The Facebook Movie

I really enjoyed The Social Network, although I doubt it had much connection to the real people involved. I don’t doubt the events as such, but I doubt the interpretation.

I noticed one thing in particular. One of the motivations of the Mark Zuckerberg character was that he really wanted to get into a Finals Club. But the Finals Clubs are essentially an archaic holdout of aristocratic WASP privilege. I didn’t attend Harvard, but I did attend an Ivy League school with similar organizations. They were not taken particularly seriously by anybody I knew, except perhaps by those whose parents had belonged to one (and those people were pretty much all accepted). This is true even though I knew people who were accepted.

It’s very difficult to imagine somebody obsessing about getting into one. It’s particularly difficult to imagine that from somebody writing web programs. The path to fame and riches in the computer world is through what you do, not who you know. The Finals Clubs are naturally inclined toward the people who are going to become lawyers and politicians. Why would somebody like Zuckerberg care about a Finals Club?

Of course people’s motivations are mysterious. Zuckerberg did go to Phillips Exeter, an elite private prep school, and he could have absorbed some sort of Finals Club ethos there. Still, Zuckerberg has said publically that he was not interested in joining a Finals Club, and I’m inclined to take him at his word.