Sonya Saraiya on David Fincher's The Social Network

A decade after its release Sonya Saraiya revisited David Fincher's The Social Network in a lengthy piece in Vanity Fair. As it happened her remarks about the film were less interesting than her remarks about Facebook in the real world--a thing that I suppose can't be helped given the profound limitations of the film.

There was, for example, her remarks about just how "toxic" her experience of the site was as she found herself subject to the post-graduation bragging of acquaintances about their new gigs, turning it into "a platform of envy--a poisonous, insidious sort that turned all of that anger and frustration inward, corroding my self-esteem and sending me into a sustained depression." Indeed, Saraiya initially thought Fincher's "Facebook" movie would be about what it was actually like to be a Facebook user, and what they felt during it--"that peculiar sense of isolation in the midst of purported connectedness," "the mingled pride and disappointment of seeing your life laid out in blue and black type," "the minor agonies of wanting people to like you on the internet."

Of course, the film had nothing to do with that, the movie not "Facebook: The Movie" but a much more personal story about Mark Zuckerberg becoming a tech billionaire. Saraiya reads it as a morality tale about ambition and money coming in ahead of principle and loyalty and friendship, but it is undeniable that the movie, in spite of the rather pathetic whining of some of Silicon Valley's courtiers in the press, is fundamentally a hyperbolic glorification of Zuckerberg. And indeed, referencing a piece the film's screenwriter Sorkin wrote for the New York Times some years later Ms. Saraiya suggests that "Sorkin is still too dazzled by the skills of a tech genius . . . to really blame Zuckerberg for what Facebook has become."

Why, precisely, is that the case? Reading that I find myself thinking about what Upton Sinclair had to say about artists, and what makes so many of them so obsequious to the rich and powerful and those in authority in Mammonart--their "sensitivity," their "impressionability," such that so many an artist "feels a real awe for authority," and sure "his sovereign is bigger in spirit . . . making him bigger in body," even when they are not in any direct way necessarily being paid to glorify them, the way they so often are.

So it would seem with Sorkin in relation to Zuckerberg--to his discredit.

I wonder: can Mr. Sorkin handle that truth?

Remembering David Fincher's The Social Network

I remember that when I heard that Aaron Sorkin was writing and David Fincher helming a film about the creation of Facebook my thought was "Who the hell wants to see that?"

As happened every so often I was wrong about that, the film actually proving a commercial success. (It was also a critical success, but never mind the opinions of courtiers or claqueurs for now.)

What interests me about that success as I look back is the apparent receptivity of the public to the particular crapola Sorkin and Fincher had to sell (for it is indeed crapola). Film critic Kevin Kearney (one of a few to comment on the film that I think can safely be considered neither courtier nor claqueur) summed it up well when he wrote that the film's makers try "to channel the enthusiasm of youth capitalism" and enthusiasm about "revolutionary potential of Internet" that were "associated with the 'dot-com' speculative bubble of the late 1990s," and the associated "market populist" crapola that, as Mr. Kearney puts it, "substitut[ed] a number of red herrings for the great social issues," as with "the upstarts with computer skills vs. the wealthy stuffed-shirts, the young vs. the old, the hip vs. the boring, and so forth" in a film that, whatever its pretensions, "blithely devot[ed] itself to sex, status and the art of being cool."

As I said, CRAPOLA!

All as, being what it is, the film has not aged particularly well, Americans these days looking rather more critically than before at the propaganda, such that even writers for a publication like Vanity Fair admit the film's having aged badly as the realities that flew right over the heads of Sorkin, Fincher, et. al. grow harder and harder for even the more credulous members of the public to ignore by the year, the month, perhaps even the week.

Speculating About the Demographics of Hate-Watching

Let us, for the moment, accept the claims that there is a good deal of hate-watching out there (by which I mean really watching things they hate, rather than just saying they do).

Alas, even as the relevant media analysts insist that more people are doing so, they are fuzzy on who is doing so--all as it seems plausible that not everyone does so equally. (Certainly I don't bother with hate-watching. My personal response to seeing something I don't like is to simply change the channel or terminate the stream--if I have even made the mistake of bothering to turn on something I end up hating in the first place--and I find that I get more and more inclined to do this all the time.)

