A short documentary now playing on the Internet is the best movie about
Mark Zuckerberg yet. It's studded with clues to the workings of
Zuckerberg's brain, and possibly even clues to the future of Facebook,
which made its initial public stock offering on Thursday.
The
film is called “Facebook IPO Roadshow,” and it runs a little over 30
minutes. The ingenious and disturbing film was conceived as the
centerpiece of the dark-charm offensive that Facebook launched to
beguile new investors. (Those investors, who didn't feel properly
courted by the canned appearance, soon began demanding to see Zuckerberg
in person, presumably so they could touch the hem of his garment rather than watch a Facebook-produced video that any schmo could see.)
But
as an ambitious propaganda piece that doubles as gloss on the current
state of the digital everything, “Facebook IPO Roadshow” is well worth
watching. The film is at pains to deny it's a commercial. As the
flat-affect movie puts it, its entire purpose is to “enable your
investment decisions” and help “you get to know Facebook better.” Very
Silicon Valley. You know there are tens of billions on the line when
company leaders get this low-key.
Though several members of the
Facebook brass show up, and the film is thick with groovy b-roll and
data visualization, Zuckerberg, in his matte blue-gray outfit and
matching eyes, steals the show—though he seems, as usual, to have turned
in his performance by Facebook chat.
Never has a mortal seemed
so laconic and blasé about a company he founded and now hopes to see
valued at $100 billion. It's almost as though, like any garden-variety
Harvard kid, he feels entitled to any valuation he dreams up.
Sure,
it would be nice, just for the moment, for Zuckerberg to pant for
approval a little, and act like he needs us. We are the ones who put the
“public” in IPO after all.
But there's something in
Zuckerberg's disregard for his audience—that spoiled, half-sadistic
style that David Fincher captured in “The Social Network”—that gives his
company its mystique. Does the noli-me-tangere
whiz-kid without a real, flesh-and-blood friend in sight seem like the
future of social life online? Maybe. Maybe there's something in his
master-puppeteer demeanor that allows his company to perpetually outrun
charges that it's faddish and trivial. (On the eve of the IPO, a poll
conducted on behalf of the Associated Press and CNBC found that fully half of Americans consider Facebook a flash in the pan!)
Zuckerberg reportedly will not come to New York to ring the NASDAQ bell
on Friday. If you're Mark Zuckerberg, evidently, you don't genuflect
toward the brutish trading floor. You ring bells from wherever you want;
in his case, it's remotely, from his new office in Menlo Park. If he's
using a bell-ringing app, you can be sure it's got Facebook inside, like
Pinterest or Quora or Spotify.
While Zuckerberg maintains his
above-it-all style in the film, the onetime fencing champ does manage to
pull off some elegant touchés and trompements at the expense of his competition. The richest one is in his opening lines:
You
know, I grew up with the Internet, right, I mean when I had—When I was
in middle school I was using search engines like Google and Yahoo.
I
just thought that they were the most amazing thing. The thing that
always seemed like it was missing was always just people, right. . .
Amazing.
Google ends up in the rearview mirror (when Zuck was a preteen, no
less) in the first 30 seconds of the speech. Zuckerberg goes on to
rhetorically dominate mobile, where Facebook has been thought to be
weak, when he prophesizes that all apps will one day be wrapped around
Facebook.
And Sheryl Sandberg, the company's captivating chief
operating officer, shows how Facebook rules advertising, with a chipper
presentation that lets her position herself as a consumer and user of
the site—the way that none of the other company leaders successfully do
in the film. (The company's status as an advertising must-buy for
companies looking to digitize came into serious question this week when General Motors announced that it would no longer buy ads on Facebook.)
In
all, the film expresses cool triumphalism. On a broad, almost monstrous
scale. It's as though the prophecy has already come to pass; all
investors and the public must do is yield to our fate.
Zuckerberg
conspicuously name-checks his hacker ethos, which involves creating
products with a “minimum” of features and, even more, a minimum of
personal exertion. The word recalls the Zuckerberg character in
Fincher's film brandishing his A.D.D. for his interrogator: “You have
part of my attention; you have the minimum amount.”
In a
disclaimer before the movie, the word “speculation” is never used.
Forward-looking statements is the preferred phrase. Speculation sounds
flimsy and dangerous, evoking some 19th-century huckster with a high hat
and the word “Diamond” in front of his name. Forward-looking, by
contrast, sounds visionary. Clairvoyant, even.
It all looks very
clean. I remember joining Facebook five years ago, not long after the
collegians-only social network opened its gates to the genpop. A college
kid insisted to me that Facebook people were wittier than MySpace
people, so I decided to see for myself.
Maybe by witty he meant
repressed. In those days, groovy, messy MySpace was dominated by dark,
bruised-looking emo collages. Facebook seemed more buttoned-up, square,
self-conscious—like an Ivy League kid applying to Goldman Sachs.
It still seems that way. In spite of the scandals surrounding Facebook, and the alarmist treatises about its effects on our lives, there's something morally fastidious about the company. Like Apple, it's almost prudish.
If this presentation looks like anti-sales, then, it might just be the blockbuster sales strategy of our age.
Correction, 5:20 p.m. ET: This column has been changes to indicate that Facebook's IPO was Thursday.
