The Social Network: Deconstructing “centuries’ worth of privilege and access”
"Fading in from black, an ethereal female chorus sings 'I don't care if it hurts/I want to have control/want a perfect body/want a perfect soul/I want you to notice/When I'm not around … I don't belong here,' building intensity alongside a haunting solo piano" in the trailer to "The Social Network." We haven't seen it yet (tomorrow!), but already it occupies our perfect body and our perfect soul. It resonates with the ur theme of our blog, the importance of being noticed by the other members of the tribe: Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in the trailer: "I need to do something substantial in order to get the attention of the clubs."
By Sissy Willis of sisu
"It's about the ability of a new media class to deconstruct centuries' worth of privilege and access that would've won in every other generation but now," writes Frank Chi at HuffPo, reviewing the movie that's the talk of the "sphere." First a bit about TSN itself, and then a bit of analysis. Now playing at a theater near you, David Fincher's "lightning-fast dramatization of the disputatious founding of Facebook" is "a grandly entertaining reminder of everything we used to go to the movies for (and still can’t get online)," writes Joshua Rothkopf at TimeOut New York …
An heir to Chayefsky's "darkly dazzling Network," indeed. It's in the air. This from Dan, who's been pounding the idea forever, often to deaf ears in the upper reaches of the GOP:
Thanks in large part to new media, politics as usual will not continue to be usual in the future … The system is broken, and it needs to be broken up.
As usual, Glenn Harlan Reynolds is primi inter pares, from his cyberancient Army of Davids (2006) to his latest must-read Washington Examiner column, "Tea Party dominance was inevitable — and I told you so." He quotes a prescient April 15, 2009 column on the topic …
Meanwhile, a clueless Thomas Friedman gets the "disgust" vs "rage" distinction but continues to be astounded …
Read full post here.
“Tea Party dominance was inevitable — and I told you so.”
- A guy who’s been drawing a government paycheck for years
“Pride goeth before destruction, And a haughty spirit before a fall.”
-A book the Tea Party has forgotten
To anyone who is on the outside looking in, the power of the TSN is intuitively obvious. It only looks chaotic and sinister to the complacent insiders who have come to assume that their power and influence is an entitlement. The buttons they grew accustomed to pressing without understanding why they worked have now stopped working and they see it all as a grand secret conspiracy.
You can see that attitude among those who persist in refering to us as “teabaggers”. Here is a infuriatingly ignorant example:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/america-on-the-brink-of-a-second-revolution-2010-09-28
To people like Paul Farrell, we are just raging anarchists out to destroy society. We don’t have a clear message? Really? Constitutional government, accountable to the voters, living within its means and defending national sovereignty? Could we make it any simpler and clearer? Has there ever been a clearer case of “there are none so blind as those who will not see”?
To entrenched elitists who require byzantine social structures founded on complicated social theories requiring big words that no one understands, the beauty of our simplicity escapes them. It’s just not a good system for protecting power and privilege for people who mostly inherited it or sold out to it. It is a serious threat to entrenched corruption. No simpler social contract was ever written than the US Constitution. When written, everyone understood it. It is still the best contract ever written. Our founding fathers left a body of literature that resonates to this day. If the elites find that to be a threat to their system, they need to go.
Pasadena Phil: Nobody says it like you:
“To entrenched elitists who require byzantine social structures founded on complicated social theories requiring big words that no one understands, the beauty of our simplicity escapes them.”
I was weaned on Word Wealth and Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style. Less is more!
Sissy: me too except when I first read Strunk & White, I didn’t get it. It is only later that I realized it was because those Catholic nuns and priests taught me how to read and write better than I had appreciated at the time. On the other hand, “Dressing for Success” ruined my life in my early business career. Whereas S&W liberates and brings out the individual, DfS turned many of us MBAs into an army of fashion drones.
OMIGOD. Another Catholic! I was brought up Unitarian before they went Gramscian … But now two things. 1. The Pope who loves cats and Mozart floats my boat, and 2. 99 per cent of my best friends out here in cyberspace are Catholic. What hath God wrought?