THE SOCIAL NETWORK

"Yer still a creep."—Lois Pain, "Superduperman"

I go alone. The movie tells the story of the founding of the popular website www.facebook.com, which probably has, like, a million members at this point. Full disclosure: I’m one. Several times a day I “log in” to see what my “friends” “like” that day, or if they have “tagged” me in their photos (assigned my name to my image, so that the photos can be cross-referenced—it’s hard to explain). What’s wild is that the movie shows how the founder of the business—a young billionaire, with a “b”—uses the website in the exact same way as anyone else. The world’s gotten strange, that’s for sure.

“There’s a difference between being obsessed and being motivated.” Humiliation to ambition is one-to-one, the dug hole and the hole filled are of the same tremendous size. Socializing in the sad flesh. A code-writing montage reliably enlivens, if you’re not writing one you’re following one, and if there’s one thing this story helps us to understand it’s that nobility is to be shed. “Clean” is the aesthetic it zealously and rightly promotes. It would be absurd, meeting Timberlake, to ask to touch his hair, but wouldn’t it be worth it if afterward, on the cab ride home, you could sniff deeply of your palm and summon both him and the way he evaporates into sparkle? The word for like is the word for corpse because bodies are mostly the same. I have sometimes found my liking too timid to warrant even that little click, as at other times it is too large and indeed, if admitted, would overwhelm the whole works.

It’s so crazy-scary when the original CFO pushes to monetize the site while it’s still building its most crucial asset: coolness. Which is exactly what I always say. But try explaining the years-long cultivation of cachet to a two-year-old who’s all, why can’t I go to the good preschool now? To like is not enough—one must choose. Some might say, this is a sorry consolation prize for having gradually and all-at-once agreed to hook ourselves up to these machines all damn day long. But I always say, think how serene we must look to whoever’s watching, aliens or God, from way up there in outer space.