When David Fincher’s Facebook original story “The Social Network” premiered 16 years ago, it wowed critics with its witty dialogue and nuanced characterization. Aaron Sorkin won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Jesse Eisenberg was praised for his portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg as an aggrieved yet triumphant prodigy. Playing a rising tech mogul earned Eisenberg an Oscar nomination and made him synonymous with Zuckerberg—not a bad thing when Zuckerberg was named Time’s Person of the Year in 2010.
Since then, a lot has changed. Today, Eisenberg balks at being associated with the tech marvel whose wealth, influence and impunity make him more like an oligarch than a scrappy college student. Eisenberg declined to reprise the role in Sorkin’s new pseudo-sequel Social Reckoning, and Jeremy Strong took over the role.
“He just doesn’t want to be lumped in with Mark Zuckerberg anymore,” Sorkin told Vanity Fair’s Eisenberg. “He didn’t like it when kids came up to him at the airport with business cards that said ‘I’m the CEO, bitch’ and asked him to sign them.”
“A Social Reckoning,” published Friday, reflects Eisenberg’s shift in attitude toward Zuckerberg on a macro level. Gone is Eisenberg’s smug, impish charm as a hooded Harvard dropout. Now, Strong’s Zach has a tailored suit and the sternness of a tyrant. Facebook (now Meta) is no longer the startup that launched a billion friend requests in dorm rooms; the company is described as a sinister and ruthless force, a tool used by kids to bully each other and by extremists to spread hate speech. The film’s climax coincides with the January 6 rebellion, which Zuckerberg watched unfold from his “War Room.”
This isn’t the only movie this season to portray the rise of tech giants as a sobering sign of the times. “Social Reckoning” premieres on the same day as “Musk,” Alex Gibney’s mega-documentary about Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, a nearly four-hour insightful documentary that Musk dismissed as a “hit.” Next week, You Can See Everything, a genre-crossing documentary in which co-director Nathan Fielder has a chilling meeting with Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes as he probes her psyche before she was imprisoned. On Christmas Day, you can watch Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial , a biopic that, according to early reviews, portrays OpenAI CEO Sam Altman as an amoral, manipulative, and unscrupulous man. Television isn’t excluded either: Graham Moore’s The Altruist, a Netflix limited series about the rise and fall of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, will launch in November.
Unlike the films that defined the 2010s wave of tech optimism, such as “The Community” and the 2013 Steve Jobs biopic “Jobs,” both of which were Sorkin-written stories that mapped the founder’s rise to the classic rhythms of the hero’s journey, this new wave of tech movies is imbued with an undercurrent of fear.
If the 2010s proved that tech companies have immense power, these new movies are making their subjects realize that they also carry enormous responsibilities.
The next act in the billionaire’s origin story is about the consequences — or lack thereof
Jeremy Strong stars as Mark Zuckerberg in “Social Reckoning.” sony
In the climactic rebellion scene in “Social Reckoning,” a flash of guilt and panic flashes across Zuckerberg’s face when he hears the news. The Facebook CEO’s notorious “free speech absolutism” is being put to the ultimate test as President Donald Trump shares a series of posts cheering on the rioters.
Although Zuckerberg eventually agreed, at the urging of his inner circle, to suspend the president’s account amid the violence, the film ends with a reality check: Meta has since abandoned fact-checking, not just on politicians and political ads, but on everything. Trump’s Facebook account was restored in 2023.
That’s the bleak postscript to The Social Network’s final title card, a kiss-off to Harvard’s then-president mocking Facebook’s profit potential: “Mark Zuckerberg is the world’s youngest billionaire.” The closing credits song is The Beatles’ “Baby, You’re Rich.”
While “Social War” isn’t exactly kind to Zuckerberg, it reflects curiosity about what he accomplished and all the big names he had to piss off along the way. There’s a reason “I’m the CEO, bitch” has become a cultural touchstone—this precocious, defiant swagger felt illuminating at the dawn of the social media empire. For a generation of millennial founders, this is downright inspiring.
As a companion piece, “Social Reckoning” is forced to grapple with the aggressive PR its predecessor provided Zuckerberg, whether intentional or not. The real Zuckerberg went through his own evolution (or, some might say, devolution) as CEO, accelerating his free-speech-at-all-costs rhetoric and currying favor with Trump during his second presidential term.
Zuckerberg’s image in popular culture has also become more mean-spirited and ominous. In “A Social Reckoning,” Strong Zuckerberg insists that Facebook should not be the arbiter of hate speech and misinformation, but a “public square” where all self-expression can coexist. “This is a business,” he declares in one scene. “You know why we don’t fact-check ads? Because we don’t have to.”
The film clearly shows the consequences of this policy. Most of the action has focused on the whistleblower scandal in 2021, when former Facebook employee Frances Haugen leaked tens of thousands of internal documents. The evidence suggests Facebook’s algorithms are designed to spread inflammatory content, push users into extremist groups and, in Haugen’s words, “prioritize profits over safety.”
“Since he was 19, Mark has been surrounded by people telling him he’s doing a good job,” Haugen later told Bloomberg, calling for him to resign as CEO. She added, “We can demonize Zuckerberg, but that won’t make him heal any faster.”
“Social Reckoning” makes this point as well, dotting Zuckerberg’s orbit with pretentious yes-men, crisis PR gurus and sartorial experts. Still, the movie doesn’t let him off the hook. In one scene, when Strong approached 38% of Facebook users with an initiative to improve security measures (in exchange for losing about 1% of engagement), the CEO’s response was indifferent. He chose to stay engaged.
Big Tech’s promises are starting to look like threats
Elizabeth Holmes in “You Can See Everything.” A24
Trends in art and film often reflect popular appetites, and this also applies to today’s tech-apocalypse.
What does it say about our gullibility that founders like Holmes and Bankman-Fried have accomplished so much on the backs of flattery and false promises from the media? What does it mean for our current structure that people like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Altman continue to exercise astonishing influence over what we see, what we feel, and even who we vote for?
To filmmakers like Sorkin, Gibney, Field, and Guadagnino—and their eager audiences—it was a sign that we were in big trouble.
Young people, in particular, are increasingly anxious about artificial intelligence, technological dominance and the broader distribution of wealth. A recent NBC News poll found that 47% of voters ages 18 to 29 have a negative view of capitalism, up from 22% in 2018. Last year, during Musk’s tenure at Government Effectiveness, a UMass Amherst poll found that nearly half of Americans described the United States as an oligarchy.
Musk’s outsized role in the Trump administration underscores the reality that the tech brothers have become protagonists both on and off screen. Their inventions are impacting everything from teenage mental health to international election results. Researchers believe they could lead to the demise of our species, with some likening the possibility to flipping a coin.
Once upon a time, in the Obama era of hope, we were fascinated by the promise and potential of technological advancement. Just think of what humans can do with tools!
Now we have to take a good look at what we are doing.