Fincher's Facebook

As a director, no one can accuse David Fincher of running away from disagreeable things. Serial killers and bare-knuckle fistfights have been his bread and butter for the most part. Why he decided to make The Social Network, though, is beyond me. A dorm room drama with a side of financial hooha, the film does not have a point, does not know if it has a hero or only villains, and does nothing to explore the really deep issues that it dances around. It is less a statement on the nature of these times than a product of the general confusion that reigns in the great valley of ethics and technology.

I am not here (on a technology and ethics blog) to talk about great performances, for which it may be acknowledged that at least Jesse Eisenberg's Mark Zuckerberg and Justin Timberlake's Sean Parker constitute a couple of decent contenders.  It has long (long, long...) been the case that Hollywood's pool of acting talent far exceeds its suppy of cinematic vehicles worthy of them. Nor do I wish to deny that the film manages, albeit it a rather formulaic way, to make a dramatically captivating tale of personal betrayals and egomania out of what you might call the classic story of the classic nerd. I suppose I could bite halfway into the summary on Rotten Tomatoes, "Impeccably scripted, beautifully directed, and filled with fine performances, The Social Network is a riveting, ambitious example of modern filmmaking at its finest." The first half, I suppose - though after it was over, my partner and I both kind of wondered aloud why anyone would really care about the story once you knew how it unfolds. As for "modern filmmaking at its finest", I hope not. Modern filmmaking at its finest ought to explore philosophical and social issues in a profound and aesthetically probing way; it ought to be art, specifically. The various comparisons to Citizen Kane that appear explicitly or otherwise in the capsule quotes on RottenTomatoes.com seem to me particularly inappropriate. That film works on so many levels it's hard to count; utilizes revolutionary cinematic techniques; and more than anything, probes its subject so deeply you can feel the nerves jangling and smell its breath. By comparison, The Social Network is nothing more than a stock Hollywood drama with a slightly unusual slant.

Why ain't this art? For one thing, the status of Mark Zuckerberg throughout the film seems to gyrate between admirable genius and objectionable "asshole" - a word used twice to describe him, and which seems to bookend the film. (That such language is startling enough to stand out in this way gives you an idea just what thin soup we are dealing with here.) Is Zuckerberg a technical genius with a keen sense of social needs and trends, or merely a hacker who managed to steal an idea from other Harvard students and through a combination of luck and deceit rode it to fame and fortune? The film version of Zuckerberg is quick with bright-sounding comeback quips, arrogant and consdescending to just about everyone around him. Legal proceedings to him are opportunities to stare out the window; a hurt and angry friend is just another body in the room. Yet, Fincher manages to make him just this side of cute and lovable too, largely on the strength of his abiding confidence in his own mission, and misguided but recognizably vulnerable appeals to people who he has hurt. The man emerges from the film as neither a really good dude, nor a really bad dude, just a somewhat confused kid who grew up too fast. Whether that is adequate subject matter for a film is a matter of taste, I guess, but for me, the character is neither tragic nor heroic nor evil, just morally and spiritually confused

Apart from the uninspired treatment of Zuckerberg's character, the film raises issues in ethics and technology, but does virtually nothing to move the debate forward, or even deepen the issues for our contemplation. Obviously, the moving idea behind it is the question of intellectual property rights. The Winklevosss brothers who sued Zuckerberg over Facebook and received a $20 million settlement are given plenty of screen time, but the matter of what constitutes an original idea, or whether an idea in itself constitutes intellectual property, or what material evidence is relevant to the question of who had an idea first, or what constitutes "theft" of creative ideas, or what constitutes deception with regard to informal working relationships - all this is somehow alluded to, but at best superficially explored. This is in spite of the fact that the film partly hinges around a hearing in which evidence is presented for and against such claims. These scenes largely involve a personal standoff between Zuckerberg and one or more of the examining attorneys; there is very little to make you think about the issues involved, which are among the most difficult and serious issues before us as a society.

