10/18/25: "The Social Network", William Marshall, and Inadequacy

Happy Saturday everybody! It’s Manny, and I’m back with my SECOND post ever. I wrote the last one with a lot of formality, I was trying to give it more of an essay/analysis vibe. But I don't wanna right now, so I guess I'll just fuck around and find out.

Weeks go by quicker, lately, since I’ve been working more. I’ve been thinking a lot about my age. 27’s weird, isn’t it? When I say I’m in my 20’s it feels like a lie. It isn’t in mathematical terms, but a 27-year-old is in their twenties the same way Ringo was in the Beatles. What’s it contributing, aside from some necessary stability?

I watched The Social Network last night for the first time since it came out. It's a movie that came in 2010, and boy howdy how I can almost smell the acrid sugar of a Coldplay album laced in its grainy filters. I was confused at the time why they cast Jesse Eisenberg as Zuck instead of Michael Cera, but upon rewatching it, Cera is way too goofy and adorable.

I don't think that, when I watched it at the age of 12, I understood the sort of damage that Facebook and social media in general would do to the world in the coming decade. I don't even think that Fincher or Sorkin were aware on that front. And yet it's all sourced from the socially outcasted mind of an insecure 20-year-old.

And now, Mark Zuckerberg is worth about 250 billion dollars. Strangely, unlike the other tech-era robber barons, I don't actually think that Zuckerberg is a bad person interpersonally. By all means, he seems to love, deeply, his wife and children. The employees he directly supervises all seem to like him...I even knew the daughter of his Rabbi, who insisted up and down that he's a kind and respectful man.

And yet, he still carries forward the Trojan Horse of AI-generated deepfakes and airbrushed influencer BBLs that is Meta. He built a multi-billion dollar company when he wasn't old enough to drink that was rooted

deeply in his own feelings of inadequacy and desire to flatten social hierarchy into a digestible pill. Even now, as a confident father with a sick-ass haircut and proper drip, those same childlike insecurities still define the kingdom he's created.

The Social Network is a story about a gross, insecure boy fucking people over and making an evil, unstoppable machine. Like if Timmy Turner from The Fairly Oddparents wished for college girls to feel inadequate and Malaysian democracy to fail.

And still, watching it, I couldn't help but feel unaccomplished. I'm plenty smart, why couldn't I have figured out a horrific way of netting a billion dollars when I was twenty? I could be enabling political extremists to commit hate crimes against groups I'm a part of and be making bank while I do it. Instead, I'm barely making rent in a suburb of LA an hour from the beach.

I don't really care about being a billionaire. But I do often feel unaccomplished. The thing that Zuck is so sure of in The Social Network is his desire to dominate and be the best. He did so in a field that didn't quite yet exist. It is strange how unbelievably confident Eisenburg makes him look for a character who is so clearly an unconfident twit. Bravo, Jesse.

When I was 20, I just got confident enough to tell a girl I liked her. I did vomit before I said it. I was not, however, confident enough to leave my hometown for longer than six months. Or stick to a major long enough to finish college. And especially not to design a dystopian surveillance software.

It's easy to search through the past and attempt to optimize. It's something people often struggle with when studying history--why are people worth studying when they made so many mistakes? For me, the study of history is an observation of beauty. I think history is really nice and I don't need the people to be nice in order to like it. And once you get rid of the need for its figures to be nice, you can come to realize the strange sort of goodness some people had then.

It's why one of my favorite historical figures is William Marshal - the man often called the greatest knight ever lived. The tournament champion-turned-general who served five English kings and eventually would implement the Magna Carta decades after its signing. He was someone enchanted with the concept of Chivalry and lived his life in accordance with it.

Chivalry, by all modern standards, is an antiquated and patriarchal moral system. It values honor over everything, and, unlike modern moralities, is deeply universal and prescriptive. And, because of this, it's often wrong. It was patronizingly classist and misogynistic, without a doubt, and enforced loyalty to monarchs the system itself found dishonorable.

