The Atlantic

One Way <em>The Social Network </em>Got Facebook Right

Over the 15 years since its founding, Facebook has marketed itself—and tried to justify itself—through a misleadingly humanistic premise.
Source: Merrick Morton / Columbia Pictures / Courtesy of Everett Collection / Gabriel Bouys / AFP / Getty / The Atlantic

Because it is the 15th birthday of Facebook, and because that span seems both an extremely short and an extremely long amount of time for Facebook to have existed, I recently rewatched The Social Network, David Fincher’s 2010 film about the founding of the website that would reshape the world.

Here’s one thing that’s striking today about the movie: how efficiently this work of mythmaking, with its claustrophobic settings and taut instrumentals and don’t-go-through-that-door ironies, doubles as a . In the years that have passed since Mark Zuckerberg built the site that became TheFacebook (, the myth pretty much requires its contributors to add), the hacker’s ethos, , has steadily hacked its way into people’s lives. So much has been moved. So much has been broken. And , written by Aaron Sorkin and featuring Jesse Eisenberg as the shuffling, shower-shoe-wearing founder, anticipated some of the fallout. The movie’s is set to a choral version of Radiohead’s “,” a song that sings of longing and belonging and

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