This is disappointing for anyone who is looking to find insights, or even a particularly incisive or perspicuous presentation of issues, here. Fincher has shown some depth in exploring the psychology of the serial killer in Seven (which I have seen) and Zodiac (which I have not seen but read enough about). One might have expected that this entry into the subject matter of technology and its relationship to society would have produced similar depth. Instead, we get a gooey admixture of romantic and financial subplots and submerged philosophical issues. Zuckerberg is heard averring that the Winklevoss brothers are merely pretentious incompetents while he himself is the creative genius. But the question as to what that means, or what would constitute a reason for making that judgment, is left hanging throughout the film. There is even a suggestion that he developed Facebook while pretending to work for them as a matter of personal revenge for a perceived insult, thereby distracting attention from the potentially much more interesting issue of how society might navigate the competing claims of creative initiative.

The superficial approach to ethical issues is further emphasized by the portrayal of Sean Parker, a Napster founder played by Justin Timberlake. The whole Napster episode and file-sharing in general raises issues big enough for a separate film, and one might have expected that the prominent role given to Parker in this film would bring the moral issues under the surface bubbling up. But far from it. Parker is identified early on as a drug abuser and manipulative egomaniac, and his 2006 arrest for cocaine possession is duly played out, while the whole question of a Napster/Facebook connection - perhaps it represents some unstable emulsion of technical genius and moral decay among "Generation Y" (or Z, or on beyond Zebra) - is barely given a nod. The only impact Parker's arrest has on Facebook is to turn Zuckerberg's face glum and send him to his own site to "friend" an ex-girlfriend. The whole second half of the film is a missed opportunity to say something interesting on this subject.

Privacy? Anybody heard of any privacy issues regarding Facebook, or social networking in general? It is true that the film presents as a kickoff issue Zuckerberg's zeal to create a site on which he can embarrass the girl who has just dumped him. But to the extent that this is explored, it is mainly as a facet of Zuckerberg's juvenile emotional structure. It is a bit of character-building, and has little to contribute to our understanding of privacy or abuse in social networking. Zuckerberg is morally demeaned by his assinine motivations, but the fact that the enterprise facilitates such abuses, and the many ways in which sites like it contribute to the violation of privacy, is a subject that is shoved far under the rug as the more Hollywood-friendly personal dramas and corporate clashes are unfolded. Speaking of boardroom and bedroom, what about the embarrassments people have faced after sharing things on Facebook that ended up being read out to them in a job interview, or by a professor, or a potential lover? Don't expect to see much about that in the film that proudly proclaims its subject matter as "the social network". Ditto the burning issue of anonymity and identity assumption on social netowkring sites. Allusions and over-the-shoulder glances at these sorts of questions are all Fincher can spare while servicing the narrative requirements of an audience trained to latch onto one-line putdowns, predictable betrayals and obvious moral contradictions.

How about the fact that some people, not least of all high school and college age kids who would do much better to study their calculus and chemistry texts, are all but addicted to Facebook, spending hours a day on it? That is apparently not good movie material either. And if quite a lot of the 500 million-plus members think the whole thing is boring, stupid, intrusive, and a waste of time; if many of them basically joined Facebook just to see what all the fuss is about; if millions of Facebook members have chatted with an old buddy or flame a couple of times, acknowledged a few "friend" requests from people they later realized they didn't really want to be "friends" with, and then forgot about the whole thing - does FB still seem like such a great idea? Well, there's no questioning along those lines in the film; it would take the punch out of the presentation of FB as a phenomenon worthy of big-budget cinema. The denouement of the film starts with Facebook passing the 1,000,000 member mark, as if that in itself is a terrific thing. What if it is a deplorable thing? You won't find much in this film to detract from the sense that the Facebook juggernaut is ultimately something we should  drop our jaws and admire, after all is said and done and the lawsuits are behind us. Zuck may be a jerk, it seems to say, but "you don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies". And by the time the closing sequence has rolled by you know that once you have 500 million friends you can always pay off those enemies and perhaps make yourself feel okay about the whole thing. Maybe they will feel okay too.

