.
And for us in this room, and widely out of this room, it has become an iconic text. Why do you think, guys?
Naomi Fry: First of all, it's just a really good movie.
Alex Schwartz: the best.
Naomi Fry: It's the best. It's, like, a g- great script, great performances, just, like, snappy as fuck, uh, but also, like, propulsive, but also just, like, rings really true, even though, of course, it does have that-- It's, you know, obviously written by Aaron Sorkin, directed by David Fincher.
Uh, it has that thing of, like, people don't talk like this exactly, you know what I mean? It's a sort of, like, 
Vinson Cunningham: Snappy, fast
Naomi Fry: Fast ... fast, you know, back and forth. But, but it, but rings true enough that it, like, really grabs you by the lapel, so to speak- ... and shakes you.
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. And I think just like given its setting and the sort of, um, handling of that setting, largely Harvard, it, it, it reaches kind of beyond itself and becomes a kind of parable about like the leadership class in this country, what it means to have merit, what it means to innovate, all these great things that I, I think it, it seemed at the time like a kind of generational portrait, not just a forensics of Mark Zuckerberg.
Alex Schwartz: I totally agree, Vinson. And yeah, it inaugurated a new genre of founder movie, where people became really interested in- Mm-hmm ... founders as a psychological profile, as a kind of hero to follow. Of course, and we'll talk more about this, the Zuckerberg of The Social Network is a fascinating figure, more anti-hero than hero, but unstoppable.
And Jesse Eisenberg in that role is, um, one of, one of the best performances, I think, of the century. So today we've got a follow-up, The Social Reckoning, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, and it finds Facebook and Zuck himself in a much darker era.
        CLIP TK: The Social Reckoning
What struck you guys about this new film as you watched it?
Vinson Cunningham: I mean, it, it, it does contain another really interesting portrayal, interpretation of Zuckerberg, this time by Jeremy Strong.
And it also, I think, shows in ways good and bad some of the exhaustion of the energy of the era that maybe began in the 2010s. You can see how in many different ways, maybe intended and unintended in this movie, um, a lot of that energy has been kinda sucked out of the room.
Alex Schwartz: it makes me think of the famous Zuckerberg quote, "Move fast and break things." In the first movie, you're seeing that in action at the very start, and here you're seeing the broken pieces.
Yes. So today we're gonna look at these two films which bookend this period of immense change for the tech industry and for all of us, and how we, the public, see it. We're tracing how founders went from being the heroes of these stories to the villains. Tech founders, I think it's fair to say, guys, have lost our trust at this point.
Yeah. And it's interesting to me that, as we'll discuss, the real hero of the social reckoning is certainly not Mark Zuckerberg, it's Frances Haugen, a whistleblower who reveals a lot of dark things happening inside the organization.
So my big question for us today is how, as a culture, we all see tech, and how we see this figure of the tech founder now, and what our relationship is to these people who produce and define the very culture that we live in. So that's today on Critics at Large, how Facebook disenchanted us
________________


Naomi Fry: Guys, do you remember joining Facebook? Tell me, what were your early days like on that fascinating platform?
Vinson Cunningham: I was at my friend Laura Wagman's house, two years after we graduated highschool, you know how Facebook started out in the Ivy Leagues I, I think- Yes and then moved a lo- So it, it took a while for it to reach my, uh, a small liberal arts college i- in New England. And, but I was back home at Laura's house and she was like, "I think you can join this right now." And I went to the-- I was at the computer at, uh, her parents' house on Riverside Drive, and I signed up for Facebook. The exclusivity roll out make it seem like a golden ticket, which was so strange. I don't think I had any really great hopes except to sort of like keep up with the Joneses.
Alex Schwartz: is a great hope. Yeah. Nomi, how about you?
Naomi Fry: I remember I was in the dropped out of grad school moment of my life at Johns Hopkins.
My schoolmate, Dan Stout, shout out Dan Stout. I haven't talked to him in like 20 years. However, he said, "I think you should join Facebook. You'll ke- you'll be able to keep up with people
Vinson Cunningham: that
Naomi Fry: don't see."
And I signed up, and, um, and it just went from there.
Like, remember the thing was like you could only talk about yourself in the third person?
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah.
Naomi Fry: Naomi Fry is,
Vinson Cunningham: is, is- Yeah ... is tired.
Alex Schwartz: Oh. Oh. 
Naomi Fry: Remember?
