“Moneyball” - Bennett Miller (2011)

Moneyball (2011) is a popular, historically-grounded American sports film with a deceptively clever subtext that provides its overall theme. To appreciate that subtext, you have to know quite a bit about the American game of baseball, a realization that is not obvious to all viewers and reviewers.  For example, critic Roger Ebert commented that the film would even appeal to non-sport fans:

“Moneyball is not a traditional sports movie, and indeed should be just as gripping for non-sports fans.”

I don’t think so.  I think you have to have some understanding of the subtleties of baseball to get what’s going on.  So I hope American baseball fans will indulge my making a few general comments about the game and about the associated underlying thematic issues before discussing the specifics of the story. 

1. The Game of Baseball
The ultimate goal of baseball is for a team, comprising nine players, to score the most “runs”. At any given point in a game, one team is on offense (“batting”) and attempting to score runs, while the defending team is in the field, trying to prevent runs from being scored.  Successive individuals on the batting team will attempt to bat a ball, thrown by the opposing team’s “pitcher”, into the playing field and out of the reach of the defending team’s “fielders”.  By doing so the batting team hopes to move players successively around the three “bases” in the field in order to get back to the original batting position (“home plate”) – at which point the team has scored a run (see the figure of the playing field).  An offensive player running between bases is in danger of being “tagged out” by the defensive team; but each base is a sanctuary from being tagged out, and a player can remain safely there while the next offensive player takes a turn to bat.

A team’s turn at batting is ended when they have made three “outs” – an out is registered when the batter is unable to hit three properly thrown pitches, or when a batted ball is caught by a fielder before it touched the ground, or when a runner is tagged out. After completing a turn at batting, the team will take the field on defense, and the opposing team will have a turn at bat. When two teams have each completed a turn batting, it is called an “inning”, and a full game consists of nine innings.

From this brief description it is clear that each team has a total of 27 outs (3 outs for each of 9 innings) available for them to use up, during the course of which they will try to score as many runs as possible.  That part of the game is simple enough.  But there are many intricacies to the rules of the game, and it can take some time for even an American to become familiar with all of them.

One of the distinctive aspects of baseball and part of its appeal is that it is a game of skill, as opposed to brute force.  Talent for the game is not so much based on strength, speed, or leaping ability, but on physical coordination.  Even a person with ordinary physical attributes can have the dream of becoming a great baseball player if he is physically coordinated. In addition, there are a number of different baseball skills, and a reasonably good team can be composed of players who are not all-around athletes, but instead have only a specialized skill that fills a gap in the team’s skill set.  I’ll return to this issue of skill shortly.

Another distinctive feature of baseball is that it does not comprise continuous play but is a a stop-and-go game of many individual “plays”.  During an entire game the pitchers on each team may throw 150 or more pitches, each of which can result in some complicated action that is a play.  All of these observed plays can be documented by spectators and in various ways measured as somewhat replicable events. This has led to an enormous amount of “statistics” – aggregated performance data about all teams and players – that have been collected about the game – much more, as far as I can determine, that any other sport or game.  To get an idea of this enormous accumulation of statistics, you might like to examine Baseball-Reference.com or the Baseball Almanac.  So there is a lot of knowledge that has been collected about baseball, and this baseball knowledge is different from baseball skill.  It is the contrast between knowledge and skill and how the two can be used that underlies the meaning of Moneyball and represents a theme far more general than just the game of baseball.

2. Knowledge and Skill
It has always been a pillar of Western thinking that for a piece of knowledge to be “true”, it must be verifiable, and therefore it must be expressible in a form that can be communicated to others.  This means that what we believe to be knowledge must be expressible in some logical form and communicable to others in some sort of linguistic format.  Knowledge has to be representable as a mental model that we can tell others about.  But skill is different and only depends on performance.  To be skillful is to interact successfully in a given environment, and a mental model is not part of the definition.  So a mathematical model in physics is a representable mental model and hence knowledge, while the capability of riding a bicycle is a skill.  This is sometimes summarized as the contrast between “know-how” (skill) and “know-what” (knowledge).