As for the generation that has largely made Facebook the phenomenon it is, they come off as vapid, party-going types who got o fancy schools, drink beer, have stripper parties, suck up to the rich and famous, and admire people for all the wrong reasons. No doubt a lot of them are just like that; but so are a lot of every other generation. What, then, is special or unique about the generation that grew up in the digital age, indeed the HTTP age? I didn't see much in the film that asks a question remotely so interesting. Perhaps unwittingly (though I doubt it) the film manages to emphasize the childishness of the millenials by casting Brenda Song, the cute but infinitely spoiled and mindlessly materialistic London from Disney Channel's "Suite Life of Zach and Cody", as one of the Facebook team's groupies. (London, I mean Brenda, giving blow jobs in a bathroom stall? Nawwww...!) But this stereotype needs to be examined, not just trotted out to fund the thrilling story of Zuckerberg's rise to prominence on the social mania of his peers.

It is duly noted in the closing sequence that Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world. Okay, I'm jealous - well, of the first $10 million or so, anyway; I've never been able to imagine what I would do with even $25 million, much less a billion. Does the film examine the unique social phenomenon of very young computer types who manage to come up with a hot new web site and either take it public or sell it for millions of dollars? Not really: Zuckerberg's wealth and his relationship to it are not really explored; he is depicted as an idealist who does not  really care about money all that much, and is just in it for the fun and perhaps some prestige. Maybe that is true of the real life Zuckerberg, but still it is yet another alternative theme that is not really developed.

To be absolutely fair, I must admit that the film is inspiring in a certain way; it triggers a kind of slap-happy feeling that you, too, could come up with a brilliant idea that would match some untapped social sentiment and make you rich - only you would do it with a much more upstanding character, not have to screw your friends along the way, and perhaps use the money to save the world. But this only shows that the model of a brilliant Harvard undergrad leading a quasi-Bohemian life while rising to fame (or notoriety) and fortune is very seductive, a life that anyone with a mission and a sense of self-worth might wish he had led and might possibly believe he could still lead. I am not so sure I want to put such seduction in the positive column when scoring a film.

I must say I regret having to be such a curmudgeon. It is not that this film is worse than a million other Hollywood releases; it's better, in fact, than quite a few. It's just that the billing and the reviews do not really match what is achieved. When all is said and done, the film leaves you thinking a lot more about a slightly troubled individual than about the enormous social questions raised by his venture. It just doesn't have much to say about issues on which we are all waiting for helpful insights of any sort. But the will to say nothing is pretty strong in the arts these days, so maybe this is after all, if perversely, the movie of the decade.

Anonymous, Eponymous, Pseudonymous: What's in a Name?

So, what excuse do I have for starting this blog last Monday and then not posting for a week? Er, just giving Google's squiddies time to find me, perhaps. It sounds good anyway. Being found is becoming more and more like, well, being, isn't it? Being ungooglable is worse than being anonymous, or maybe just the same thing; and being eponymous is just like being John Malkovich, at least in the scene where we go inside his head and everything says "Malkovich... Malkovich... Malkovich". No one can ever be 100% anonymous (as Eliot Spitzer just found out), or really eponymous (" 'Tony Alterman', the Google search result of the human being by the same name...") or synonymous with just about anything except perhaps your DNA code. And the last thing many people want today is to see "No results found for [your name here]." But there was a time, believe me, when people felt differently; say oh, about 7 or 8 years ago...