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. That was at least like the syntactic setup, yeah. Yeah.
Alex Schwartz: Ooh, you're bringing me back. 
Naomi Fry: Remember poking?
Alex Schwartz: Who could forget?
Naomi Fry: which I guess is a kinda cheeky way to get someone's attention.
Vinson Cunningham: "Hey."
Alex Schwartz: Sometimes you would poke each other back and forth for what felt like your whole life.
Naomi Fry: my God, yes. I, I, I, I did have one person I, I had that with for, like, years and it was, like, a running joke.
Alex Schwartz: Okay, so let's turn to the texts. Into that world in 2010 comes The Social Network, and it's actually, as a side note, very funny for me to realize how close it was to the founding of Facebook, because by the time The Social Network came out, Facebook was such a given of life that it's.. Now I'm like, "Oh yeah, of course, it was still pretty early in the whole thing," but 2010 felt very distinctive from 2004. The Social Network was directed by David Fincher. It was written by Aaron Sorkin. and we've each revisited the film for this occasion.
So tell me, critics, what were your impressions upon re-watching The Social Network? 
Vinson Cunningham: Well,
what Nomi said is just dead on. It's just Great. It is so, um, it's got a mood, a menace, a propulsion from scene one. That first scene being, I don't know, one of the great just like dialogue-driven, uh, explorations/revelations of character.
Um, Zuckerberg, as played by Jesse Eisenberg, talking to a young woman who's his girlfriend, her name's Erica? Yes. Erica
Alex Schwartz: Played by Rooney Mara. Great cameo
Naomi Fry: M- a young Rooney Mara.
Vinson Cunningham: And, you know, in his, uh, indelicate, blithe, arrogant way, totally insults her until she, um, breaks up with him, uh, in the middle of a conversation about his obsession about f- uh, final clubs at Harvard.
        CLIP TK: The Social Network
And, um, it just tells you everyth- it's the whole movie in miniature in certain ways. This hubristic, heedless, slightly kind of, um, clueless person, uh, juxtaposed against the power that he stands to gain and eventually does gain, um, and how that plays out in the social world, the social network.
I mean, it's just a brilliant opening scene.
Mm-hmm.
Um, so that's, that's, that was my big thing, just like, wow, what a movie. The other thing that it reminded me of, and I think it bears on, um, some of the rest of what we'll talk about, is how much the atmospherics of this movie, the slightly gray, um, sort of corporate mist of it, like how it looks, has been so influential in the, in the, in the, in the intervening years.
Like, everything on Netflix looks like this. If it's supposed to be slightly downbeat, it just looks totally gray. Um, and it has become a cliché, but I do think that David Fincher's sort of, uh, visual landscape for this movie is just so evocative. And, um, it's the first, it-- perhaps the first, but certainly, um, since then, the best application of this kind of palette.
I was just like, wow, man, what a not only good, but influential movie.
Naomi Fry: Yeah. That's, that's funny. I didn't really think about that, Vinson, but you saying this now, I mean, also the score that's, um, by the team of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which won an Oscar, which is a sort of like menacing electronic, very atmospheric score. It's a very
stylish,
Vinson Cunningham: 
Naomi Fry: endeavor, which is kind of like an interesting choice for a movie about, like, a grasping nerd. Yeah. You know what I mean? Because the way it-- The, the character of Zuckerberg It's like this absolutely entitled, uptight asshole, uh, who has enough arrogance to just say like, "I'm gonna reach for the stars." Yeah. You know, "And fuck you, fuck everyone else." But at the same time, there is a kind of, weird heart-rending quality. the need, the hunger, the lack of this character. And his-- he's rejected by women, and he's a kind of like proto-- not exactly an incel, but kind of like a proto-reject- Yeah ... who uses that sense of hurt to basically seek, seek revenge, you know? I mean, though it's of course not worded in these terms, it's, it's implied- Yeah ... in the movie. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. I th- this-- 
Alex Schwartz: I viscerally remember Going to see The Social Network in the theaters was such a powerful and awesome viewing experience for me because, I was living in Paris, I was out of college, um, and that first scene, Vincent, that you described, which sets this pace and this tone, it has the Sor- Sorkinian dialogue, the snappiness of it,  And I just felt like s- this movie is so American in a way that exhilarated me.  It is fast, it is loud, it is aggressive, it is unapologetic, One thing that strikes me about rewatching this movie is how much the movie is about betrayal and social bonds breaking and rupturing. The movie is structured around a s- a pair of civil lawsuits- Yeah that, um, you know, Z- Zuckerberg is being sued by the Winklevoss twins, played by Armie Hammer, who-
Naomi Fry: Great performance, by the
Alex Schwartz: Yeah, we gotta say it.