Might it be that hate-watching is something we see more among, for example, college graduates of the coastal cities of middlebrow attitudes and the people who imitate them, with all the addiction to elitism and snobbery and irony (I refrain here from using stronger words) that goes with that?

It doesn't seem implausible.

Alternatively might it be that hate-watching is something we see more among those demographics which may not like the ways in which television has changed in recent decades? For example, the shift away from casual and easy viewing to insanely overpraised Midcult pretension? Or who dislike the way the ever more pervasive and strident status politics of our time seem ever more constantly manifest in what is supposed to be the entertainment to which people look to take their minds off their troubles and relax? (I certainly suspect that what I have said about TV commercials carries over to TV more broadly, and it is undeniable that a lot of people are not loving it.) Could it be that rather than, for example, taking refuge in the more pleasing TV of a past era, at least for some of the time, they prefer to bash the present?

That doesn't seem implausible either. And it all seems to me to be worth a bit of consideration from those who study such things.

Do People Really Hate-Watch So Much?

These days we hear ceaselessly of "hate-watching." This is not merely a matter of people watching things they don't like (because their partner wants to watch and makes them sit through it), but of people deliberately watching things they don't like for the pleasures to be had in despising them.

It seems plausible that a good many people are only saying they are "hate-watching"--perhaps because they are embarrassed to admit they actually enjoy the trash they are consuming (as with those who "watch ironically").

Yet it is not wholly inconceivable that more of this may be going on, partly because of the pathetic desire of some to feel superior to something, anything, at all, partly because the Internet offers no shortage of cesspools in which to wallow in one's own nastiness about the safely petty, partly because of the increasing tendency to distracted rather than engaged viewing encouraged by a host of factors (like people catching TV anywhere and everywhere on their smart phone rather than sitting down for a proper watch).

Still, one can picture something more serious going on. It may be that more people are so exhausted or stressed out that they can't get into anything really enjoyable, and find it easier to get pleasure out of mocking something bad rather than enjoying something good--perhaps all the more in as there is less casual, "easy," viewing in recent scripted production, and so many people take in so much of the execrable reality television that really does deserve all the insult that can be thrown at it. It may also be a matter of the extreme distance between what even people who are not incapable of enjoying a show or a movie actually experience when they see contemporary offerings as against what the increasingly loud claquing of the critics tells them they are supposed to be experiencing. (There was once a time when people laughed at the TV critics' unhinged outpourings of praise for The Sopranos, but alas this is standard now.) And it may be that what gets made now, reflecting our cultural politics, is inherently divisive--in contrast with the blander, more general audience-oriented fare of the past, pandering to some while showing utter contempt for the tastes of those outside the target audience, all as some are not just ready but eager to make a culture war out of anything and everything, and so rather than changing the channel on what they can't stand staying so that they can fight the good fight over at the review aggregators and everywhere else online.

Of the Supermarket Self-Checkout Machine: A Few Thoughts

The use of self-checkout machines in supermarkets says a lot about the manner in which business has employed automation--just as does its use of the phone tree in customer service. It is more eager to reduce its reliance on human workers than to maintain a tolerable quality of service, and to that end prone to rush systems not yet ready for use into the workplace, and leave their remaining employees, and their customers, to suffer the resulting problems.

The courtiers of business in the press, the kind who call a Jack Welch or a Ken Lay or a Sam Bankman-Fried a "genius," use words such as "innovation," "entrepreneurship" and "leadership" to denote such things.

Real people use . . . other words to describe the practice.

The User-Unfriendliness of Our Information Technology

Aubrey Plaza recently gave an interesting interview to the Wall Street Journal in which she owned up to never having seen the season of The White Lotus for which she has been nominated for an Emmy because she could not work the password system for the relevant streaming service.

Some may be tempted to laugh at Ms. Plaza, but I applaud her for admitting something that more people should be frank about, namely the extent to which functional people are being defeated by supposedly simple technological tasks, which seem less and less simple. Even as the general level of verbal and numerical literacy show every level of declining the standard of computer literacy expected of the user seems to be ever-increasing, reflected in how these days it seems that if you Google any problem you will find casual advice to go poking about in your registry editor to resolve the most minor-seeming issues--as if this were not a good way to brick your computer, especially if you are not an expert in such things, but have little alternative as the "easy" fixes seem to fix less and less all the time.