Not long after 9/11/01, every company that had any claim on imaging technology was trying to jump into the biometric identification fray, hoping to make a killing on terror (terrible pun intended). Not that the technology was anywhere near the task of correctly picking a known terrorist out of a crowd; but it sounded like the answer to our hopes and dreams of feeling safe again. Yet already, the prospect of having our imaged body parts encoded on ID cards and distributed to vendors of everything from burritos to airline tickets, was causing anxiety among those who did not want to see the tragedy of 2001 turned into an excuse to create the society of 1984. What happens to the right to privacy when the proliferation of biometric imaging turns your fingerprint, your face, your hand geometry and your DNA into commodities that can be demanded for identification, not to mention exchanged like social security numbers for fun and profit?

Sun Microsystems was one such company that was quick to rush in with an airport identification scheme. Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun, and a culturally sophisticated individual who is always ready with a pithy philosophical comment, was quoted as saying that we need new mechanisms to "govern privacy while at the same time resetting expectations about civil liberties"; and that "I'm for the right to privacy but not necessarily the right to anonymity". Now, let's ignore the crack about "resetting expections about civil liberties" so that Sun can more effectively market its products. My interest is more in the distinction between "privacy" and "anonymity" that is being drawn here. What exactly do they mean, in this context?

Suppose I am presenting myself in person to other individuals, who represent commercial or governmental interests, and to get what I want from them (an airline ticket, access to my bank account, or a burrito, for instance) I have to present some image - in abstract mathematical form, of course, since biometric id's are not stored as images but as points in a mathematical landscape - but it represents something that is supposed to be uniquely me. Is the idea supposed to be that what I give up here is just my anonymity, and not my privacy?

I think it is quite the opposite. When I am required to let someone do a digital scan of my face in order to get through the security check, so far as I can tell, I have not yet given up my anonymity - the staff who determine whether I passed the test don't even have to have my name, at least in theory, or any other identifying information about me whatsoever - but I think my privacy has surely been compromised, as I have already given up for public use and consumption the very thing I thought was sacrosanct, control over my own body. No, I am not in chains nor have I been tortured or otherwise subjected to pain or serious discomfort. Nevertheless, the details of what makes me unique as a human being were not simply copied, in their superficial aspect, for art or amusement, but were demanded, scanned, anlayzed, encoded, and stored in a database. I used to think that it's my damn business, thanks very much, whether you should know anything more about my body than I care to make visible in public. So much for that idea. (If you think this is just idle fussing, wait until the day it is discovered that some biometric information can be used to detect some disease or deformity that you'd rather not disclose.)

Now, what about anonymity? Most likely, that's gone too. It's gone in more or less the same way that it would be if I were required to carry around an RFID chip with my name and SSN encoded on it. (No surprise that these are two competing ideas for the design of the driver's license of the future.) Once I offer my fingerprints to the burrito place to scan, they can connect them with my name and other personal info. Why? Well, maybe I just give it to them to enter into their database. But all I really have to do is allow them to associate the biometric image with a credit card number, from which Bob's Burrito can glean everything from my name to my home address for the last 12 years (at least if they're willing to pay enough for it). And of course with the EZPass-like airport card, the very point is to identify me. When the FBI or the Police Department sets up security cameras that can scan faces in a crowd and compare them with a database of known criminals or terrorists, the point, again, is to identify not merely the face but the name and background of the individual. So, really, anonymity is out the door too.

Now, all of this is just a bit of a preliminary to some recent discussions about anonymity and the Internet, for example, this piece by Andrew Kean. Kean is a fairly widely published technology writer, but his opinion piece here is not exactly a paradigm of subtlety or measured judgment. His subject is "The Curse of Internet Anonymity", and though he states that the issue " is actually a lot more complicated than it first appears" he does not really treat it as very complicated at all. Children, who he refers to as "Generation Facebook", are taught "to lie about who they are". Parents collaborate in this to protect kids from "the social scum –- the sexual predators, the financial scammers, the con artists, the bullies, and the gossips –- who are corrupting the Internet with their criminality, perversions, and incivility". Aside from lumping together sexual predators and "gossips" he manages to throw in a barb at people who use music-sharing sites for "killing the recorded music industry"! (If someone is in the midst of committing suicide as they are rapidly dying from a terminal disease, doesn't poisoning them count as euthanasia?) Kean does not fail to remind us that "real lives have been wrecked by the evil actions of anonymous Internet users" and that "vulgar and irresponsible anonymous Internet users are souring public discourse", etc. You get the general tenor of it.

