I wrote some thoughts about The Social Reckoning. I was reasonably involved in some very narrow aspects of the story it tells, and thought it epitomized the mostly terrible conversations we've been having about tech for a really long time. First some caveats:  I barely interacted with Mark Zuckerberg at all and have zero direct knowledge of any scene he's in. Those scenes didn't ring true to the general layout and vibe of the company to me, but whatever, I wasn't present.  I looked Francis Haugen up once we knew she was the one that took the documents, and we were apparently in one meeting once together and I have zero memory of her and I'm sure her of me. I'm pretty familiar with the documents she took, but there were a ton of them, virtually all required a lot of context to understand, and it would be near-impossible to actually have much of a handle on what they all said (Haugen herself certainly did not). Though the ones that resulted in media stories specifically I spent a lot of time trying to understand. I know Jeff Horwitz reasonably well, and am very familiar with the stories he wrote based on the documents he was given and was directly involved with that aspect of things. I thought the movie was quite bad in typical bad movie ways, and other folks will do a better job of going into precisely why. But there's something it misses that I think does matter and want to try to describe. We're an entire generation into the algorithmic recommendation and attention economy vortex that has largely defined contemporary culture, but we aren't any closer to wrestling with what any of it means and how to move forward in constructive ways--and this movie was a great example of that. Sorkin's perpetual great man of history worldview, where Horwitz is an uncomplicated vassal of justice, Haugen a singular hero, and Mark is an evil, corrupt, and fragile boy king somehow moves us even further from wrestling with any of this. Which, on some level who cares? It's a movie and it's supposed to be entertaining, and what difference does it make if the description of the company as some evil monolith gives you an actively less good understanding of how it operates? But I think it does matter, if only because we're speedrunning the whole thing again with AI and it's dramatically more important this time around that we have actual conversations about tradeoffs and principles and policy instead of using tech as a short-term foil for narrow, bad-faith, arguments with no long-term meaning. If you think Facebook was a fortress of evil, run by a singular villain, where people sat around tables and created priorities aimed at fucking over society in order to increase profit margins whose end result led directly to riots and election outcomes, you're wrong in a way that's hamstrung our ability to grapple with tech in any productive way for a quarter century. Sorkin's portrayal of Facebook as a place where you couldn't raise product-related concerns and where people didn't want to hear about bad things, if it were ever true, was long gone by the time I got there in 2019 (don't even get me started on the idea leaks weren't constant before Haugen). People raised safety concerns about all kinds of things all the time and they got taken seriously. I have no doubt there are examples of people not being pumped about a concern raised by person x about issue y, but you have to look at this within the context of any work culture being open to criticism. And Facebook, while I was there, was remarkably open to it. The company asked itself hard questions about hard things and when it constructed flawed products, policies, and procedures it was generally aggressive about exploring those flaws and trying to improve them. The willingness to do exactly that is largely the premise upon which Haugen, Horwitz, and Zuckerberg eventually found themselves depicted in this film. It doesn't mean the place was great or even good. It was, like all complex things I've been around, kind of a mess. Big-picture questions about the role of social media, algorithmic feeds, recommendations, and platform tech are fair and important. If anything, I've become more pessimistic about some of these things-- and Meta's role in them--though I view these as a much broader failure than the companies themselves, extending across media, policy, and regulatory landscapes. Incredibly consequential technology companies can and do contain serious people, earnest safety culture, and extensive self-criticism—and still sometimes produce major harms. Until we can actually confront that contradiction, and quit creating fantasies where outcomes are based exclusively on a flawed woman in a park and a flawed man at a desk we're not going to get anywhere toward creating an ecosystem that actually lets technology be the rising tide we need it to be. The most important thing I've learned working for some pretty relevant tech companies is that there are near-zero clear wins and the tradeoffs are messy, complex, nuanced and endless. And the most important thing I've learned working for or around some notable political and corporate leaders is that the clouds *never* part to reveal a class of ultra-capable, superclass of leaders. There are no warrior-poets or heroes or villains running the world's most important stuff. It's just a bunch of frighteningly familiar, fucked-up people, with their own strengths and weaknesses running all this consequential stuff. My big beef with The Social Reckoning (outside of being a bad movie in banal ways) is that it gets this all wrong in a way that makes us actively dumber about how the combination of tech and power work at the exact moment in time we need to be getting more thoughtful.