It is not what we expect--the conventional expectation that technologies grow more user-friendly, not less, with time, and it seems fair to discuss why this has not happened here the way it has with, for example, cars.

One plausible reason is the geometric increase in the performance and complexity of personal computers as against just about everything else, with the standardization of Internet connectivity, home networks and much else playing its part--and the ever-rising burden of cyber-security.

However, one can also argue for other less justifiable factors--as with that sign of decadence in product development, the creation of lots and lots of features that no user really wants or needs but which add to the complexity of the system so as to potentially cause additional problems, simply to justify selling a new thing rather than more of the old thing.

Less innocently there is operating system makers' obscene obsession with spying on everything computer users do in a manner George Orwell could not even begin to imagine, and locking them into "ecosystems" of their crappy products. (Thus is it the case that you can't just get the computer out of the box and turn it on and use it with the option of creating an account if you want to do so later on--rather you are required to create an account as part of a set-up process. In said process you are pressed to network with the computer all the company's other devices, never mind whether you actually own them or not. And you are barraged with advertising for their other wares before you can finish the set-up process--which, if you are canny, will include rooting around through their system's settings unchecking box after box after box to, as much as is possible, deny the company permission to take your information and lock it up in the clouds. And on and on it goes.)

It does not seem at all unreasonable to think all this has something to do with the notorious failure-proneness of our computers today--which leaves us devoting 10 to 20 percent of our computer time to just coping with problems according to a recent Danish study.

Put into automotive terms it is as if we were still in the days when idiots of the kind Booth Tarkington seems to have found so charming taunted motorists trying to repair their vehicles after they broke down by the side of the road with shouts of "Git a hoss!"--with the difference that where then cars were toys for the rich, today everyone is required to use a computer just to get through the day.

No, it isn't Your Imagination--The Internet Really is That Right-Wing

While once upon a time we heard much market populist claptrap about the web giving voice to the voiceless as we now know the way the Internet functions and is utilized--how its apparatus is run and why, and who uses it and how--favors the easily communicated and therefore familiar and well-established idea, those with money and legacy media access, those on the right side of major corporations of the media and other varieties with all their strictures, and those who appeal to a privileged audience--all of which, of course, works out to the right having a much easier time than the left using the Internet to promote its ideas. The unsurprising result is that online many do find themselves feeling that the web has a right-wing bias, with the right's complaints about Big Tech not being in their corner only affirming the fact--because we actually hear so much of their complaints, in contrast with a left whose complaints get far, far less hearing anywhere that anyone who does not deliberately seek them out is likely to come upon them.

What seems more debatable is just how much difference this has made. Looking at the twenty-first century one may regard the right, and especially those relatively far to the right, as having gone from triumph to triumph during it as any remotely progressive tendency suffered the extreme opposite. How much, one may wonder, has this been a result of how people live online?

It is a very large question--but it also seems to a very worthwhile one given the political direction of the era.

The Overlooked Legacy of Vladimir Zhirinovsky?

After his Liberal Democratic Party of Russia got 23 percent of the vote in Russia's parliamentary (Duma) election, Vladimir Zhirinovsky got a lot of press in the Western news media--because his party's near-quarter of the vote for Russia's legislature went with Zhirinovsky's image as an ultra-nationalist fascist "crazy man" who spoke of such things as Russia retaking Alaska from the U.S. by force and using large fans to blow radioactive waste into the Soviet Union's ex-Baltic republics, all while keeping the press in soundbites and anecdotes that were obscene or threatening or violent. Especially given the tendency to draw comparisons between post-Communist Russia and Weimar Germany, not least in perceptions of a country suffering profound political disorientation amid world-historical defeat and economic calamity possibly leading to the triumph of the extreme right, many thought it possible that Zhirinovsky or someone like him would become Russia's next President.