There certainly has been a lot of bruhaha about anonymity lately, but IMHO it is almost all just as misplaced as Joy's comment. That is because, if there is a problem about anonymity, it is the lack of it that should trouble us, not it's alleged proliferation. People are not anonymous when they use a pseudonym; they are pseudonymous, which is hardly an offense. Until the Internet age, no one ever called anyone on the carpet for adopting a pseudonym or going by two different names. Cicero and Tully turn out to be the same guy, Mark Twain is exposed as really Samuel Clemens, Marian Evans turns out to have paraded as George Eliot - get out the torch let's burn their books, let's throw darts at their effigies; beter yet, let's delete their Wikipedia entries! Does it sound ludicrous? Okay. So that's what I think of this garbage about anonymity. There is nothing wrong with adopting a psuedonym, and never has been. I adopted one on my first blog; now I don't, but I respect anyone's right to do so.

People have all sorts of reasons for not wanting their written words to be associated with their live persona. Picture this: a guy writes a novel full of all sorts of passages that are loosely based on the intimate details of his relationship with his wife. But he has children, some of them still young, but old enough to read his book. Feeling that in spite of the fictionality of many of the passages his children would be shocked at the recognizable connection with their mother, he decides to publish under a different name, which he will protect carefully from being publicly associated with him. That's one example; let your imagination run wild and think of others.

People have the right to be pseudonymous. All other things being equal, people have the right not to be directly associated with what they write; what counts is the content of what is written, not the authorship relation itself. Someone who writes a book exposing certain people as mafia members or corrupt law enforcement personnel may go to great lengths to keep his identity secret. Not only Marian Evans in the 19th c. but Wendy Carlos in the 20th adopted false names and hid their identities because they feared not being taken seriously if they went public as women. Whether they were right or not, it is clear that the moral weight for their contemporaries lay in protecting their pseudonyms, not outing them.

Publishing under a false name is not too different from being anonymous. But it is a little different: for "Anonymous", the most popular author in history, can publish an endless number of pieces which can only be linked together forensically; whereas "Joachim Pumpernickel" can, at least in principle, become a unique authorial persona, just not one that is tied to a known individual. This is another way in which the current flap about "anonymity" is off the mark. Someone who writes a blog or publishes reviews on Amazon under the name "Plexiglas" (made it up - apologies if there is anyone who actually does) can have a style, personality, history - in effect, an identity - over time, such that if they forget to sign one of their posts someone might conceivably be able to say, "Oh, that sounds like something Plexiglas would have said". (There was - is? - a mathematical group that published under the name "Bourbaki", though there was no person by that name in the group. "Bourbaki" had an identifiable perspective on mathematics. The name was apparently that of a French army officer.)

Psudonymous bloggers and posters are not violating anyone's trust, nor are they necessarily exercising undue caution or obscurity. People have a right to privacy, and they have a right to participate in public forums at the same time. I should be able to walk into a crowd without having my face scanned and matched with a biometric database. I should be able to speak in public without telling everyone my real name. Not being a criminal, nor having malicious intent, I should be able to use any name I want, or none, when doing so does not in itself harm anyone. When I say "in itself", I am comparing it with, for instance, someone who signs someone else's name on a check, or falsely prefixes "Dr." to his name, or claims to be a different person so he can get a second (third, fourth...) marriage license or access to additional government benefits. This is spoofing, or just plain fraud, for here, deceiving someone about the name is to deceive them about your entitlement to certain social benefits that you are not, in fact, entitled to. This sort of person does not want anonymity either; they want a false name. Their real name only matters insofar as it can help prosecute them. But they can be prosecuted under any name.

