The Class Wounds of a Jewish Upstart

„The Social Network is many things, but mainly it is a dazzling polemic. Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher have performed an ingenious feat. They have used the old-fashioned medium of film, now under siege by the digital culture, to expose Facebook's manipulative culture of seeming self-exposure. When Mr. Sorkin told New York magazine that I don't want my fidelity to be the truth; I want it to be storytelling, he was cleverly turning the tables on Facebook. With its perpetual invitation to treat other people as levers in a game of social climbing and control, Facebook puts reality up for sale to the most potent imagination.

Any reproach Mr. Zuckerberg might make to Mr. Sorkin for fictionalizing his life and portraying him in an unflattering light would crumble under the irony of Facebook's culture of self-fabrication. In the film, the Zuckerberg character's retort to a lawyer who is deposing him in one of the two lawsuits he is involved in, a caustic quip to the effect that everyone lies under oath, reflects the profitable temptation to play fast and loose with the truth that is at the heart of Facebook's universe.

But Mr. Sorkin is a master storyteller, and he is not simply laying bare Facebook's disconnected claims of connectedness. He is portraying the very social complexity that would provoke someone to not only invent the sanitized, asocial context of Facebook, but impel someone to join it. Much has already been written about the film's opening scene, in which Zuckerberg is rejected and  humiliated by a girl, resulting in the Wound that leads to revenge and triumph. But the even more fundamental factor in the birth of Facebook is the social atmosphere of Harvard.”