Facebooked, Only for Men

There are a lot of geniuses. We should meet some stupid women once in a while.

The boy with no friends created the biggest friend club and called it Facebook. Mark Zuckerman doesn’t have to be exactly the same as he is portrayed in David Fincher’s movie, written by Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing”). He doesn’t have to be different either, despite the freedom for which fiction allows. He is a loner who loses his girlfriend in the first five minutes of the movie, after having massacred her with associations of seemingly free ideas. But they are driven by the mind and logic of Zuckerman — a man who talks in algorithms. Give him a word, and the search engine that is there, somewhere in his brain, organizes the search and provides the results. They are different and regurgitate information but have one thing in common: the organizing brain of the connections. The brain of Facebook’s inventor has TMI — too much information.

Tired of the unilateral and, in the end, illogical conversation, the recipient of the useless TMI leaves the genius and runs toward a normal life. Upset, this Harvard student, an expert in operative systems, goes to his dorm and drinks some beers. Drunk, he decides to write some insults and slander on his blog about his ex-girlfriend, some of a sexual nature, for revenge. She ends up being ridiculed before the entire faculty. Defamation on the net, as she says, is not written with a pencil and stays there forever. This episode establishes Zuckerman’s twisted, scoundrel character. With the beer gone to his head, he decides to invent Facebook, pirating all the facebooks and university course books he can find. His only friend, Eduardo Saverin, a Brazilian, helps him with an algorithm that can compare women’s faces according to erotic attraction. I forgot to say that the goal was to humiliate women by selecting and comparing them in pairs in order for the boys to vote online for the sexier one. In one night, the traffic to the site breaks down all web communication at Harvard. Welcome to Facebook.

Several lawsuits and settlements later — brought by those from whom he stole ideas and help — the 20-year-old genius is number one in the Vanity Fair ranking. He is the richest and most powerful in the new establishment, ahead of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. These individuals created jobs; Mark Zuckerman created the biggest and the most powerful keyhole in the world. It has 550 million users. More concerned with his own privacy than that of others, as Jon Stewart said (or was it Steve Colbert?), Mark Zuckerman created a new pattern in communication and behavior and became a billionaire in a few months.

His friend, Eduardo — now turned enemy — sued Mark and received a settlement that made him the owner of a share of Facebook worth $1.5 billion.* A tiny fraction. Imagine then Mr. Zuckerman’s value. Not bad for an agnostic Jew born in the suburbs of New York with a father who taught him computer programming in the cradle.

For a person who created a virtual friends club that auto-multiplies, Zuckerman exhibits anti-social behavior. To establish a public image, he reinforced his donations to charity. He calls himself “a good guy.” This is a testimony to the strange world in which we live: a world that replaces knowledge and experience — which are products of time — with quick information and voyeurism. A world in which one of its most valuable men has no emotional maturity.

Facebook is a success, but technically Zuckerman wasn’t its only creator. Without Sean Parker, a multimillionaire genius who created Napster at 19, Zuckerman wouldn’t have achieved this. As Parker (Justin Timberlake) says in the movie, “ … a million is not cool. A billion is cool.” Sean, who spent time in prison for drug use (that’s why he left Facebook and his non-official adviser position), is a self-confessed alcoholic addicted to partying and women, to luxuries and extravagance; and is a brilliant mind that conceives the future and its trends.

He is a visionary and a more complex character than Zuckerman — he is the ant’s grasshopper. A friend of Hollywood and power, Sean Parker financed Facebook through Peter Thiel (creator of PayPal) and catapulted him into the stratosphere. This club of geniuses dominates the world of teenagers and will dominate the future until it’s taken over by some other club born at Harvard, the university that has the most geniuses per square meter. As ex-president Larry Summers says, “Harvard undergraduates believe that inventing a job is better than finding one.” It is an exclusive boys’ club where women do not enter. As Summers, the genius that Obama appointed to solve the financial crisis, said, women do not have enough intelligence for math. To paraphrase Woody Allen (in “Annie Hall”), there are a lot of geniuses. We should meet some stupid women once in a while.

*Editor’s Note: According to Forbes magazine, as of September 2010, Eduardo Saverin’s net worth is $1.15 billion.