Naomi Fry: Gotta give it to
Alex Schwartz: Yeah. Um,And then another great performance by Andrew Garfield who is this kind of loyal, sweet co-founding figure, who Zuckerberg really steps on at e- every turn and ends up betraying in a pretty heartbreaking moment in the movie, who's also suing him. And so Zuckerberg is abrasive and aggressive in these situations in ways that really presaged what we would see from him, the actual person, at congressional testimony later when he became famous for being in these kinds of conflict-ridden situations. let's talk about the image of Mark Zuckerberg that's in this movie. What picture emerges of that character?
Naomi Fry: Uh, demon in training.
I mean,
I think, you know, if we're thinking about the more general attitude towards Zuckerberg vis a vis against the attitude towards tech in this movie, okay? I think it's a portrait of a person, okay? Mm-hmm. it's not yet a portrait, an indictment of kind of a larger attitude
of a,
of a tech founder, right?
Yeah. We see this person, this particular person, obviously very brilliant, um,
extremely ambitious,
Naomi Fry: who will stop at nothing. 
But that is his own story, and I don't know yet, I don't think yet that the attitudes that we will come to have over the ensuing 16 years, um, towards tech in general and the tech, the figure of the tech founder, it's not yet there. 
Alex Schwartz: I think it's a really interesting read- Mm-hmm ... because I see this as a warning already. Facebook was so high in its own supply when the company started to expand in the very early days at this idea of connection.
Zuckerberg became the person saying, "We're trying to connect the world." That's still something he's saying, and yet y- what I love in part about this movie is the anger and rage and amorality that you see to this character. He starts by creating something called facesmash which is a rating site available on Harvard for men to rate women’s appearances comparing one to the other, and he's trying to think even early in the movie, "What is a product that people need?" He's like a pusher. "What is a product that people need- Yeah ... that they won't turn away from?
Oh, they wanna know things about each other. They want the social cachet of putting themselves out there. They wanna show off who their connections are." So- I take what you're saying, Nomi, and I think you're right, but I do think it's still a very dark portrait of Zuckerberg and the product, and we get all the betrayals.
We get, um, this, this relentless need to expand, and we get the loneliness at the center. So even though, of course, this movie didn't say, "This is a platform that's going to enable genocides in Myanmar," for instance- Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm ... you, you still get a real sense that this is something that is not inherently good at all. 

The Social Network gave us an origin story for Facebook. In the social reckoning, we see how that story has played out. That’s in a minute on CAL from TNY. 
:: MIDROLL:: 
Alex Schwartz: Okay, we've been talking about The Social Network and the way that it mythologizes and complicates the founding of Facebook. 16 years have passed. And today, we are getting the modern companion piece, The Social Reckoning, a movie that was written and also directed by Aaron Sorkin.
And I just wanna say, for those who don't know this, that, um, it's not because of a falling out with David Fincher. David Fincher had an exclusive Netflix contract that, thank the heavens, he has decided not to renew. Mm-hmm. We're excited to have you back, David Fincher, from Netflix.
Um, Vinson, can you set the scene for us?
Vinson Cunningham: The Social Reckoning is set not unlike, um, The Social Network, along two separate but mutually implicated timelines. One of them is a kind of real-time scenario of Mark Zuckerberg being coached by his team, uh, to do congressional, testimony on the subject of, moderation, free speech, and let's just call it the relationship between, um, reality and falsity on the platform Facebook.
Uh, the other timeline, which sort of creeps up to the moment of this, practice session, is, the growing relationship between a journalist and his subject. Mm-hmm. Um, the subject,is Frances Haugen.
She works on the sort of civics-based group within Facebook that is supposed to be, monitoring the kind of, let's just call it the health of the user base. Um, a, a unit which we q- quickly come to see has its internal conflicts that cannot really be, synthesized because every step you take in favor of the users goes away from, you know, engagement, the great god of, um, the internal culture of Facebook at the time.
On the other hand, we have, uh, the Wall Street journalist, Jeff Horwitz, who is sort of really a politics journalist and is coming to understand the tech world through his engagement, um- the wall Street Journal with Francis Haugen. He's trying to learn Facebook as he conducts, uh, an ongoing investigation into what turns out to be the substance of the film, which is, the switch within Facebook, uh, in terms of how it measured engagement and what it, quote-unquote, "optimized for."
