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Zuckerberg is flat-out wrong in his assertion that Hollywood doesn't understand people building something just because they like building things. I'm quite sur

Zuckerberg is flat-out wrong in his assertion that Hollywood doesn't understand people building something just because they like building things. I'm quite sure he's right when it comes to some people in Hollywood, possibly even many of the most powerful people. But I'll bet that what gets a great writer like Aaron Sorkin up in the morning is the same kind of creative impulse that drives hackers. Sorkin is a hacker - just in a different medium. None of which is to say that Sorkin's portrayal of Zuckerberg is at all accurate. In the West Wing, Sorkin once wrote: "You think I think that an artist's job is to speak the truth [but] an artist's job... is to captivate you for however long we've asked for your attention." I think he's quite right, but it's a heck of a philosophy if you're making a movie about someone still living.

deleted 16y ago
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philwelch 16y ago
But I'll bet that what gets a great writer like Aaron Sorkin up in the morning is the same kind of creative impulse that drives hackers. Maybe. But maybe writers don't see technical people (like hackers) as creative people. They wouldn't be the only ones. Or maybe they do understand that impulse, but underestimate their audience and assume the audience isn't going to understand the creative impulse.
rguzman 16y ago
Further, regardless of the writers' ability to relate to hackers they still need to write stuff that appeals to people. Most people don't enjoy just building things like hackers do.
- deleted 16y ago
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- mturmon 16y ago
  The writers I know have a pile of unsold or uncompleted scripts and stories. They were experiments, or drafts, or betas (if you like). Often they're working on several things at once, sometimes just with friends for kicks. They're driven to create also (characters, plots). I'd say one difference is, it's easy to hold a steady job as a programmer, but as a writer you have to really work the business side. It does change the emphasis sometimes from creating to selling.
jessriedel 16y ago
> Zuckerberg is flat-out wrong in his assertion that Hollywood doesn't understand people building something just because they like building things. He's not insulting the creative drive of moviemakers, he's lamenting the fact that they choose not to (or cannot) make this drive understandable to the laymen in the context of IT. (P.S. I love your book! But your justification for CP maps is misleading!)
- roc 16y ago
  It's not about making the drive understandable. Everyone understands it in a general sense. Every 'lay' person I've ever met has some hobby they 'geek out' over, as its own reward. For movies, it's a matter of making the story entertaining for the larger swath of people who (by definition) don't all geek out about the same things. E.g. I'm a geek. I'm a gamer. I can't even get up the motivation to netflix King of Kong, let alone watch it all the way through. I understand and respect that those guys geek out over Donkey Kong. But that doesn't hold my interest. Hollywood would have as much luck trying to make people understand the joy of hacking as we hackers have in trying to make people understand privacy and security.
  - jessriedel 16y ago
    >Everyone understands it in a general sense. Every 'lay' person I've ever met has some hobby they 'geek out' over, as its own reward. I think you're either wrong here, or are using "geek out" so generally as to make it pretty much meaningless. Playing Halo, drinking fine wines, and whittling figurines are not equivalent to IT creation. Having a passion for those former things does not automatically allow one to appreciate the latter.
apl 16y ago
Can we stop over-applying the word "hacker" to everything that produces something or other? I know that Graham loves doing that, but it just dilutes the term till it becomes utterly vacuous. Screenwriters are not hackers. There's very, very little commonality. Well, both create text at some point. I'll give you that.
- pg 16y ago
  "I know that Graham loves doing that" I do?
  - apl 16y ago
