The first thing you’ll notice about the first trailer for The Social Reckoning is how much Jeremy Strong sounds like Mark Zuckerberg.
Like, it’s uncanny! It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end because you’re looking at Kendall Roy and hearing Zuck. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
Strong, an actor known for his deep commitment to a performance, sometimes to the annoyance of his co-stars (just ask Brian Cox), has modulated his voice so that, if you closed your eyes, you could actually be listening to the tech baron.
It’s not just in the change in octaves, it’s in how he’s layered in Zuck’s petulance and defiance, the smugness, and the assured arrogance when he says, “Enough! People around here understand that when I say no, that’s the end of the debate.”
Strong has maybe five lines of dialogue in the trailer for The Social Reckoning, but it’s enough to leave a very strong impression. The film is released in October, and it can’t come soon enough.
Ever since Aaron Sorkin announced he was doing a follow-up to The Social Network, the 2010 film he wrote and David Fincher directed, there’s been a lot of anticipation for the project.
In the 15-plus years since the release of that earlier film, which was a fictionalised telling of the founding of Facebook in Zuckerberg’s Harvard dorm room, the power, perception and role of social media platforms have dramatically changed.
When The Social Network came out, Facebook had been live for barely half a decade. It was still something largely considered as a fun way to stay connected with friends and family rather than a haven for racists and grandparents (the two are not mutually exclusive).
The film was more about the egos and fights among the group of men (or boys) associated with its birth and success, and in Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder was an egomaniacal brat with a God complex but he wasn’t, well, evil on a global scale.
Evil is obviously an incredibly fraught word, often steeped in religious connotations and used for dramatic effect, but it doesn’t speak to how much the perception of Silicon Valley and tech have changed since Fincher’s film.
Take this line in the trailer of The Social Reckoning, spoken by Jeremy Allen White who is playing a dramatised version of real-life journalist Jeff Horwitz, “This company and that guy are playing an unprecedented role in our lives”.
As early as 2019, Sorkin had been playing with the idea of a sequel-of-sorts because of all the developments since 2010. He and Fincher had talked it over and for various reasons, decided to not proceed.
But a confluence of events happened: the January 6 riots on the US Capitol, and the 2021 Facebook leak in which whistleblower Frances Haughen revealed that Facebook (and parent company Meta) was well aware of the harmful effects of its products on its users and opted to do nothing.
Specifically, the leaks concerned what the business knew about the impact of Instagram on its young users’ mental health including posts promoting anorexia and self-harm, as well as how Facebook has been used to incite and spread violence around the world.
They knew, and they did nothing, because it didn’t suit the business model.
Another line in The Social Reckoning trailer from the Zuckerberg character, “I’m a free speech absolutist, I’m not the one who’s lying, and I’m not stopping them from seeing someone who is”.
Cool. Cool, cool, cool.
There was a fallout from these revelations, including Congressional hearings and a lot of head-shaking all over the world.
But what were the real, longer-lasting consequences? Meta and Zuckerberg are more powerful than they’ve ever been. Forbes estimated his net worth in March to be $US222 billion, almost double what it was in 2021, the year of Haughen’s leaking of those internal documents.
He’s the fifth richest person in the world.
A dramatisation of that event through Sorkin’s insightful pen and lens (he is also directing) is sorely needed, even if we are five years on from that era, which is almost three lifetimes in tech.
Mikey Madison, the Oscar winner from Anora, will play Haughen while White’s Horwitz is the reporter, then working for The Wall Street Journal, who broke the story. The ensemble also includes Bill Burr, Wunmi Mosaku, Billy Magnussen, Betty Gilpin and Gbenga Akinnagbe.
It’s been many years since tech billionaires became one of the most loathed villain classes of modern society, and we all sit around and bemoan their outsized influence, power and net worth.
From the time between The Social Network to The Social Reckoning, these tech companies and their controllers have become not a force for good, connection and possibility, but a malevolent one. There’s no question over their motives, the verdict is in.
And yet…
We can’t stop using their products. They are ubiquitous and inextricable – and deliberately designed to be addictive.
Can Sorkin’s movie be a real reckoning? Probably not. But at least we’ll all feel slightly guilty about our own complicity for a couple of hours. That’s not nothing. Right? Right?
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