In the cases that Mr. Kean mentions - the woman who caused a little girl to commit suicide after pretending to be her friend, people whose reputations or sexual orientation are made the object of assault or derision in popular electronic forums - anonymity has nothing to do with the issue. Suppose the writers were named Jane Smith, John Brown and Bill Jones, and they posted their names; how would this make a difference? They would not be anonymous, but the moral problem with their obscure poisoned pen letters would be the same. Or, suppose they had easily identifiable names - wouldn't this be worse? Because at least some people would have the sense to write off the accusations of an obviously pseudonymous writer, or to take them with a grain of salt, whereas if people see a name that looks easily identifiable they are likely to give more credence to the allegations.

Objection: "But at least if you can identify them you can hold them responsible for their actions." Depends who "them" is here, because you can hold "the author of that particular nasty post" responsible for their actions too (this is called a "definite description", in the language of philosophy), though you don't know who it is that wrote it. Anonymity is never enough; people can be easily tracked down, too easily, from a single comment on a message board to a live human being in the back room of a fourth floor walk-up in Baltimore. Our lack or anonymity is scary. What is scary about the nasty creatures in cyberspace is not their anonymity, but their irresponsibility. They think they are safe from suffering the consequences of their actions, or indeed they desire bad consequences for the victim, and think they will not endure anything similar themselves. But it is not the fact that they fail to announce their names that makes their actions wrong. What is wrong is equally so whether they state their names, regular pseudonyms, ephemeral screen names or just post Anonymously. The post was, after all, written by a person, the same person regardless of the name(s) they use. They may be difficult to physically track down whether they are anonymous or not. Once they have been tracked down, they can be held accountable.

The anonymity issue is a red herring. A jerk is a jerk (that's eponymous, I think) - let someone use their name, a different name, no name, or ten names, what counts in the problem cases is that they are venal and cowardly, not that they are anonymous. I would bet there are hundreds of people named George Bush around the world. Let them all sign their posts "George Bush" - someone is sure to scream "anonymous blogger!", "spoofer!" etc. maybe we should all change our names to George Bush (please, whatever you're about to do, don't do it on your computer...) - then the anonymity business will go away and we can turn our attention to the people behind the names.

Indeed, multipseudonymity can be far more devastating than anonymity; one malicious individual can present as a whole community, and mount an attack on someone who feels the burden of agreement among several apparent authors. The unethical nature of this is clearly not tied to mudslinging alone. Suppose the owner of a bed and breakfast periodically logs into a popular travel site from a different email address and posts glowing reviews of their shabby, mildewy, boarding house. No one was dissed. But everyone has potentially been deceived, misled. Suppose the owner used her real name in one of these reviews; would it make a difference? Would people do enough research to figure out that it was the owner herself writing? Again, names in cyberspace are generally pretty meaningless, except for widely known personalities (and even then there's the George Bush problem, but I'll let that rest).

Anonymity makes no difference. The real problems have been around forever: deception, cruelty, dishonesty, irresponsibility. The author of a plagiarized book or term paper is more dishonest in their use of a name, and their actions more reprehensible, than any "anonymous" instant message user who does not deceive but merely hides their identity. Deceiving the person(s) on the receiving end of a communication is unethical, not because you hide your name but because you deceive. Dragging people's names through the dirt is obnoxious behavior, and doing it "anonymously" is cowardly behavior; hurting people intentionally is immoral, and doing it through anonymous posts, like spraypainting "Jill is a lesbian" on the side of the school, is disgusting. Anonymity is not new, and is in fact a right that we must hold on to. The fact that it can assist one in doing harm should not blind us to the value of this right. When anonymity goes out the door, so does privacy, to an extent, and the ability to exercise free speech and speak unpleasant truths without suffering evil consequences. Let's identify the problem correctly and stop moaning about anonymity, before the loss of it turns around and bites us in our virtual behinds.