Instead of just trying to get likes, now it wants, a more holistic engagement, which happens, you know, through reshares or whatever. Like, it's, it's about how Facebook basically baked into its system a process of deep, ruinous, lasting, uh, radicalization. So the story is building within the Wall Street Journal, and the roof is falling in at Facebook headquarters
Alex Schwartz: Mm-hmm. Thank you, Vinson. Very well done. Beautifully done. And now, let's find out, did we like it?
Naomi Fry: Okay, okay, a couple things. First of all The Social Network, as we've all agreed, is a, it's a, it's a high bar. It's a high bar to reach 
because that movie was really great and defined an era in a way that was not only, um, uh, really, you know, defined it really well, but also the era, as again we've noted, was one of relative hope, right?
We were looking forward. Zuckerberg was Man of the Year. Um, Obama was in office. Um, social media hadn't yet destroyed the brains of like a full generation of, not, several generations. Merely half a generation. Merely half a generation, right. But we didn't know that yet- Yeah, yeah ... really, right? It was so early on. As you noted, Alex, it was like literally six years into Facebook, we had a biopic about the founder of
Alex Schwartz: Yeah, and also, yeah, I'll, I'll just, I'll just add, um, Nomi, I think one of the reasons that it was not seen as quite as destructive yet, and wasn't quite as destructive yet, was that most people did not yet have smartphones.
Naomi Fry: Yes. So absolutely, that's a great point. And so we were mere babes. Mere babes. Our, our brains clean as whistles. You know, relatively
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. And
Naomi Fry: now we come to this movie with our brains tainted, destroyed, simply heaving, uh, with, with, you know, gross like algorithmic information that has been pumped into the water at an accelerated pace, yeah, for, for, for, yeah, more than a, once again, more than a decade.
Right. And so we come to this already rotten to the core. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. It doesn't feel good. Mm-hmm. I'm not sitting down and being like, "I'm gonna feel good about this." So this is just kind of like a, an, an introduction, um, to say that it might not be a fair, um- That makes sense  equation to set up, let's say. That said, I don't think it's a very good movie so once again, as in The Social Network, there's an introductory set 
Mm-hmm. It's like the, the, the, the, the caption of it, the title card is White Girl Wasted, and we see this young-ish blonde who is clearly intoxicated, approached by two cops, uh, on the side of a highway. And they're like, "Ma'am, are you okay? And she films them.
They are both of color. She is not. She is white. And, uh, she in a very, is, in a very racist, you know, s- kind of like attacks them racistly. Yes. And I, it was a g- it was a good scene. I was like immediately inside I was like, "Oh, okay, we have this like-" Really good scene.
Really good scene,
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. Yeah.
Alex Schwartz: gonna upload this video to Facebook.
Naomi Fry: upload this video to Facebook. She's gonna
Alex Schwartz: "Say hello to the internet." Yes. Yeah. 
Naomi Fry: You're like, "Oh, what's gonna happen?" Oh, we Sorkin back. Like we have this, you know, really snappy back and forth. It rings of truth, even though it's kinda over the top, you know, those hallmarks of, of kind of like the Sorkin method. And I was like, "Ooh, we're back," you know? I was like, "Ooh, what's gonna happen now?" And then we kind of descend into kind of like slow procedural almost, or sort of like the snappiness is gone. It, it, the, there is an attempt to revive it by kind of having this like dialogue between who are the two main characters, which is the Jeff Horwitz character, the reporter from The Wall Street Journal, who was played by Jeremy Allen White, and the Frances Haugen character, the whistleblower, who was played by Mikey Madison. And so they have this sort of like- fake will they or won't they? I mean, you know, it's not really a will they or won't they, but it, you know, it's the sort of like energy of kind of like she nags him. He's like, you know... She's like, "You're an idiot. You don't understand." Everything is repeated a trillion times. Like, it feels very, very dragged out, and I hate to say it, the performances aren't that great. I, you know, I've watched clips of Frances Haugen, you know, in front of Congress, on 60 Minutes. This was a, like a self, the self-assured, really smart, really like truth to power woman who took the bull by the horns and like fucking like did the thing, you know?
And here we have Mikey Madison, God bless her, loved her in Anora, you know, stuttering, like, "Blah, blah," you know? Like, the whole thing is like really weird. I'm like, "Why is this like this?" 