Of course, the next election saw Zhirinovsky's party's position in the country's parliament collapse as the Communists emerged as the principal opposition, and Yeltsin won the election of 1996, while the country started stabilizing politically and economically about the turn of the century. Zhirinovsky and his party remained in parliament, but they never recovered their early '90s-era position in Russian politics, or their hold on the world's attention. (Indeed, Google's Ngram viewer shows how mention of Zhirinovsky plummeted after 1996.) An occasional piece of theatrics on his part still grabbed attention, but for its intrinsic interest, or evocation of back when he was taken more seriously, rather than because anyone thought "This is the next Iron Man of Russia." And indeed, Zhirinovsky's death in 2022 seems to have been almost unacknowledged by the media in the West.*

Still, looking back from 2024 I am struck by how the combination of political stances like Zhirinovsky's theatrics and vulgarity have since become standard for what cowardly members of the press euphemistically call "populists." I doubt that those who have blighted the world in recent decades by becoming heads of government sought to deliberately imitate him, but they certainly thought along similar lines, played to the public in similar ways, and redefined political culture in the process, such that Zhirinovsky could seem to have been ahead of the curve, and in his conduct a glimpse of what the twenty-first century had in store for us had we but understood--Zhirinovsky conquering the world, so to speak, through personal style rather than any military force at his command.

* Admittedly this may have been partly because of the cause--the COVID pandemic. It seems that the press, which early on turned to downplaying the pandemic, has not been overeager to call attention to the deaths of public figures as a result of said virus.

Selectively Remembering Jane Austen

Just as it seems that some new remake of one of Jane Austen's novels (and often, several of them) in production at any one time so do we see the story of Ms. Austen's life told again and again--the author played by Olivia Williams, Anne Hathaway and others over the years. In the depictions it seems that the tendency is to portray her as essentially like the heroines of her novels--minus the happy ending, as if Elizabeth Bennett never got Mr. D'Arcy.

There are some grounds for such a conception. Still, if Ms. Austen was, like her heroines, a daughter of marginal provincial gentry, and concerned primarily with their domestic affairs to such a degree that it is common to say that one can read her books without noticing that the Napoleonic Wars were going on (perhaps the more in as people are more likely to read Pride and Prejudice than Persuasion, or Mansfield Park), this was hardly a matter of her having been somehow unaware of goings-on in the wider world, or indeed their being remote from her own life because of a relatively lowly station. After all, Austen had brothers serving in the Royal Navy as ship commanders during that conflict, with her brother Francis getting a knighthood for his part in the war before Waterloo (this conflict just the early phases of careers that saw both become Admirals, and Francis Admiral of the Fleet), while their sister Jane is known to have drawn on their knowledge of naval affairs during her work (for instance, learning about "prize money" so that she could include it in Persuasion). Such things seem less surprising when one considers their assorted wealthy and prominent connections--Warren Hastings, who is compared with only Robert Clive as a conqueror of India for Britain, a friend of the family.

In my experience one gets even less inkling of Austen having had such a life from the stories told about Austen than those Austen told by Austen in her books. And I suspect few care to have it otherwise, preferring as they do that image of a sort of real-life Ms. Bennett to that worldlier side of her background--leaving it the kind of thing rather more likely to be raised by an Upton Sinclair as he cast a respectful but more than usually historically-minded eye upon her work than to those who read her work to escape into a world they imagine to have been more genteel than their own.

Stanley Kubrick and the "F" Word

Some time ago I looked over those charges and countercharges about the politics of A Clockwork Orange between its director Stanley Kubrick and the journalists of the New York Times at the time of the movie's release (back when they really did have liberals writing for them). Going by Kubrick's remarks there seemed to me no question of his, at least at the time, having been a right-winger, certainly if one takes as the standard for that the fundamental matter of human nature at the individual and group levels, and what it means for whether society can be rationally changed to produce a freer, more egalitarian, more thriving order. (Indeed, Kubrick joked in one interview that he gave at the time that if he went on he was "going to sound like William Buckley.") However, Kubrick took great umbrage at the use of the word "fascism" to describe his film, and at least by implication himself. Especially given the way in which he argued (he attacked those who used the term, rather than trying to disprove them) one could wonder whether he was simply reacting against having the highly charged label applied to him, even if it was being applied fairly (fascists often do object to being called fascists, because of the term's charge for many), or whether he really did have grounds for being thought not a fascist.

