Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg in the movie “The Social Reckoning.” (Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures/TNS)
A week ago my wife and I went to see the new Aaron Sorkin film The Social Reckoning, a sequel of sorts to the writer’s 2010 film The Social Network. If the earlier film portrayed the birth of Facebook, the new one delves into the company’s maturity—if that is the right term. In it, Mark Zuckerberg is played by Jeremy Strong as a CEO so cold-blooded that the viewer might be forgiven for thinking that his rigid posture reveals a spine consisting of a stainless-steel rod rather than bone, while his gaze is so unblinking that surely whatever sensory information his eyes bring in is converted into bits and bytes there rather than in his brain. What better way to ward off the dire prospect of empathy or any other kind of emotional connection?
In other words, in The Social Reckoning the cyborgs—or, to use a newer term I’ve encountered online, the tech broligarchs—seem to have the upper hand despite the best efforts of whistleblowers and journalists, and it especially feels that way because the high-stakes Senate hearing for which Strong’s Zuckerberg is prepping in the film took place in 2020, and in hindsight the Congress of that year seems like a shining exemplar of democratic functionality compared to the servile rubberstamp it is today.
All of which is to say that on the way home from the theater, where by the way we shared the auditorium with a grand total of three other paying customers as if to underscore the success of Facebook and other new-media giants in sucking us into personal rather than shared entertainment experiences, I was glum, and this glumness stuck with me through the night and sent me into dark dreams about the ability of the unelected tech bros and their technically elected political partners to shape humanity’s future.
Compared to this realm of gobsmacking influence, I thought, was there still value in all the virtues I find here in Flagstaff, in being a good neighbor, in hiking the forest trails, in experiences of community, in welcoming visitors from other parts of the world who come to enjoy our region’s fantastic sceneries? In the face of the digital tsunami, haven’t those expressions of living become precious—perhaps not just in the sense of being valuable, but more so in the sense of being overly refined or distant from what is truly important? I grew even more despondent when I reflected on the fact that I have not even seen the other tech-nightmare movies out there, such as the new four-hour documentary about Elon Musk, the unexpectedly popular documentary about wackadoodle Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, or the forthcoming Artificial, about Open AI’s Sam Altman. So many megalomaniacs, so little time . . . compared to those who exercise such outsized power, aren’t the rest of us like ants, crawling around far underfoot, an undifferentiated mass that might rise to the level of a pesky annoyance, but nothing more?
It was dispiriting to think this way until I recalled that a week earlier I’d had the opportunity to visit a couple of Hopi cultural sites. I was with a small group of visitors, guided by a few tribal elders who were sharing what they deemed appropriate for curious outsiders. Along the way one of the guides had taken the time to point out something that could easily seem entirely unremarkable to someone steeped in the Arizona outdoors: namely, a teeming anthill, whose occupants had built a large and remarkably symmetrical mound of tiny pebbles in the middle of the unvegetated trail.
Watch where you step, our guide said, pragmatically and wisely, for there were so many rock-pecked petroglyphs on the sandstone walls and boulders around us that it would indeed have been easy to step unknowingly on the mound and rile the occupants up into biting.
But he didn’t stop there. He went on to tell us that ants occupy a special place in Hopi cosmology, acting among other things as intermediaries between the worlds above and below ground. Traditional Hopis, leaning into humility as tech bros definitely do not, never disturb an ant mound, knowing that such an act would have repercussions somewhere on down the trail.
This belief is also in line with ecological realities; ant tunnel complexes help aerate the soil and enrich soils, while the ants themselves distribute seeds, and researchers from NAU have documented how the rims of ant mounds provide good habitat for plants imperiled by dry conditions or grazing.
Ants matter, in other words, just as my neighbors do. They matter broadly, in ecosystems around the world, and they derive their power through their numbers, and through their ability to collaborate with one another in pursuit of common goals. Sound familiar?
To get hypnotized by great power—whether wielded for good or evil—is to fall for the very narrative the powerful like to relate, namely that great concentrated power is the only kind that matters. The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are wrong about that. The question for all of us—in this election, this year, this decade—is whether enough of us will act on that knowledge.