        CLIP: The Social Reckoning
Meanwhile, Jeremy Allen White also,
Vinson Cunningham: like-
Naomi Fry: is he meant to play an idiot? Like, I, I mean, what is this thing? Like, it keeps like the, the ve- very kind of like obvious and un- unbelievable moments of like he knows nothing about tech. He couldn't use his GPS. He couldn't make it to the headquarters, like the SF headquarters of The Wall Street Journal. He needs everything explained to him a million times. I'm like, "What is he doing on this story?" Like, or maybe, okay, he's not a tech reporter, say, but it gets, everything gets hit on the head-
Vinson Cunningham: A lot of times
Naomi Fry: A lot of times
a trillion times. 
Like, it's okay. Obviously, like filmmakers take liberties. It doesn't need to be exactly this. But the way it turned out, I was like, This is like
so,
um, un- uncaptivating somehow. 
Alex Schwartz: Vincent, how was your experience?
Tell me.
Vinson Cunningham: Um, not dissimilar. let's face it, it's a drastic downgrade from David Fincher, the director, and Aaron Sorkin, the director. Um, you, you, you can see, in ways that are kind of interesting, Aaron Sorkin's roots in the theater- Mm ... much more manifestly than you could in The Social Network. Now, the deposition table becomes a kind of play in The Social Network, but is surrounded by real cinematic storytelling, mood setting, all the things that we've already talked about, ambiance. Whereas The Social Reckoning really is just two plays, the thing with the rehearsal and the thing with Horwitz and Hagen. And I do-- I did kind of read the relationship between, um, Hagen and Horwitz as a kind of, uh, the way they are styled by Sorkin, sort of, um,  dunderheaded tech journalist. Which really just for, uh, for me, it just really was like he had a sign on his forehead, did Jeremy Allen White, that said boomer. 
 It's like the one thing that really does trace these movies together, it's like somebody like Sorkin being like, "These people rule the world, and I still don't understand what they do." And that's kind of funny, right? Um- And kind of a continuation of many sort of, you know, problems that have been developing since the early part of the 20th century.
It's like, citizens at a increasingly distant remove from even comprehending the systems that frame and determine many vectors of the course of their life. Okay, I get that. Um, and there are other, like, really interesting things. 
how the, uh, an institution's actual, effects in this world can diverge radically from its stated mission. There's lots of great themes, you know? It's something that was written by a skillful playwright. But everything just kinda sits there on the screen. I thought Madison was good. I thought, I thought Bill Burr, who sort of portrays a former confidant of Zuckerberg, who's now in the room as a sort of conscience, like, "No, you need to, like, censor these ads," I thought he was really good.
Um- But other than those kind of lonely excitements on both sides of this film, I just, um, I thought that it needed more Zuckerberg.
Naomi Fry: What did you think of, of Jeremy Strong?
Vinson Cunningham: He did a,
he did a, a very competent Zuckerberg, and I thought that it was, it was funny in certain moments of, like, his obvious, social maladjustment.
 but I honestly thought that it needed more Zuckerberg because it needed more, in the same way that the first film, for me, was really kind of a, an examination of Harvard- Mm ... and how our, like, how a, a kind of American, a whole meritocratic elite is formed.
Naomi Fry: Meritocratic, quote,
Vinson Cunningham: Quote-unquote, right. But the quotes are not. Right. The ideology of meritocracy, whatever it means and how it is symbolized by Harvard. Um, there's this whole backdrop of, like, everybody that works at Fa- at Facebook is so smart. That's the one thing that never goes questioned in this movie. Mm-hmm.Okay, but show us Facebook and its leadership, and show us the, like, what conditions the rest of what we're seeing. Um, I think leaving Zuckerberg as just kind of a joke behind a desk does this film a disservice, What'd you think, Alex?
Alex Schwartz: Well, I agree with you guys for sure. It's not a great movie, And Vincent, everything you said about the feeling the loss of Fincher is quite true to me, 
and I have criticisms of my own, which I'll come to. That said, I enjoyed seeing it, and- Mm-hmm ... I-- In the way that you can go see a movie and it doesn't have to be a masterpiece, I actually found it to be fun and engaging to watch, That said, I think this movie exists for one reason. I think this movie sees itself as a form of whistleblowing. Yeah. Yes, it's repeating what is already out there- Mm-hmm ... and what is what is known. But it is, it does pack a punch to come across it again. And so what I was reminded of, which is the entire point of the movie, is that it didn't have to be this way. Mm. These choices that were made from the inside, the thing that they keep talking about, the movie goes by the, um, the acronym MSI for meaningful social interactions.