There are some people, such as Michael Polanyi [1] and many cognitive scientists, who conflate the two and refer to skill as a special type of knowledge, called “tacit knowledge”. These people mostly believe that the operational aspects of a skill are encoded in the brain in some logical format, but that it is just a little too complex to be articulated, and so lies “just below the radar” of consciousness.  But I believe that skills and knowledge are fundamentally different and not just two degrees of the same sort of mental activity.  So in my view, it is better to keep knowledge and skill as separate and distinct categories.  In fact the fundamental difference between knowledge and skill has been emphasized from a different quarter – phenomenologist philosophers.  For example, Martin Heidegger distinguished between two basic modes of encountering things in the world – “ready-to-hand” and “present-at-hand” [2].  By his account, when we see a tool, such as a hammer, we usually see it as ready-to-hand: we see it as something we can use to accomplish a task.  In this way, it becomes part of and enhances our skill at doing something.  But when we look at the same tool as a theoretical object, an item of knowledge that be analyzed in terms of its properties, we are viewing it as present-at-hand.  Similarly, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, when he spoke of the “intentional arc”, said that skills involve a tight interaction between the performer and the environment, such that skills are not stored as mental representations, but as operational dispositions [3].  According to his thinking, the body attempts to maintain a “maximal grip” on a situation by continually configuring itself for an optimal interaction.  So we learn how to ride a bicycle not from a book, but by making continual interactive embodied-mind adjustments in the world.

Thus skills and knowledge are fundamentally different, and skills are the more critical aspect of intelligence. But knowledge is still very valuable. Knowledge can be used as a tool to support one’s skill, just as the craftsperson employs the right tool to enhance his or her craftsmanship. In fact in our modern IT-besotted “Knowledge Economy”, many organizations tend to place so much emphasis on knowledge that they neglect the importance of interactively grounded skills.  But  there is a very prominent organizational domain (and one germane to this discussion) where knowledge is not overvalued – and that domain is baseball.

3. Moneyball
As I mentioned, baseball is the quintessential game of skill, and the focus on skill dominates all aspects of the game, including management.  As a consequence of this focus on skills, knowledge tends to be neglected.  This brings us back to the film Moneyball.

In the US major professional baseball leagues, as with many professional sports around the world, the individual teams compete for the best players in an open job market.  Usually the wealthiest teams wind up with the best players.  In 2002 the Oakland Athletics baseball team found itself losing out to wealthier teams when it came to bidding for top players in the job market.  Top Athletics players Johnny Damon, Jason Giambi, and Jason Isringhausen all chose to sign as free agents with other baseball teams.  With his top players gone, the Athletics’s general manager, Billy Beane (played in the film by Brad Pitt) needed to come up with a new strategy.  The best teams in the league, such as the New York Yankees, had three times as much money to bid and spend on players as the Oakland Athletics had.  How could the Athletics compete with the best teams under those circumstances?  Moneyball tells the story of how Beane came up with such a new stratregy and what transpired as a result.

Since the focus on skill in baseball has been so long-standing and pervasive, even the baseball talent scouts have relied on their intuitive skills (rather than on knowledge) to judge player value when looking for new prospects. A scout would watch the play of a prospective player and assess his worth based on his own “feel” for the game, which was taken to be his accumulated wisdom based on experience.  This was understood to be the talent scout’s essential skill.  The strategy that Beane decided to employ was to turn his focus to knowledge – to do some knowledge mining.  This he did by employing a numerical analyst, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), who collected and evaluated statistics about all the available players.  Brand was not a skilled baseball scout and had evidently not even played much baseball.  He was just a baseball fan – but a knowledgeable baseball fan.

Among the many baseball fans in the US, there was a special group devoted to “sabermetrics”, a term derived from the acronym SABR, for “Society  for American Baseball Research”.  Pioneered by amateur statistician Bill James in the late 1970s, sabermetrics sought to analyze aggregated baseball statistics (of which, as mentioned, there is a huge amount) in order to make performance predictions.  Along the way, James and the sabermetricians made a number of interesting discoveries that ran counter to conventional baseball wisdom.  For example, they discovered that the 27 “outs” that a baseball team had available to them in a game were a precious commodity, and it was never advisable to sacrifice even one of them.  Hence their statistical analyses demonstrated that a well-known baseball play, the “sacrifice bunt”, was counterproductive and should never be used.  Similarly, they observed that attempts to steal a base were usually unproductive, unless a successful outcome was almost certain.  And they also noted that getting on base was crucial, so a batter should  “take” (avoid swinging his bat to try to hit) many pitches in an effort to be awarded a “base on balls”.  Thus a group of baseball analysts, by simply watching games and employing mathematics, were able to come up with information that challenged the baseball canon.  Peter Brand was one of these sabermetricians.

