Putting the ass into, or taking it out of, Asperger’s?

The Social Network is very good filmmaking, but it’s ultimately not more interesting than the real-life subject it addresses.

As we transition from the age of narcissism into the age of autism it makes great sense that the reins of power move from the narcissistic and entitled elite (perfectly personified by rich, rowing twins who are, in fact, played by one actor—a feeble antagonist that Andy pointed out was a lot like young Malfoy in Harry Potter, complete with eating clubs evocative of Slitherin) who stand in stagnant and befuddled contrast to the code-cracking Rain Man-like neuro-atypical embodied by Mark Zuckerberg.

Mark Zuckerberg (actually, the character portrayed in the movie, which is not at all the same thing) seems every inch the asshole, but really he is not.  He is not hard-hearted so much as socially mind-blind.  He does lash out at a girlfriend, but mostly because he is wounded and cannot metabolize his hurt; he is computer-language gifted but socially retarded—a perfect specimen to helm our ship of fools into the New Age.  If we release judgment, perhaps this movie-Mark Zuckerberg is oddly enlightened:  he has a sort of collective compassion (he knows what the group is ready for and wants) and he practices this compassion without attachment (which to us muggles looks like coldness and not caring).  Perhaps he is an agent of karma, his own and ours as well?

He understands math, code, algorithms and this positions him to ride the beast of the zeitgeist.  The spirit of our time is certainly Facebook, but to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg invented it is to miss the bigger picture.  Someone was going to be there first, and someone was going to make a bundle on it, but the real phenomenon is the group, not the creator of the place where the group meets.

Facebook, at least in the movie version, is all about cool, which hardly anyone in the movie actually is.  Justin Timberlake is great at playing Sean Parker, the founder of Napster; he is a Peck’s Bad Boy of tech, but he is not mind-blind; he reads as old-school narcissistic and debauched, but he is charismatic and humanly flawed.

Mark Zuckerberg is seen as idealizing Sean Parker, but not because he get chicks and knows how to order up fun at a restaurant or club; the boys are simpatico in not being all about the money.  And neurotypicals are most generally into money and other normal signifiers of cool; thus their mutual outlier status, Parker’s chip on his shoulder and Zuckerberg’s apparent Aspergers, allows them to become a sum of more than their parts (and while it seems that Zuckerberg arbitrarily betrays his best friend, it seemed clear to me that without Parker’s savvy, Facebook would not have exploded by getting needed capital at a critical moment).

While Mark Zuckerberg is rich, it seems likely enough that the reason he resists taking his company public and cashing in big-time is that once he lets go the reins he becomes just another nobody in the muggle world.  That he realizes this and cares to hang onto his thread of cool, even if it has him tethered like Ahab to the leviathan, makes him complex and not all that unlike ourselves.

Zuckerberg is an ambassador from the future; he is smart in a way most so-called normals do not get, but he and what he portends is like water receding from the shore before a tsunami.  Mark Zuckerberg is a convenient emblem, but of what?

Normals will likely see him as a morality tale of heartlessness, of a hubristic Icharus heading for some sun-melted fall, some Kane destined to call out for his Rosebud one deathly day; but I sense that it’s a whole new ballgame on planet earth and emotions are no longer the central currency by which humans will progress.  We have feelings, but we are not our feelings.

Like Spock and Hal before him, Zuckerberg is almost completely rational.  He is not truly the source of deceit and betrayal, it is the group that is full of this.

I find Facebook itself to be more or less a non-starter, like a really good phonebook in which you can find most, but not all, of the long lost people you have lost along the way; a reasonable, but not singular, potential place to do reach-outs to those you want to know (but still, you must socially position your inquiry to be accepted as a “friend”).

On Facebook the very meaning of a friend blurs with associate, neighbor, fellow earthling. The main reason the Facebook fad will eventually fade away like a hula hoop is that it rose on being cool, and now people like me are on there.  Facebook is like a cool club that only cool people can get into for fifteen minutes.  But that was fifteen minutes ago, and like all clubs of that ilk, someone inevitably chooses to cash in and then it’s no longer cool.  The moveable feast moves on.

Thus Facebook will be forced to cash in and cash out by the pressures of a world that cannot possibly understand its creator—because the world is its creator.  Zuckerberg is rather like Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo—a visionary ahead of the curve of his time, inspiring myth but living in actual social isolation.