And basically, it means that Facebook made a choice at some point to prioritize not the number of likes that something got, but the n- amount of times that content was re-shared. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And that led people faster and faster and faster to divisive content And it made a conscious choice to reject safety precautions in order to do that, in order to make sure that people would stay hooked. 
Yeah. The kind of emotional climax of the movie is the situation room at Facebook on January 6th, where there are images of the rioters trampling over police officers, and Zuckerberg is being asked by his team to make a choice.
Do you shut him down? Meaning, do you shut down Donald Trump, who is on Facebook going live, And Zuckerberg, it all comes down to one guy. This complex tragic horrific political event coming down to one guy. But I wanna come back to the Zuckerberg portrayal, 'cause I wanna get a little bit deeper Into him Sorkin has bent over backwards to say this is an anti-hero, it's not a villain. No, this is a villain
Naomi Fry: It's an absolute villain.
Alex Schwartz: plays a villain who has kind of no other life than to expand and dominate. I like Strong's performance. I didn't think it gave a complex image of this man at all particularly, 
if there was something I would've wished for a little more in the Strong performance, it's, um, something of the Kendall Roy ridiculousness that Zuckerberg absolutely has.
Like, I could see actually even Kendall Roy, the character who Strong plays so amazingly on the show "Succession."
Vinson Cunningham: some intersections
Alex Schwartz: I think he ... I, I could imagine him taking inspiration from Zuckerberg. The effort at coolness that Zuckerberg sometimes exerts to the most pathetic ends. I’m thinking for instance of even to say these words gives me a chill of horror, at the Meta connect event in 2024, imagine that people, I I'm looking right now at my computer at a picture of Mark Zuckerberg 
And he's wearing this black T-shirt that says in, you know, fascist-like, "Aut Zuck aut nihil," which is a Latin phrase that means Zuck or nothing. 
Naomi Fry: Can you imagine, like, saying... Like, having that be your own... Like, have someone else say that? I mean, you certainly pay them en-
you know, you- certainly- Totally
I'm sure they do, but then- Right ... just let them do it, I
guess? 
Alex Schwartz: Well, you know, I, I just wanna leave you guys with this. Frances Haugen, I was reading an interview she recently gave The Hollywood Reporter, a great interview. Again, I really admire this person. Yeah. And so I was cool with having this be, like, a, a kind of obvious film about heroes, the heroes are journalists and whistleblowers. we love it. We, we love this kind of subject. Um, but she said something really interesting that I wanna, I wanna share with you guys.
She mentioned that things she was expecting to be made, um, to cringe by the way tech was portrayed, and she wasn't. It was other stuff. And the, and the interviewer says, "What made you cringe?" She says, "Mark Zuckerberg's office more than anything. They made a good, rich, multi-billionaire office with a giant bank of windows and the big desk and the great view, and this is kind of sad, but Mark would never sit in an office like that because a window that big is a security threat.
He has bulletproof glass around him. He sits in the center of a quarter-mile long building because he's so scared. He buys all of his neighbors' houses so that there's a buffer. That man is a prisoner of his own decisions." I think Strong captures a piece of that, but, um, that to me is the perfect coda- Mm-hmm
to the Jesse Eisenberg character in The Social Network, who you already see becoming a prisoner of his own decisions
After the break: the rise of the whistleblower. CAL from TNY will be right back 
:: MIDROLL:: 
We've been talking about two bookend movies, The Social Network and The Social Reckoning, dealing with Facebook, its creation, and now the fallout of hugely consequential decisions made by Mark Zuckerberg primarily, and his team of advisors about how to engage users, which have driven up friction, um, misinformation, all sorts of bad stuff in society.
So I think it's fair to say that the trajectory, the 16-year trajectory between these movies has gone from something, um, even if dark, more hopeful and new and fresh, to something very dark indeed. There has been a huge disillusionment period. We know a lot of bad stuff, and we're learning more every day.
Um, the $17 billion settlement that Facebook recently agreed to Meta rather. Meta, yes.
We
Naomi Fry: remember when- Yes ... when Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021.