    Unfortunately, yes. "Hackers and Painters" is a rather famous instance of that particular non-analogy. Given that you've published a book under this title, however, I doubt that there's any point in debating the issue here. So I'll just say, even if painters and architects are hackers (to which I strongly object, but hey), including screenwriters such as Sorkin goes one or two steps too far. There's a line, and crossing it just makes "hacker" semantically arbitrary.
    - pg 16y ago
      I don't think I ever applied the word "hacker" in that book to anyone except programmers. Or in anything else I've written: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apaulgraham.com+hacker http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apaulgraham.com+hacker
      - pixcavator 16y ago
        >>"Hackers and Painters" is a rather famous instance of that particular non-analogy. >I don't think I ever applied the word "hacker" in that book to anyone except programmers. This is called a "non-denial denial".
        pg 16y ago
        It's called a denial of the actual claim (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840270 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840270) instead of the one he tried to turn it into when called on it. Man, today is one of those days I wish I'd never even started posting comments on HN.
pg 16y ago
"Creative" people don't all have one type of motivation. I think people in the entertainment business don't usually have quite the same motivations that hackers do. When people in the entertainment business make things, even when they have the purest motives, they do it to affect an audience. Whereas hackers often build things mainly for themselves, just to see if they'll work. Movies are messages. Hacks are not, necessarily. I think what Mark meant is that people in Hollywood would find it hard to imagine someone building something like Facebook just to see if it would work, rather than to have some effect on its audience, especially considering that one of Facebook's most distinctive features, at least now, is the enormous number of users it has.
- boucher 16y ago
  I think it's difficult to separate "see if it would work" from having "some effect on its audience" for something so completely focused on its audience. This isn't a hard disk driver, it's software built around the notion of real people interacting with each other. I also think in the context of starting a company around it, the motivation is absolutely to have an effect on your audience. After all, your moto is "make something people want" not simply "make something that works."
- kenjackson 16y ago
  But by the nature of a social networking site "seeing if it works" means "seeing if it affects in audience in a way to get them to join". I'm sure Mark wasn't interested in seeing if he could build the technical aspects of the site. Besides issues of scale and some of the newer programmatic layers, none of it seems like rocket science from the perspective of a developer. Unlike a hacking project to see if you can make free long distance calls... I think that Facebook is a lot more like the movie than what Woz used to do.
- Alex3917 16y ago
  "Movies are messages. Hacks are not." Maybe art films are messages, but most Hollywood films are all just following the same masturbatory formula to sell tickets by telling people what they want to hear. The goal is to glorify the complacency of the average American by selling them on the idea that they can get different results by doing the same thing. That's why just about every Hollywood film starts with the main character waking up one day and discovering that he's different than everyone else, and he has some sort of special destiny. No hard work required, you just have to recognize that one big opportunity that only comes once in a lifetime and take it, or whatever other bullshit. If anything hackers should learn from Hollywood and use the same toolkit to market their startups. Apple does it extremely well, but rarely do I see startups doing a good job at it.
InclinedPlane 16y ago
I suspect a person like Sorkin appreciates the drive to "create art" for no other motivation than to create, but I think the disconnect is the failure to recognize a work such as Facebook (or anything IT related) as a work worthy of the same motivation. I think some people see such a work (stripped of all wealth, fame, and power) as about as noble a calling as mowing a lawn. Thus the necessity to juice up that part of The Social Network with drugs, women, and parties.
taylorlb 16y ago