Much of the story of Moneyball traces the interaction between Billy Beane and Peter Brand.  Brand was a knowledge guy. Beane was a skill-guy. In fact Beane had been a major league baseball player, himself, though his playing career had not lived up to expectations. But Beane was also smart – smart enough to have once been awarded a scholarship to Stanford (which he had declined in favor of signing a professional baseball contract instead) and smart enough to see the potential of Brand’s sabermetric approach [4].

Prior to the start of the 2002 baseball season, general manager Beane installed Brand as part of his management team.  The other members of his management team were not impressed with the unprepossessing and clearly unathletic Brand.  He was an awkward goose in the company of a bunch of sleek, self-satisfied ducks.  But Beane persisted and began acquiring low-cost players based on Brand’s recommendations.  Brand pointed out to Beane that some available players were, on the basis of his statistical analyses, much more valuable than they appeared.  These players did not look like model athletes, but they could be effective, and they could be acquired on the cheap. 

Once the regular baseball season game, Beane began insisting that the team employ Brand’s sabermettrician-inspired strategies, such as avoiding base-stealing and sacrifice bunts.  This proactive involvement with the players was an unusual practice for a baseball general manager, who manages the team’s personnel and leaves the on-field tactics to the field manager (who is essentially the head coach, but in baseball parlance is just referred to as the “manager”).  But Beane was a former player and only about forty years old at this time, so he still retained his own intimate feel for the game, much to the consternation of the manager.  In fact Moneyball shows that the manager, Art Howe (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), was a traditionalist who dismissed the new tactics and was acidly resentful of his boss’s interference into his own domain.  

 
Nevertheless, the Athletics, with its somewhat rag-tag collection of players, began the 162-game season reasonably well, winning 16 of its first 27 games.  Then they began to falter, losing 15 of their next 19 games.  All the nay-sayers in the team’s clubhouse and in the media came out now and expressed scorn for Beane’s new approach.  It was too gimmicky, they said, and it just wouldn’t work.  But Beane and Brand stuck to their guns – Brand’s recommendations were not based on hunches but on solid statistical support from past performances.  Gradually the team began to win.  And the Athletics’s baseball fans rallied to the team’s support and began flocking to the stadium to watch the games.

Later on in the season, in fact, the team went on an extraordinary winning streak, winning 20 games in a row.  This set a new league record (records date back over one hundred years). The film dwells a bit on the last game in that winning streak, which was truly phenomenal.  The Atheltics started that game against the Kansas City Royals by building a huge 11-0 lead in the early innings.  Then the Royals staged a comeback.  In the 8th inning the Royals scored five runs to cut the lead to 11-10, and in the  9th inning, the Royals finally tied the score at 11-11.  But the reeling Athletics still had their own 9th inning turn at bat.  The manager inserted one of Beane’s acquired “ugly ducklings”, Scott Hatteberg, as a substitute to bat, and Hatteberg promptly hit a dramatic home run to win the record-setting game in front of the home crowd.  This was not Hollywood, but how it actually happened, and a hack film scenarist couldn’t have come up with a more melodramatic sequence of events.

So Beane and Brand were finally vindicated.  The Athletics finished in first place with 103 season victories (an unusually high total even for a first-place team).  The end-of-season playoffs were an anticlimax, though, and the Athletics were eliminated without winning the championship.  Nevertheless, Beane was recognized as an ingenious genera manager for guiding an underfunded team to the best record.

Of course, there are other narrative threads to Moneyball than the one of skill and intuition versus objective knowledge.  One of them concerns the psychological journey of Billy Beane.  He is shown to be a man who feels utter agony when he loses.  He is still tortured by his failed baseball career as a player and often mentally relives past episodes of failure.  He suffers so much at the thought of his Athletics losing that he often avoids watching games and buries himself in personal exercises in his gym.  He is also divorced, and his teenage daughter is also “lost” to him – she’s now in the custody of his ex-wife, who has remarried.  The film shows Beane struggling hard during his parental visits to maintain contact with the young girl. 