We humans are wired for empathy, language and collective knowledge transmission (but not all of us humans, and the uptick in those who are not thus wired is intriguing, particularly if these outliers might see ahead of the curve).  As humans we’ve gone past instinct (i.e. being born knowing how to hunt or spin a web) and have advanced, as a species, by being teachers of the storehouse of our group’s collective knowledge.  Not everyone knows everything, but between us, the group has developed ways to store and transmit knowledge so that it is not lost to the group.

The fact that the brightest of our group are working to connect us all seems consistent with a centralized nexus of meeting that starts with mindless goofing around (much like language starts with meaningless babbling) but may platform into meaningful groups, sub-cultures and knowledge bases.   This is how we humans have built up a knowledge base that is far more vast than any one brain can hold.  But now that the wisdom has moved to “the cloud” of the intangible worldwide web that holds its info in triplicate and quadruplicate across multiple servers, the cat of exclusivity is out of the individual bag.

What used to be locked in the library stacks of elite universities is becoming open to the world, the real Berlin Wall in all this was the admissions officer at the elite university and the wall is crumbling faster than the machine of marketing can brand, monetize and exploit the fading signifiers of what used to be cool by virtue of being exclusive.  Our culture is like Gatsby floating dead in the pool of his mansion, and Tom and Daisy are worse, not better, off.

Mark Zuckerberg, in leaving Harvard in order to change the world, traces a meta-message about the growing irrelevance of Harvard and that sort of elitism altogether.  After all, as the head of Harvard quips to this year’s Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, they look like they’re showing up in his office to sell him a Brooks Brothers franchise.

Sure, Harvard will still matter for a few years, but in the sweep of change, we’re all living in Rome with no idea that the lead wasn’t such a great kitchen idea.  Those who think that Mark Zuckerberg is an outlier are unable to see the hordes of Zuckerbergs materializing all around us.  This is beyond a good or a bad thing, it is what it is.

Collective intelligence, I intuit, will prove rational.  It is emotional and ego-driven competition that has brought the world to the brink of destruction; perhaps it will be algorithmic intelligence that will calculate how best for humans to survive.

Mark Zuckerberg himself is not the Buddha of the collective, he is a Hollywood movie:  an errand boy sent by grocery clerks.  It’s the zeitgeist that calls the shots.  We like to think that we decide what to do and how to live our lives, but it seems equally plausible that some sort of larger spirit shapes and determines much of our overall experiences.  Like The Matrix, we are lead to believe we are in control, but who are we kidding?  If we were as autonomous as we imagine, our massive amounts of insecurity, depression, anxiety and cruelty would drop just a tinge, don’t you think?

No, the spirit of the time is more in charge than we might realize, but we have the personal option to try and love the world and align with where our group is going.  Like surfing, even if the waves are potentially destructive, if we go with the flow, we may have an interesting ride.

Many stories are written about Mark Zuckerberg because he is the youngest billionaire.  Money is a signifier that catches the attention of the dense, old school purveyors of exclusivity.  After all, if everyone can join the exclusive club, then it’s not special anymore… but how often the so-called exclusive things are really over-rated, how much the value rests on the perception of scarcity.

The last thing the rich and powerful want is for every ordinary person to feel secure and good about themselves.  Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to care much about his money; it’s not his drug.  Again, I think this is cool and cutting edge in an unconscious sort of way:  if a billionaire lives at a lifestyle level that is within reach of many merely normally successful people, could this possibly erode the absurd notion that it’s cool to live in a mansion or drive a ridiculously overpriced car.  I mean really, what’s so cool about that?

Could it be that the “value” of homes have dropped not just because the economy is bad, but also because there has been a sea change in what “value” means?  Privacy is eroding and this alarms some, but perhaps this foreshadows a world in which young people will like to live in communities, maybe the apparent artificiality of “connecting” on Facebook will be a harbinger of people with like interests finding each other and setting up communities that reflect how people want to live and with whom.

Maybe this will breed more exclusivity, but even then it may be no longer about who landed on Plymouth Rock but about who likes to write code, who knows how to read code… maybe “code” is the new language that the front-runners in our age of autism already “speak.”

And even if I am destined to be a sad Neanderthal, dying out in the wake of the intellectually superior Homo sapiens, at least I can strive to enjoy my brief days in the sunset of a setting culture.  But if they turn out to be smart enough to offer up a better way, and certainly there must be a better way than a culture hobbled by the sorts of problems our world faces, then aren’t these alien smarties fit to lead?  And if they flame out, then it will turn out that they were not the fittest after all.