But William Marshall was patient. And principled. And loyal. He was hard-working, lacked vindictiveness, and carried a deep care for the people around him. In a near-contemporary biography of him, The History of William Marshal, rivals of his frequently approached him with Machiavellian, Game of Thrones-esque schemes to which he mostly responds with childish levels of bewilderment and naivety.

He was no plotter. He was no careerist. And yet, through his talent and honesty, he became one of the most powerful and wealthy men in his nation at a time that didn't particularly value talent or honesty.

Unlike Zuck and I, William Marshall didn't seem to have a looming sense of inadequacy hanging over his head. It's hard to, as a knight, seeing as that if you were really so inadequate, you'd probably just be dead.

Earlier, I said that it's easy to look into the past and attempt to optimize it. Both The Social Network and The History of William Marshal attempt to do so. In the former, Zuckerberg is an anti-hero surrounded by people he hurts. It's a cautionary tale about ambition, but unlike MacBeth, he doesn't get a beautiful monologue and a sweet duel to the death. He's just lonely, clicking "refresh" on his ex's Facebook to see if she accepted his friend request. Piteous and small like the rest of us.

In William Marshal, our hero is the chivalric ideal. He isn't worse than everyone around him; he's better. Much better. And we, the progeny of history, are meant to aspire to his image. But neither stories actually depict these figures as they were: in the years covered by The Social Network, Zuckerberg was already dating his now wife, and was, by all account, a kind and devoted boyfriend. And William Marshal, though less accounted for, certainly wasn't the paragon of virtue his biography paints him out to be.

The authors change the events to fit their narrative because the figure outpaces the person. The story is better told by archetypes than multi-faceted, complex human beings. People are contradictions. I, for, instance, keeping eating Taco Bell despite the violent diarrhea that follows it.

They both accomplished more than myself when they were my age. William Marshal was already a mentor to Henry the Young King. Zuckerberg was already Zuckin' it in Palo Alto. I work for my goals harder now than I ever have in my life. Certainly, more than when I was 20. But what do I do with prior years of regret?

The answer is not much. The answer is to keep working, to admire the past for what it was. Like an art gallery, you view the shapes, and colors, and patterns. The textures and perspectives. And, at the end, you leave. That's something William Marshal was great at. He was a prisoner of Geoffrey de Lusignan for years, in which time he was tortured and deprived. He was humiliated constantly in the court of King John. But he kept his head down. He worked. And he moved on.

Zuckerberg can't move on from a trillion-dollar company. I doubt he even sees it as a mistake, and why would he? He has so much stuff now. But below his, frankly dope, chain he wears on his muscular, ju-jitsu powered neck, you can still see the scared, insecure kid he was in 2004.

I think The Social Network is a good movie. It's not one of my favorites, but, y'know, neither is The Godfather. But it tells the story of a character, not of a person. Zuckerberg sucks in it because Facebook sucks. I've no clue if Mark Zuckerberg is a good person or not. If he is anyone to castigate or aspire to. That's what's more confusing about him than certain other tech oligarchs; he's full of contradictions between his personal and professional life.

He's not someone I should measure myself up against, because I don't want these contradictions. I want to do good through my work. Like William Marshal. Or the Paw Patrol. And Spiderman.

The lesson to learn from William Marshal is the same as every figure of his archetype; Tokugawa Ieyasu, Pedro II of Brazil, Iroh from Avatar...it's patience. It's just patience. Viewing history requires patience. Looking yourself in the mirror requires patience. Getting good at anything requires patience.

It's something that the society Facebook has built detests, what with our labubus and American Squid Games adaptations. We love Marvel movies because they present heroes with natural capability, who require no effort or time spent in limbo. This is Mark Zuckerberg, too...one day he's a baby-faced Harvard sophomore, and the next he's a billionaire. But it's nothing to aspire to because it contains no aspiring. There's no doubt that real-life Zuckerberg put in a ton of work to build Facebook, but that's not the myth, the myth is he's Antman in a $200 hoodie.

I've watched so many people give up on their dreams because they aren't Mark Zuckerberg; they are older than 21, and they aren't successful. Patience, by its Latin etymology, only means the ability to suffer. And the point of stories like William Marshal's is that there are some dreams worth suffering for.