There's not a lot of "let's do this just to do it" going on in Hollywood. Think about it: at it's root level, the film business is FAR more money driven than the tech community at large is (Silicon Valley can be just as nasty as Hollywood, but that's not everyone). Hollywood is structured in such a way that doesn't reward collaboration and sharing (at all) but instead rewards exclusivity and cut throat behavior at every level. There isn't exactly a large and thriving open source film making movement out there. Very few outsiders are breaking into Hollywood in the way they are in the tech world.
- anthuswilliams 16y ago
  You're wrong. >>Silicon Valley can be just as nasty as Hollywood, but that's not everyone. Hollywood's not everyone. There are thriving filmmaking communities in just about every large city on earth. They don't all have the same mass appeal as Hollywood vehicles, just as small town startups rarely have the same appeal as Silicon Valley companies, but they're there, and they're vibrant. Furthermore, the very definition of avant-garde cinema is, to some degree, "let's do this just do this just to do it". >>There isn't exactly a large and thriving open source film making movement out there. It's called independent film, and the number of participants has skyrocketed in the last decade. Sure, they fantasize about it becoming a major hit like Paranormal Activity, just as every startup founder and his iguana fantasizes about being Google. But that doesn't mean they aren't making movies just cos they like making them.
CamperBob 16y ago
I have to wonder if Zuckerberg saw the same movie I did. It was crystal-clear that his character in the movie was motivated by the same Wow, wouldn't it be cool if... impulse that he's saying was absent.
- feral 16y ago
  The writer of the movie seems to disagree with you. Sorkin writes: "It was a revenge stunt, aimed first at the woman who'd most recently broke his heart (who should get some kind of medal for not breaking his head) and then at the entire female population of Harvard." This page is obligatory reading on this debate (previously posted to HN): http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2010/10/aaron-sorkin-responds-to-commenter-in.html http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2010/10/aaron-sorkin-responds-... Now, I'm not saying what did or did not drive Zuckerberg - but Sorkin, who wrote the Zuckerberg character, thought the character was motivated by revenge.
  - CamperBob 16y ago
    It may have begun as a revenge stunt, but somewhere between the $1 and $25,000,000,000 valuation points, it was no longer a revenge stunt. MZ would have lost interest at about the $12 point if it were just about revenge, and I think the typical viewer will understand that.
    - St-Clock 16y ago
      I 100% Agree. There is a difference between "it all started with a revenge stunt" (the lawyer say something like this at the end of the movie) and "I worked all these years motivated by a revenge stunt".
  - olavk 16y ago
    The interpretation of the movie should be based on the movie, not on a snippet of a blog comment by the writer.
neilk 16y ago
It may be that Sorkin understands the need to create things, but he doesn't seem to have identified that in his subject. Instead he's given him only nasty motivations -- most of them about a surly nerd's revenge against the social system. Sorkin has said that he's more interested in being faithful to an idea and a story, not to the events as they happened. Seems kind of ironic, since the movie accuses its "Mark Zuckerberg" of being callous to how reputations can be affected forever by public depictions.
sabat 16y ago
What the typical Hollywood writer doesn't understand is the computer people up north also build things for fun. They understand the idea of doing something for fun, but seem to think it only happens in the film/TV industry.
tlb 16y ago
"Hollywood doesn't understand" means that it can't be conveyed in the Hollywood medium, not that a particular artist in Hollywood doesn't understand it.
nikster 16y ago
It's not that they can't imagine it in Hollywood - they can, but it would just make for a much more boring movie. I think the fact they made a good movie is much more important than accurately portraying how facebook came to be. That's for Zuck's memoirs to explain, some day. As my grandfather always said: There are no true or false stories, only good ones and bad ones.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