So in the face of all this anguish about losing, Beane’s managerial vindication is a personal triumph.  At the end of the 2002 baseball season, he if offered a huge contract to be the general manager of  a rival, wealthier team, the Boston Red Sox.  There he could apply his knowledge-enhanced managerial skills and have more financial resources with which to do it.  But he had long ago turned down a Stanford scholarship for money, and he decides not to repeat that kind of decision.  There are other things more important to him than money this time around.

One of the appealing things about Moneyball is the ingenious casting.  I suppose credit for this should extend beyond just the casting director, Francine Maisler, but whoever is responsible deserves high praise.  Jonah Hill is fabulous and exceptionally convincing as the nerdy Peter Brand, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is also dramatically effective as the cynical field manager, Art Howe (although the real Art Howe reportedly felt he was misrepresented in the film).  In addition, the players, the scouts, the executives all look the part.  Brad Pitt is effective in his own way, too.  His sad eyes project a wincing, pensive look about him that adds depth to his roles.  This winds up occupying a lot of screen time, but he often manages to suggest a reflective person (when he is not indulging in wasteful fist-slamming temper tantrums).

Overall, you have to credit director Bennett Miller and screenwriters Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin for making Moneyball something much more substantial than just another sports thriller.  In fact Sorkin had similar success elevating The Social Network (2010) well above what might have been expected of a film oriented around Facebook.  So I will be keen to look out for the next Sorkin outing.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Polanyi, M. (1966). The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday.
2. Heidegger, M. (1927/2008). Being and Time. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (trans.). Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
3. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2002). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge. 
4. In actuality, Beane had been interested in sabermetrics before 2002, but probably for narrative economy, the film compresses this development into the single year.

“The Social Network” - David Fincher (2010)

The Social Network (2010) is about one of the hot cultural topics of the moment, the massive move to computer social networking and the extraordinary rise of its primary platform, Facebook. So even a poorly crafted film would have attracted considerable interest from many quarters. But the public and the critics generally judged The Social Network to be top-notch entertainment, giving it thumbs up all round: it earned eight US Academy Award Oscar nominations and has grossed well over $200 million. Based on Ben Mezrich's book, The Accidental Billionaires, about the founding of Facebook, it is notable that this mainstream Hollywood production is not a product of the youth culture it examines, but is instead something of an examination from the outside of that sphere – it was directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, 1999) and scripted by Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, 1999-2006). In fact the clinical examination metaphor is made explicit in the production, since all the events depicted are seen from the framing device of two concurrent court depositions associated with lawsuits that were filed about the events depicted in the film: the law courts are trying to get at the truth of what exactly took place in 2003-2004 concerning the rise of Facebook

In fact the film’s viewers, too, are probably looking for some kind of truth, or perhaps many truths when they go to see this film. After all, in just a couple of years, Facebook has amassed 750 million users and is considered to be worth more than $70 billion. How did this thing that was started by a single 19-year-old programmer get so big, so fast? Depending on what part of society they are coming from, viewers probably wanted to know the real story, the truth, that could provide answers to the following questions:

• What made Facebook different from its other social networking competitors (Myspace, Friendster, Bebo, Orkut, . . .) and how did it come to dominate the market? Does it have special technical features, algorithms, or user affordances that make it so much better?
• How does the youth-dominated high-tech computer industry work and what is it like to be a computer hacker?
• Who is Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, and what lies behind his success?
• Did Mark Zuckerberg actually steal the idea of Facebook from some of his fellow students and cash in all by himself?

Amazingly (for a film that has satisfied so many viewers presumably looking for these answers), the film doesn’t provide definitive information for any of these questions. Although The Social Network is grounded in actual court testimony (much of the testimony in the hearings is taken directly from the court transcripts), some knowledgeable critics have even complained that the depiction of the main character, Mark Zuckerberg, has serious inaccuracies [1,2,3]. In particular they argue that the film shows Zuckerberg to be

• insecure – but they say he is not;
• being obsessed with gaining an invitation to one of the prestigious, upper-class Harvard Final Clubs – but Zuckerberg denies having had an interest in that;
• being a social outcast who could not find a girlfriend or relate to girls – but apparently he has had a steady girlfriend since 2003.

