There’s also what is supposed to be a very impressive, seductive moment when Parker woos Zuckerberg with fancy cocktails and beautiful women, telling him, “They’re scared of me, pal, and they’re going to be scared of you.” He doesn’t specify who “they” are, but his words call up an idea that was en vogue in 2004 - the point of “disruption” being to piss people off, take names, and charge full steam ahead, without care for any of the un-fun consequences. There’s Justin Timberlake’s famous line as Sean Parker: “You know what’s cooler than a million dollars? A billion dollars.” By 2010, audiences knew a billion dollars was cooler than a million dollars, though they didn’t know that in a matter of years, a billion dollars would sound like nearly nothing. They took their humor from the dramatic irony inherent in how quickly the life of the internet was moving along.

In 2010, quotes from the 2004 history that The Social Network portrays were already supposed to be funny.

It’s a handy, comforting way of trying to slot Zuckerberg into power structures that had already been studied, rather than acknowledging the fact that upending those (and replacing them with sweeter-faced but insidious new power structures) was the DNA-level goal of what he was building. It’s not really clear what Emerson or Dargis were saying, other than they believed Zuckerberg would be pretty powerful, and that the moment seemed portentous enough to warrant tying their reviews to classics of contemporary sociology. Wright Mills’ 1956 book about bureaucratic authority figures.

Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers credited it as the film that would forever “define the dark irony of the past decade.” Jim Emerson’s review at started with 300 words from Erving Goffman’s landmark 1959 essay “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.” The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis called it a “resonant contemporary story about the new power elite,” and linked out, on that line, to a summary of C. Film critics at the time seemed to be betting that The Social Network would serve as a major historical document.

The social network watch online hd