Andy and both my kids agree on one thing:  they believe that Facebook makes the world a worse place.  I’m not sure about that, I think the world is what it is and Facebook doesn’t move the needle, it is the needle—it mirrors where we are at, it doesn’t place us there.

The argument that Facebook makes things worse is that it is a forum for cruelty.  I rather think that it outs the cruelty that has always been there:  World War One and the advent of killing at an unprecedented, mechanized and fully monetized level was much more cruel than any app that rates who is hotter than another.

The challenge to humanity is not whether to log on to Facebook or not, the challenge is to raise our own consciousness to the point where we might actually understand not just where Mark Zuckerberg is coming from, but where we are all going… together.

Facebook is a mirror, if you see an ass in that mirror then it’s important to look more deeply and see the beauty below the noise, the fear, the desire, the judgment, the impermanence.

The Social Network is like a Hitchcock film in that it deliberately evokes tension and anxiety, it gives away its icy feelings and it hinges on the notion of exclusivity and the fear of being left out of the group, which at an animal cellular level, means death… like a wolf forced out of the pack, like an old Inuit set adrift on an ice flow.

The metanoia waiting to happen regarding Facebook is, actually, the opposite of exclusion and exclusivity, it is the realization that we all matter, but also that no one matters all that much.  Like ants, we are the social network and if we’re to live in harmony with our environment we need to stop attacking each other, hurting our Self, like a body gripped by disease.

In my view, the universe is like a vast game and if you align with what the universe wants you court luck.  Zuckerberg is “lucky” in that he played all night in the zeitgeist casino and he won.  If he thinks this is purely skill, he is Icharus; but if he continues to work for the universe and guesses correctly, he will continue to “win.”

The fact that Mark Zuckerberg gave a hundred million dollars for helping distressed public schools in New Jersey may be a PR ploy, but the fact that he chose to benefit kids and education makes me hope that this is in keeping with what the universe wants.

While Mark Zuckerberg wasn’t always “nice” to the people around him, it’s hard for me to think that someone like Mark Zuckerberg having some power is really going to be much worse than the robber barons and Wall Street cheaters that precede him.  If it’s more of the same, then it’s hardly interesting in the long run; but just in case it marks a shift, perhaps the real implication of the “social network” is the realization that we all potentially have a role to play when it comes to the emerging world.

As a non-joiner myself, I can’t help but wonder if Zuckerberg is, consciously or not, working on the realization that you can’t not be part of the group.  Perhaps Facebook will achieve seven billion members—then what?  It would be so universal as to become utterly meaningless, like asserting that you breathe—central to life, but not much of a signifier of individuality.  I think that would prove its ultimate and already implicit point.

The big reveal in the end may be that the web was never more or less than a mirror and a metaphor for the truth that we are, and always were, all connected even before the web allowed this to be a massively realized epiphany.  The Dali Lama, the Buddha, Jesus, Lao-Tze and other visionaries of the immaterial world have long known this.

Perhaps the true social network will be like the arrival of spirituality without religion—a time when we stop being dicks to each other not because we are taught to do this, but because we realize that this truly is enlightened Self-interest.  Maybe that is when kids will no longer hate themselves and their peers, when kids will stop cutting their own skin and jumping off bridges.

The social network doesn’t cause the ills of the world, but it can be the messenger, a wing-footed Hermes traversing many dualities:  rich/poor, ingroup/outgroup, nice/mean, booksmart/streetsmart, typical/atypical, etc.

So, my ultimate message for the few readers who have stayed with this long rambling post:  you and I are very much in this together.  Our connection is not happening on Facebook, but it is happening in the social network.  Thus the network is not exclusive to Facebook, but the concept of total inclusivity encompasses us, even as we contemplate how we think and feel about it.

And just in case I’m correct in intuiting that it’s all about consciousness, perhaps it serves us to awaken to, and employ, the greater truth which is that our minds are already wired together.  That truly awakened human beings don’t need no stinkin’ Facebook, but in a good way—in a very good way.  Thus I don’t ask you to friend me, tweet me, follow me or rate me; I ask you to join me in using your exquisitely beautiful and brilliant spirit to mentally friend, like and love all our collective children (including 26 year-old Mark Zuckerberg, the rich and the poor, the people Mark hurt and those he helped and the 500 million souls who have likely still not found what they’re looking for on Facebook).

Namaste, Bruce