So I went to see THE SOCIAL NETWORK on Saturday. In case you don’t know, the film chronicles wild-savant-genius Mark Zuckerberg and his founding of the popular social networking site Facebook. The film opens with Zuckerberg being dumped by his girlfriend. In this opening, he’s portrayed as a insanely smart, unselfconscious genius-asshole. As the film goes on, Zuckerberg continues to play the role of genius-asshole, sometimes, he is marked with a kindness that strikes the viewer more as naive than genuine.

But this is just a film. A film that is based on a book that is characterized more as “juicy fun” than “reportage” (from the Mark Zuckherberg wikipedia page linked above).

That being said, several things fascinated me about this film:

1. Zuckerberg’s portrayal: People seriously can’t get enough of this romanticized genius bullshit. It’s pretty pathetic, if you ask me.
2. The whole concept of the “social network” in relation to Zuckerberg, especially in terms of Agamben’s notion of the exception.
3. Facebook itself as Agamben’s apparatus.

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