Certainly the pessimistic view of human beings and the prospects for society's redress of its ills, his contempt for "liberals," etc., that Kubrick expressed at the time are views he at least shared with fascists, as he did with the right more broadly. Yet the argument for fascism as a distinct tendency (rather than a synonym for "extreme right," a species of horseshoe theory-minded totalitarianism, a mere slur, etc.) is based on its mobilization of part of the public behind a right-wing agenda for the sake of preserving a bourgeois-capitalist order in the face of a radical challenge that can only be defeated through illiberal methods of government. Of course, in the aforementioned interview Kubrick did quip that the insecurity people felt because of crime, combined with "a little economic disappointment, and the increasingly trendy view that politics are a waste of time and problems have to be solved instantly," could translate to "very serious social unrest in the United States," and ultimately to "very authoritarian" government "of the Right," but his attitude toward this expectation was ambiguous. After all, to say that a thing is plausible, or even likely, is not to endorse it--even if one allows for some pathways being better than others. (In such a situation "you could only hope you would have a benevolent despot rather than an evil one. A Tito rather than a Stalin . . . of the right" he said.) The result is that there are grounds for rejecting the view of Kubrick as having himself been a fascist--though it also seems only fair to admit that much of what he said, as a filmmaker and in his interviews--has been grist to a fascist's mill, enough so that those who accused Kubrick of being one were far, far, from groundless in doing so. Indeed, even if Kubrick may not be a fascist, there seem few grounds for denying that A Clockwork Orange "works" as a piece of fascist propaganda.

Remembering Idiocracy and Silicon Valley Together

Some time ago I wrote about Mike Judge's film Idiocracy and HBO show Silicon Valley together, because while they had their differences the two seemed so complementary to one another. Where in Idiocracy Judge satirized the unintelligent, in Silicon Valley he satirized people who were supposed to be the extreme opposite. In ultra-conventional fashion--after all, were Judge not so we would likely never have heard of him--he identified unintelligence with the lower classes, and intelligence with the super-rich elite.

It also seemed to me safe to say that when, in the case of Idiocracy, he punched down, he did so very visibly, obviously and forcefully at the poor, while in Silicon Valley his punches up were limited to eccentric individuals, rather than to any group as such.

So does it generally go with comedy in America in our time, in which the right to punch down with impunity is hailed as the essence of the free speech, and never mind anything else.

Of "Kakistocracy": A Few Words

The reader of this blog may be familiar with the words "oligarchy," "plutocracy," "kleptocracy."

"Oligarchy" refers to government controlled by a small group.

"Plutocracy" refers to government by the rich.

"Kleptocracy" refers to government by thieves who use their positions of authority to rob the public.

"Kakistocracy," derived from the Indo-European root word "kaka," the meaning of which I imagine most readers can figure out for themselves, refers to government by society's worst.

A more obscure term, when a handful of commentators dared to use the term in public a few years ago it caused quite the sensation, but I am not sure that it has entered really common usage. According to Google's book-checking Ngram viewer usage of the word between 2016 and 2022 merely doubled from a very low level, so that as of the later date one is still about 280 times more likely to encounter usage of the word "oligarchy," forty times more likely to encounter "plutocracy," and about sixteen times more likely to come across even the relatively newfangled "kleptocracy." This is in spite of there being room to argue that even those three words are less frequently used than they ought to be in English, especially when we discount their use to fling abuse at other countries on officialdom's "Disapproved" list.

I might add that the word kakistocracy would seem to have a particular usefulness in a society in which conventional wisdom-guarding elites (in complete, ironic, obliviousness to the concept's flaws, pointed out by the very sociologist who coined the term!) ceaselessly refer to their society as a meritocracy. Those who disagree can point out to them that it is in fact the other, opposite thing with the rather pungent label, their supposed "meritocracy" in fact a "merdeocracy," and the singers of meritocracy as a contemporary actuality, if actually believing their own claptrap, apparently unable to tell Shinola from the other thing.

The Hired Killer in Fiction

Writing of David Fincher's film The Killer David Walsh remarked that "[h]ired killers like these . . . with their automaton-like precision and fanatical attention to detail," are fantasies, and about that Mr. Walsh is of course entirely right. Read up on the relevant subjects--crime, intelligence, covert operations--and you never find anything like these stock figures of so much thriller fiction. Ever.

So where did they come from?

I suppose one can see in these figures a combination of two "petty bourgeois" fascinations--the fascination with the criminal who refuses to be bound by society's rules (indeed, Walsh cites this again himself), and with the "professional." The petty bourgeois, after all, is a great admirer of the professionals whose competence and whose "standards" fiction endlessly, wildly, exaggerates. In the hired killer we get the merger of the two, making the figure irresistible to their imagination--which, after all, is substantially the imagination to which the pop culture industry plays.