Alex Schwartz: and the movie implies as a result of bad press from this whistleblowing. but anyway,  There is a sense, a cultural sense, I would argue, that we now wanna really look at the dark side of these figures. Like, movies this fall, We're seeing Alex Gibney's mega documentary, Musk, which we haven't seen yet, but I don't expect it to be kind. There's-
Naomi Fry: like a, like complete ode, like-
Alex Schwartz: Well, like the Walter Isaacson biography. I mean, it will be interesting for us to look at it. Listeners- Yeah ... if you stuck with us from the very start of our show, um, you may remember that one of our first episodes was about Walter Isaacson's incredibly flattering, sort of shockingly flattering biography of Elon Musk.
Now look where the culture is pointing. Um, there's the Luca Guadagnino film, Artificial, about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that had to float around after Amazon dropped its distribution because Amazon is, of course, also owned by a tech billionaire. Um, Nathan Fielder has a new documentary coming out about Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced Theranos founder, which we will be discussing.
Um, and I'm thinking, you know, uh, at The New York Times, the critic Alyssa Wilkinson, who I really enjoy reading, wrote a really interesting piece I recommend, um, that our listeners might like too. It's called "As Big Tech Takes Over Hollywood, the Picture on Screen Gets Darker." And she is arguing that there was a real turn, that there were these kind of fun i- moments with shows like even, um, Silicon Valley, which was such a fun- Yeah
parody show. Like, it parodied this idea of the founders, but those guys were lovable. They were likable. They were, they were goofs, but they were our goofs, you know? 
        CLIP: Silicon Valley
And then she talks about things getting darker in media portrayals, and this kind of especially spate of shows and movies making fun of or, or being harsh about founders, like The Dropout about Elizabeth Holmes, like WeCrashed about Adam Neumann and WeWork, like Super Pumped about Travis Kila- Kalanick, who founded Uber. And I do think that's become the kind of... I think she's right. It's become the archetype now, that there's a sort of asocial, she says a nar- quote, "A narcissistic, amoral menace unbothered by things like ethics and laws as long as the stock price goes up." I do think we're kind of there. 
Vinson Cunningham: yeah, it, it's, it's interesting because I, I guess I wonder whether,
you know,
that darkening, 
Whether it is sort of- Descriptive of our moods or it is a kind of y- y- you mentioned a sort of didactic warning perhaps, semi-didactic warning intended by Sorkin in some of his writing about this stuff. Whether it is like prescriptive by the, by, by culture makers and whether it will like help us to digest these figures as they continue, um, continue to pop up. The best reason to watch The Social Reckoning is that a lot of people still don't understand some of these things about this company.
Yeah. You know? The, it's like, it reminds me of the, um, the Federal Theatre Project. There were these, back in the 1930s, um, these, uh, government-funded plays that, um, were just basically, uh, they were called living newspapers, and peop- and, uh, troupes of actors traveled the country putting on, uh, versions of what was happening in the news, using theater as a nakedly didactic political tool to sort of raise consciousness about the contradictions that, that are all around people and framing their lives.
Um, I do wonder if a kind of news giving or news bringing, even however belated, I mean, you know, Jeff Horwitz won the Pulitzer Prize for the series of articles that ran in the Wall Street Journal. But I wonder if just purely, even if it's like sort of politically inflected information bringing, is maybe a salutary effect of these kinds of portrayals.
Alex Schwartz: Let me ask the question the opposite way also. If the founder figure, the ruler, the Augustus, the Caesar of these tech companies, which, yeah, are empires much bigger than any government that have profound implications for all of our governments, if they're the cultural villains right now, who are the heroes?
One answer is the whistleblower. I think we're at an interesting moment in AI where, again, like, w- talk about whistleblowers. There are people now popping up on Twitter all over the place from within OpenAI saying, "Yeah, this thing is bad. This thing is dangerous.
Vinson Cunningham: the planet," man. "Yeah,
Alex Schwartz: this is no good." 
We just, we, we've seen this movie where the whistleblower is made out to be, um, a hero for obvious reasons, and I totally bought it. I'm also thinking, and I wonder if you guys can, like, help me add to this little library of contemporary whistleblowing texts. I'm thinking in particular of Careless People, the book that was published last year in hardback, it's coming out in 2027 in paperback, um, by Sarah Wynn-Williams, who worked at Facebook, then Meta, for many years, um, from 2011 to 2017, so I guess it really just was Facebook then.
And I became aware of this book, When it was announced very close to publication date and it became immediately apparent that Meta was going to throw big legal tools at it, like, you know, a kinda whack-a-mole situation to try to...