Besides the issue of whether the characterization of Zuckerberg is authentic or not, the film doesn’t even say much of anything about the experience of computer social networking or how the software that drives it was constructed.

Despite these criticisms concerning the film’s failure to reveal authentic and realistic information about its main subjects, though, I would say that the film does have its virtues. We just have to realize that this film is not about gritty reality, but is actually more of an expressionistic fable about characters that exist partly in our collective imagination. And on these terms, the film does convey something of an interest. So for the moment, let’s consider the fictionalized characters as shown, who may differ considerably from the real personages after whom they were fashioned.

First let’s consider the surface reality of the film. From the outset we are plunged into something of a dreamworld, or at least the dreamworld of TV dramas. What we see is not how real people really act, look, or talk. The pacing is too fast, filled with snappy and smart verbal comebacks to any remark. The girls, most of them Asian, are all slender, glamorous, and enticing. This is more the stuff of male fantasies than of the literal truth. At a social mixer party that takes place at a Harvard Jewish fraternity in the film, a male friend of Eduardo, one of the film’s main characters, remarks that he wants to develop an algorithm to explain the connection between Jewish guys and Asian girls. Eduardo responds,

“I don’t think it’s that complicated. They’re hot, they’re smart, they’re not Jewish, and they can’t dance.”

I guess that just about sums it up.

But it is exactly this dreamworld that makes the film compelling. The story is not about social networks, but about a particularly bizarre social network, in fact the social network (as the title reminds us). In this case the social network concerns the principal characters, an odd pairing that fate and circumstance has thrown together:

• Mark Zuckerberg, the gifted and nerdy computer whiz who starts Facebook.
• Eduardo Saverin, a Brazilian math major at Harvard and Mark’s roommate. Eduardo works as Mark’s early financial advisor.
• The Winklevoss twins, two studly and patrician Harvard upperclassmen who want to recruit Mark to work for their own fledgling computer company.
• Sean Parker, a West Coast entrepreneur who was part of the founding of two well-known computer startups, Napster and Plaxo. Sean entices Mark to move Facebook out to the West Coast.

The plot is crafted as a variant on the classical “hero’s journey” [4], an oft-told story of a dangerous and lonely passage into a mysterious realm in quest of a hidden treasure – but fraught with multiple temptations and dire jeopardy. An iconic example of the hero’s journey is The Wizard of Oz (1939), and in fact I was reminded of David Lynch’s expressionistic turn on that very tale, Wild at Heart (1990), while watching this story unfold.

The film narrative is divided into three acts, and each one features alliances, betrayals, and the confrontation of threats. In each case the protagonist Zuckerberg is faced with a test that he manages to pass through by means of a shaky and not altogether trustworthy alliance. All three acts are framed, as I mentioned earlier, in the context of the later lawsuit deposition hearings, so they represent selected flashbacks of key events during the period under examination.

1. The Harvard Startup.
In the first act we meet the Aspergerish Zuckerberg talking to his girlfriend, Erica, and manically maintaining two conversation threads with the same person at the same time. She eventually zones out of his narcissistic and insensitive ramblings and announces that she is dumping him. Bewildered, Mark goes back to his room and vengefully calls Erica a bitch on his Friendster blog page before turning away from the too-complicated human world and spending all night hacking up a computer mashup, called “FaceMash”, that enables Harvard students to rate and compare how “hot” the coeds are on campus. Although this computer application is immediately popular, it gets Mark in trouble and leads to his suspension. But the bravura exploit draws the attention of the Winklevoss twins, who, together with their classmate Divya Narendra, have decided to start a local blogging and social networking platform at Harvard called “Harvard Connect”. They offer Mark the job of programming their service platform, and Mark agrees to join them. But it’s clear that these guys are just out to use Mark and exploit his programming genius. He’s just a tool for these sophisticates, who dominate Mark by virtue of their being upperclassmen, their immense wealth, and their social status. Meanwhile Mark secretly decides to go off and develop his own social networking platform, and this activity delays his work for the Winklevosses. These are the key events associated with the subsequent Winklevoss lawsuit against Zuckerberg, which claimed that Mark had stolen their idea (their “intellectual property”) for Facebook. We never do get much of a feeling whether Mark meant to screw the Winklevoss twins from the outset and how much of his own venture, initially known as “thefacebook.com”, was his original idea. Actually, it turns out that even his original FaceMash application was not such an original idea, since something very similar had appeared at MIT a year earlier [5].