philwelch 16y ago

But I'll bet that what gets a great writer like Aaron Sorkin up in the morning is the same kind of creative impulse that drives hackers. Maybe. But maybe writers don't see technical people (like hackers) as creative people. They wouldn't be the only ones. Or maybe they do understand that impulse, but underestimate their audience and assume the audience isn't going to understand the creative impulse.

rguzman 16y ago

Further, regardless of the writers' ability to relate to hackers they still need to write stuff that appeals to people. Most people don't enjoy just building things like hackers do.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mturmon 16y ago
The writers I know have a pile of unsold or uncompleted scripts and stories. They were experiments, or drafts, or betas (if you like). Often they're working on several things at once, sometimes just with friends for kicks. They're driven to create also (characters, plots). I'd say one difference is, it's easy to hold a steady job as a programmer, but as a writer you have to really work the business side. It does change the emphasis sometimes from creating to selling.

jessriedel 16y ago

> Zuckerberg is flat-out wrong in his assertion that Hollywood doesn't understand people building something just because they like building things. He's not insulting the creative drive of moviemakers, he's lamenting the fact that they choose not to (or cannot) make this drive understandable to the laymen in the context of IT. (P.S. I love your book! But your justification for CP maps is misleading!)

roc 16y ago
It's not about making the drive understandable. Everyone understands it in a general sense. Every 'lay' person I've ever met has some hobby they 'geek out' over, as its own reward. For movies, it's a matter of making the story entertaining for the larger swath of people who (by definition) don't all geek out about the same things. E.g. I'm a geek. I'm a gamer. I can't even get up the motivation to netflix King of Kong, let alone watch it all the way through. I understand and respect that those guys geek out over Donkey Kong. But that doesn't hold my interest. Hollywood would have as much luck trying to make people understand the joy of hacking as we hackers have in trying to make people understand privacy and security.
- jessriedel 16y ago
  >Everyone understands it in a general sense. Every 'lay' person I've ever met has some hobby they 'geek out' over, as its own reward. I think you're either wrong here, or are using "geek out" so generally as to make it pretty much meaningless. Playing Halo, drinking fine wines, and whittling figurines are not equivalent to IT creation. Having a passion for those former things does not automatically allow one to appreciate the latter.

apl 16y ago

Can we stop over-applying the word "hacker" to everything that produces something or other? I know that Graham loves doing that, but it just dilutes the term till it becomes utterly vacuous. Screenwriters are not hackers. There's very, very little commonality. Well, both create text at some point. I'll give you that.

pg 16y ago
"I know that Graham loves doing that" I do?
- apl 16y ago
  Unfortunately, yes. "Hackers and Painters" is a rather famous instance of that particular non-analogy. Given that you've published a book under this title, however, I doubt that there's any point in debating the issue here. So I'll just say, even if painters and architects are hackers (to which I strongly object, but hey), including screenwriters such as Sorkin goes one or two steps too far. There's a line, and crossing it just makes "hacker" semantically arbitrary.
  - pg 16y ago
    I don't think I ever applied the word "hacker" in that book to anyone except programmers. Or in anything else I've written: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apaulgraham.com+hacker http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apaulgraham.com+hacker
    - pixcavator 16y ago
      >>"Hackers and Painters" is a rather famous instance of that particular non-analogy. >I don't think I ever applied the word "hacker" in that book to anyone except programmers. This is called a "non-denial denial".
      - pg 16y ago
        It's called a denial of the actual claim (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840270 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1840270) instead of the one he tried to turn it into when called on it. Man, today is one of those days I wish I'd never even started posting comments on HN.

pg 16y ago

"Creative" people don't all have one type of motivation. I think people in the entertainment business don't usually have quite the same motivations that hackers do. When people in the entertainment business make things, even when they have the purest motives, they do it to affect an audience. Whereas hackers often build things mainly for themselves, just to see if they'll work. Movies are messages. Hacks are not, necessarily. I think what Mark meant is that people in Hollywood would find it hard to imagine someone building something like Facebook just to see if it would work, rather than to have some effect on its audience, especially considering that one of Facebook's most distinctive features, at least now, is the enormous number of users it has.

boucher 16y ago
I think it's difficult to separate "see if it would work" from having "some effect on its audience" for something so completely focused on its audience. This isn't a hard disk driver, it's software built around the notion of real people interacting with each other. I also think in the context of starting a company around it, the motivation is absolutely to have an effect on your audience. After all, your moto is "make something people want" not simply "make something that works."
kenjackson 16y ago
But by the nature of a social networking site "seeing if it works" means "seeing if it affects in audience in a way to get them to join". I'm sure Mark wasn't interested in seeing if he could build the technical aspects of the site. Besides issues of scale and some of the newer programmatic layers, none of it seems like rocket science from the perspective of a developer. Unlike a hacking project to see if you can make free long distance calls... I think that Facebook is a lot more like the movie than what Woz used to do.
Alex3917 16y ago
"Movies are messages. Hacks are not." Maybe art films are messages, but most Hollywood films are all just following the same masturbatory formula to sell tickets by telling people what they want to hear. The goal is to glorify the complacency of the average American by selling them on the idea that they can get different results by doing the same thing. That's why just about every Hollywood film starts with the main character waking up one day and discovering that he's different than everyone else, and he has some sort of special destiny. No hard work required, you just have to recognize that one big opportunity that only comes once in a lifetime and take it, or whatever other bullshit. If anything hackers should learn from Hollywood and use the same toolkit to market their startups. Apple does it extremely well, but rarely do I see startups doing a good job at it.