It, it obviously didn't like what was coming. It didn't like these very unflattering portrayals of Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and other executives at Facebook. Um, but by and large, it's m- it makes the same message as Frances Haugen's book, as the social reckoning, that this could've been another way. 
Are there other things in this kind of like whistleblowing category that come to mind for you?
Naomi Fry: Yeah. I mean, I have a woman who I'm friends with, I should note, Claire Stapleton, who was, uh, an employee of Google and was one of the organizers of, um, the w- the, the walkout in 2018  she wrote a memoir called "Don't Be Evil" that just came out in, in August. And, it's a really interesting kind of look from the inside of, in this case, it's Google, it's not, it's not Facebook, of a young kind of bright-eyed, like Ivy League graduate who gets hired to do internal comms at Google at the kind of like, at, in its utopian era, 
And, uh, she is a believer. She is a true believer. It, it's a very... And she kind of explains, she shows in the book how, especially to a young person in those years, those Obama years, it's, it's kind of a, was a very seductive vision of like, "This is a good company. This is a good company." And as the time wears on, the kind of idea of we're gonna create a better world that's good for everyone across the board begins to fall by the wayside, and that, of course, is reflected not only in the way, uh, the company treats its products that are pushed out to the world of users outside it, but also within the company itself.
And so it's, it's just, it's, it's a kind of like lower key, uh, story, but nonetheless, it's a really good kind of entryway into like, " I lived through this. Like, let's take a look inside at how, at how,
like-it was all just bad management, the profit motive, and, like, pettiness essentially.
Alex Schwartz: It makes sense to me that the whistleblower has become this heroic figure. I'm thinking even, I mean, th- I think whistleblowers have been seen in the culture as heroic figures before, of course, like Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,
Naomi Fry: Who is mentioned in the- Exactly ... yeah,
Alex Schwartz: Something that is,
Vinson Cunningham: Edward Snowden, who I think has a lot of credit to claim for the, the emergence of this archetype more recently, too.
Alex Schwartz: Yes, absolutely. Um, and I, I'm thinking actually of a piece that our colleague Jill Lepore wrote about Edward Snowden- Mm ... and about his memoir, which is a, a really fascinating essay. It's fascinating essay. It's from 2019, and 
Lepore's point is that when there are too many whistleblowers, it's just showing you how weak and bad these institutions are, that their internal processes of self-regulation, self-improvement, fixing problems, taking critique seriously don't function.
And I think we certainly see that at the governmental level, and we're seeing it at all these companies as well. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah, it's really interesting, this idea of the sort of insider become outsider, someone who knows the sort of folk ways of the company and can sort of turn them inside out for us.
But I do wonder if in the final analysis, it will have to be people from the outside who occupy, not only in real life, but in this sort of mythic space of who is the hero, occupy this role.
Um, recently on "60 Minutes," there was a segment, um, hosted by, um, Norah O'Donnell about the local backlash to data centers. Hmm. Yeah. Um, and there was this guy, he was like a, a Texas rancher. and it was like, "You know, no, these things are threatening our way of life,"
        CLIP: 60 minutes
He was really well chosen for the job on 60 minutes, could really articulate the way that these enterprises have become something other than sort of like, you know, rooted in any notion of, of sort of the benefits for people.
I'm reminded of, uh, during the 2012 election, Mitt Romney's huge gaffe where he says, you know, "Corporations are people, my friend." Yeah. Nobody believes that anymore
Naomi Fry: I thought you were gonna talk about the dog on the roof.
Vinson Cunningham: That was bad too. I mean, we're all a dog on the roof of big tech
Naomi Fry: We really are. Um- And were we ever so young
Vinson Cunningham: flapping in the wind willy-nilly. And, uh, uh, and so that, this, this man, I thought Blake O'Quinn, this, uh, uh, third-generation Texas rancher, I think he wa- uh, I think he, to me, all, he, very clearly and maybe instantly, um, and a lot of the people in the segment were talking about it's not about red versus blue.
I don't care about, like, partisan politics anymore. It's about what kind of country do we wanna have? What kind of world do we wanna have? And I thought, I thought that was maybe a glimmer of this, this, this hero to come.
Alex Schwartz: This has been Critics at Large. Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kuchman, and we had engineering help today from Pran Bandy, with music by Alexis Cuadrado. As always, you can find all of our episodes at newyorker.com/critics.