The Petty Bourgeois' Romanticizing of the Outlaw

I have often seen writers refer to a fascination with crime and criminals as being distinctly "petty bourgeois," but I do not remember any of them clearly explaining why they think that is so in an explicit way. What I have gleaned from them is the view that, being petty bourgeois such people are not on top, and frustrated--their lot, if far from the worst society has to offer, still that of the "bound but unprotected" and they naturally not liking it much. At the same time being petty bourgeois they are essentially individualistic and conformist, so that they do not imagine, let alone desire, any other world than this one. They just want to change their condition in the one that exists. And the rule-breaking criminal, who is at the very least refusing to be bound, and if they get big enough, in some degree protected too in a society where corruption is not unknown (else what need for an Eliot Ness or a Batman?), has a fascination for them as someone doing what they would like to be doing, or would like to have done in the past (such that they would be enjoying the benefits of those actions now).

Certainly thinking of Robert Merton's "theory of anomic behavior," which I understand to have been the result of his examination of crime, this seems to track. As Merton wrote society sets goals for its members and sanctions particular means for realizing those goals--like individual economic advancement through education and getting a job (or, less often these days, be-an-entrepreneur-in-a-legal-line-of-activity). The conformist accepts goal and means--getting ahead, and getting the job supposed to lead to that. The rebel and the "retreatist" in their different ways and for different reasons refuse goal and means--disbelieving in getting ahead, and refusing to pretend the way taking the job requires them to do. The "ritualist" Merton describes as rejecting the goal but accepting the means--in the sense that they do not really believe in all that getting ahead stuff, but get a job anyway and go through the motions (because, frankly, it's very, very tough to live without a source of income). However, there is one other category--what Merton called "innovators"--who accept the goal but rely on a less than approved means, i.e. accepts "individual economic advancement" as a life's purpose but pursues the object through illegal business activity. They are not rebels, they accept the success-striving recommended to them, they just resort to disapproved means to go about it--while not advertising those means, or necessarily meaning to persist in them beyond their attainment of their goal.

I do not recall Merton saying anything about this, but I think that what those who picture crime as an object of fascination to those sincerely eager to get ahead, but disappointed in the sanctioned options and their results--perhaps especially in times of declining prospects for the "middle class." Few act on such nonsense--but all the same, the attraction on this foolishness on some level has its part in making criminals very popular protagonists in contemporary pop culture.

David Walsh Reviews David Fincher's The Killer

David Walsh has recently penned a review of David Fincher's Netflix film, The Killer, and taken the film as an occasion to consider Fincher's now three decade-old record of directing feature film, paying particular attention to such movies as Fight Club, The Social Network, Gone Girl, and the more recent Mank. Walsh argues that while "each of [Fincher's] films has intriguing and even insightful moments," Fincher tends overwhelmingly toward superficiality, particularly evident in his "predilection for brutal, irrational behavior," and identification of "certain alienated moods," while never having much to say about "their origin or trajectory," and certainly not their "social sources." All in line with a "shortsighted, limited vision of humanity and society" apparently consisting of little but "general misanthropy," "pervasive darkness," and "the desire to make people uncomfortable" it is not, but only by the credulous confused with, "criticism of capitalism, corporations, contemporary civilization . . . modern marriage" that leaves us with the "chilly and banal" at that level, only underlined by the "style" over which Fincher fans gush so much.

I cannot say that I have tried to follow David Fincher's work, but I have seen a fair bit of it all the same, and going by that Walsh seems to me to do an exceptional job of summing up the (very limited) strengths and (considerable) weaknesses of a filmmaker who, in spite of the plaudits with which les claqueurs of the entertainment press lavish him, has a "body of work" with "many more minuses than pluses in" it, just as Walsh seems to me to have been one of the few to grasp the profound limitations of Quentin Tarantino's work (especially as his career went on).* Walsh seems to me equally correct in treating Fincher's outlook and its limitations as not merely his own, but characteristic of that cohort of filmmakers that emerged in the '90s, and has increasingly dominated the American cinematic scene ever since, of which Fincher is a star.

* The few others who did grasp Tarantino's limitations include Gary Groth, and James Wood. It seems significant that neither is by profession a film reviewer, and that neither seems to have been much heard from since regarding Mr. Tarantino.