But somehow the issue of Mark’s originality doesn’t seem to matter in this story told on screen. We are basically on the side of this innocent, naive kid struggling against the super-confident giants that are always expected to win, because the deck is inevitably stacked in their favor. Although on the surface Zuckerberg appears completely outmatched by the Winklevoss twins, in the end it is Mark, like the mouse topping the cat in the Tom and Jerry cartoon, who dumps the Winklevoss twins and plows ahead with his own company.

2. TheFaceBook.Com
Zuckerberg and his roommate and pal, Eduardo Saverin, set out to build thefacebook.com (which will eventually become Facebook.com). Saverin is no slouch, by the way – we are told early on that one summer he made $300,000 investing in oil futures, and he becomes the Chief Financial Officer for the startup company. Throughout The Social Network, much of the action is seen from Eduardo’s perspective, and he is something of a narrator for this tale. This feeling of him being the narrator arises naturally from the fact that Saverin was Mezrich’s principal source for The Accidental Billionaires (Zuckerberg did not cooperate on the book or the film). So we are just getting Saverin’s side of the story all the way along. It is not surprising then that Saverin is the most sympathetic and human of the principal characters in the film. In fact only his role (played well by Andrew Garfield) and that of Erica (Rooney Mara) who come across as real, believable people. The rest of the roles, though well-acted, are heavily dramatized caricatures.

Anyway, in the context of this tale as its cinematically told to us, it is evident that Saverin’s sensitivity and humanity are necessary counterbalances to Zuckerberg’s disconnected and obsessive focusing on his own narrow goals. After some successes both with Facebook and with meeting girls, the two close friends meet up with the next turning point, the encounter with Sean Parker.

3. The Journey Out West
In a way, Parker (in an enthusiastic performance by Justin Timberlake) turns out to be the key pivotal figure to the narrative. He is a dazzling and seductive Mephistopheles, as he completely awes Zuckerberg with his glitzy familiarity with California showbiz-style entrepreneurship. The innocent and genuine Saverin is no match for this smooth operator, and he is easily sidelined by Parker’s almost demonic presence. In fact there is a scene in a San Francisco nightclub that summons up the images of the devil, himself, in the form of Parker seductively leading the ensnared Zuckerberg into a netherworld of forbidden rituals. It is certainly the “innermost cave” [4] of danger for the naive Zuckerberg. Parker represents a different kind of threat than the Winklevoss twins. While the Winklevoss twins were imposing and formidable antagonists, they were external threats – like powerful beasts of the forest. But Parker is even more dangerous – he appears to be attacking Zuckerberg from within and threatening to capture his very soul. And the horrified Eduardo is powerless to stop him. Parker soon engineers a semi-takeover of Facebook by landing some big-time investors to invest heavily in Facebook, thereby establishing Parker as president of the company and forcing Eduardo out of the picture (he would later Zuckerberg over this).

In the end, though, fate plays its hand and saves Zuckerberg from being completely taken over by Parker, as Parker’s fast-paced social life leads to a cocaine bust that removes him from the scene. In the film’s closing sequences, Zuckerberg is seen as having triumphed over everyone. He cam pay off the lawsuits and still be the world’s youngest and perhaps most powerful billionaire.

Many people have criticized the real Zuckerberg for being an ego-obsessed monomaniac, using his calm demeanor to mask a heartless arrogance that is willing to exploit anyone (and everyone, when it comes to people’s privacy) who stands in his way. Yet in this film, anyway, his character comes across as essentially innocent. He is the lone hero who pursues his dream to do it his own way. He spurns easy money and never lets distraction get in the way of his efforts to make Facebook into the what he had originally envisioned: a mechanism to connect people together. So as a drama, The Social Network works. Even though Zuckerberg’s relentless drive led him to move on from his friendship with Saverin, he does get what he wanted: the Facebook that can change the world.

But this victory comes at a price, and at the end of the film, Zuckerberg is still thinking about Erica and wishing that he could get her back. He has created the social networking behemoth, but his own social network is defunct.