InclinedPlane 16y ago

I suspect a person like Sorkin appreciates the drive to "create art" for no other motivation than to create, but I think the disconnect is the failure to recognize a work such as Facebook (or anything IT related) as a work worthy of the same motivation. I think some people see such a work (stripped of all wealth, fame, and power) as about as noble a calling as mowing a lawn. Thus the necessity to juice up that part of The Social Network with drugs, women, and parties.

taylorlb 16y ago

There's not a lot of "let's do this just to do it" going on in Hollywood. Think about it: at it's root level, the film business is FAR more money driven than the tech community at large is (Silicon Valley can be just as nasty as Hollywood, but that's not everyone). Hollywood is structured in such a way that doesn't reward collaboration and sharing (at all) but instead rewards exclusivity and cut throat behavior at every level. There isn't exactly a large and thriving open source film making movement out there. Very few outsiders are breaking into Hollywood in the way they are in the tech world.

anthuswilliams 16y ago
You're wrong. >>Silicon Valley can be just as nasty as Hollywood, but that's not everyone. Hollywood's not everyone. There are thriving filmmaking communities in just about every large city on earth. They don't all have the same mass appeal as Hollywood vehicles, just as small town startups rarely have the same appeal as Silicon Valley companies, but they're there, and they're vibrant. Furthermore, the very definition of avant-garde cinema is, to some degree, "let's do this just do this just to do it". >>There isn't exactly a large and thriving open source film making movement out there. It's called independent film, and the number of participants has skyrocketed in the last decade. Sure, they fantasize about it becoming a major hit like Paranormal Activity, just as every startup founder and his iguana fantasizes about being Google. But that doesn't mean they aren't making movies just cos they like making them.

CamperBob 16y ago

I have to wonder if Zuckerberg saw the same movie I did. It was crystal-clear that his character in the movie was motivated by the same Wow, wouldn't it be cool if... impulse that he's saying was absent.

feral 16y ago
The writer of the movie seems to disagree with you. Sorkin writes: "It was a revenge stunt, aimed first at the woman who'd most recently broke his heart (who should get some kind of medal for not breaking his head) and then at the entire female population of Harvard." This page is obligatory reading on this debate (previously posted to HN): http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2010/10/aaron-sorkin-responds-to-commenter-in.html http://kenlevine.blogspot.com/2010/10/aaron-sorkin-responds-... Now, I'm not saying what did or did not drive Zuckerberg - but Sorkin, who wrote the Zuckerberg character, thought the character was motivated by revenge.
- CamperBob 16y ago
  It may have begun as a revenge stunt, but somewhere between the $1 and $25,000,000,000 valuation points, it was no longer a revenge stunt. MZ would have lost interest at about the $12 point if it were just about revenge, and I think the typical viewer will understand that.
  - St-Clock 16y ago
    I 100% Agree. There is a difference between "it all started with a revenge stunt" (the lawyer say something like this at the end of the movie) and "I worked all these years motivated by a revenge stunt".
- olavk 16y ago
  The interpretation of the movie should be based on the movie, not on a snippet of a blog comment by the writer.

neilk 16y ago

It may be that Sorkin understands the need to create things, but he doesn't seem to have identified that in his subject. Instead he's given him only nasty motivations -- most of them about a surly nerd's revenge against the social system. Sorkin has said that he's more interested in being faithful to an idea and a story, not to the events as they happened. Seems kind of ironic, since the movie accuses its "Mark Zuckerberg" of being callous to how reputations can be affected forever by public depictions.

sabat 16y ago

What the typical Hollywood writer doesn't understand is the computer people up north also build things for fun. They understand the idea of doing something for fun, but seem to think it only happens in the film/TV industry.

tlb 16y ago

"Hollywood doesn't understand" means that it can't be conveyed in the Hollywood medium, not that a particular artist in Hollywood doesn't understand it.

nikster 16y ago

It's not that they can't imagine it in Hollywood - they can, but it would just make for a much more boring movie. I think the fact they made a good movie is much more important than accurately portraying how facebook came to be. That's for Zuck's memoirs to explain, some day. As my grandfather always said: There are no true or false stories, only good ones and bad ones.