The geeks, we know, will inherit the Earth. The question is, what kind of Earth will it be, when the basis of that inheritance is the kind of libertarian playfulness in which all human behaviour is data, and all humans are products, happy to license their privacy to a remote billionaire on the basis that it’s good to be connected, even if that connection occasionally supports unpleasant things such as the distortion of democracy, fake news, hate speech, hatred, all that?
I had a look at my Facebook page while watching this film. Mostly, it’s benign. There’s some stale politics on there, cat pictures, a sick dog, a rude viral graffito about our future prime minister and some ads for magic flip-flops and Club Med holidays.
I’m not likely to buy magic flip-flops or sign up for a Mediterranean holiday camp so there’s something odd going on with my algorithm. But I understand that the content of my page is the result of the stuff I put in. If I like my friend’s cat picture, there will be cats. And why not? Cats are beautiful. If I decide to hate the police, or become a nationalist loon, the page will super-serve my inadequacies. Facebook exists in the margins of insinuation.
The same thing is going on with this film. It is, to a large extent, a PR job, designed to show Facebook is responding to the bad publicity it received via the Cambridge Analytica affair, and other scandals.
Mark Zuckerberg is not interviewed, which is good for him. Instead, we meet a number of tame Facebook employees who are identified only by their first names, a quirk which — along with the Steven Mackintosh voiceover and the sub-Philip Glass soundtrack — lends an air of corporate video to the endeavour.
Hema, the director of Social Good, is trying to use Facebook to solve the worldwide shortage of blood donors. Yann is building a multi-million-dollar AI lab to work on Live Pose Detection, to understand body language and emotions.
Jonny is lecturing new recruits (Noobs) about how Facebook is a company where making money is secondary. “We don’t believe in being arseholes,” he says, because this is a place of corporate informality, where work takes place on a campus with free sweets, bicycles, shops and an arcade. In this coder’s utopia, all employees have two birthdays: their own and their Faceversary, where they celebrate their years of active service.
There are two metaphors at work here. One suggests that Facebook has released a genie from a bottle, and the problem for the company (and all of us) is how to control the magical, mythical creature.
The other suggests that the invention of the internet is akin to the invention of the railroad, which — in an American context — opened up the country in ways that hadn’t been foreseen, prompting anarchy, economic growth and changing everything. What’s not to like?
Inside The Social Network: Facebook’s Difficult Year is on BBC Two at 9pm tonight