This brings us to the larger issue, beyond the hero’s journey depicted in the film, concerning what Facebook really offers to us. Zuckerberg said that it was all about people making connections. When you can do that effectively online with Facebook, you can presumably find out what your friends are doing, eating, drinking, and watching. But the way Facebook works, subtlety and context are lost, and so, too, is privacy

In my view Facebook does not have a magic formula for social interaction. It was simply slightly better and slightly less bothersome than its competitors, and in the power-law economics of global electronic commerce, the leader, no matter how small its initial lead, will dominate overwhelmingly in the marketplace, whether it's in search engines (Google), operating systems (Microsoft), or social platforms (Facebook). And since Facebook is now so pervasive, the information that it has collected about everyone is enormously valuable to commercial enterprises, who will pay high fees to get at that information and make Facebook even more wealthy – a wealth that has been amassed by its acquiring and aggregating personal information from you and me. But we should not be seduced by mere size. As a social tool, Facebook is no more innovative than mass-market TV.

Facebook in fact is based on a reductionist, Objectivist view of reality – an impoverished perspective founded on a simplified and uniform ontology (mental model of the world). In terms of world modelling, it has always been the goal of the natural sciences to develop a universal model of reality, and we all know about the great advances in physics, chemistry, and biology towards this direction. But the complexity of human social interactions is well beyond the explanatory powers of the natural sciences. It is admittedly true that it is possible to employ simplified, quasi-universal ontologies that cover simple products and processes that we use for common and straightforward actions. But the human social world is at the other end of the spectrum in terms of complexity, and it is precisely that sphere of activity that will not succumb to such simplicity. In the social domain, everyone develops their own mental model of reality based on what they can learn from others and from their local contexts. To interact effectively in society, one has to have empathy: one’s mental model of reality must include the notion of other people who have their own, different mental models of the world – and they in turn have mental models that include guesses concerning what our own mental models may be like to them. We do this all the time, almost unconsciously, when we try to navigate in the social world, but in fact it is an extraordinarily complex mesh of multiple models within multiple models.

There are people, however, who have difficulty empathizing, the more extreme examples of whom may exhibit autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, and ADHD. Since they don’t empathize and imagine the mental models of others, they don’t see a social world out there of multiple models. For them, the external world, including it social aspects, has only a single, universal model. It would be natural for such a person to come to the idea that the way to extend our understanding of that single, social model is to connect as many people as possible together so that they can all share what they know. This is apparently how Mark Zuckerberg, and people like him, thinks. That’s why the mere act of social connection was so fundamental to him and became his mantra. In this way of thinking, when a person connects with a “friend”, he is connecting with someone who is on the path to being mentally identical to him. They are just at various stages along that path towards comprehending the universal ontology.

But we should not let such empathy-challenged people wire us into a social system that diminishes the rich potential of our interactions. Deep down, we know, of course, that the idea of a “friend” is far more subtle than the way it has been defined in Facebook. In fact the real meaning of friend, just as the meaning of love, is actually so deep and context dependent, that it has forever challenged the world’s poets and artists. And each beautiful poem and work of art that has been produced on these subjects has been understood individually by each listener/observer in terms of his or her own meaningful local context. In contrast, Facebook, as it stands today as the product of Objectivist computer geeks, lumps every connection with another user as simply an unqualified and undistinguished “friend”. You may be electronically connected by this process, but these are often meaningless connections. As Zadie Smith reminded us [3], we need computer systems that empower us to be even more human, not reductionist-driven systems that only provide us with a fast, but barren, landscape of meaningless connections. Those better systems that we need will certainly come eventually, I am sure, and when they do, they will be produced by technically skilled teams that can go beyond reductionism and incorporate the poetry and empathic compassion of complex social interactions.
★★★½

Notes:

1. David Kirkpactrick, “What’s True in the Facebook Movie”, The Daily Beast, September 30, 2010, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/09/30/the-facebook-and-zuckerberg-in-the-social-network-arent-real.html.
2. Jose Antonio Vargas, “The Face of Facebook”, The New Yorker, September 20, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas?currentPage=all.
3. Zadie Smith, “Generation Why?”, The New York Review of Books, December 23, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/nov/25/generation-why/?pagination=false
4. Christopher Vogler, The Writer’s Journey, (1992).
5. Facemash was preceded at MIT by “Hot or Not” in 2002. See http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N69/69hotornot.69n.html.