The Guide #264: Why is Hollywood obsessed with the tech-bro baddie?

In this week’s newsletter: Dead-eyed billionaires can’t hold a candle to the maniacal cinematic villains of old – it’s time Hollywood rewrote its source code• Don’t get The Guide delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereSixteen years ago The Social Network was released and the first stirrings of a new cinema archetype were seen: the tech-bro villain. Perhaps that’s too damning a description for the Mark Zuckerberg portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg in David Fincher’s 21st-century classic about the dawn of Facebook; he’s certainly not a villain in the mwah-ha-ha, moustache-twirling sense. But he is, at the very least, on the wrong side of antiheroic: brilliant, brittle, status-craving, cruel and in charge of a social network with an exploding user base. Back then of course, the ramifications of this combination of troubling personality traits and transformative technology hadn’t quite dawned on us all: to many, social media sites still seemed a societal net positive. But the character was chilling enough to give even the most Pollyanna of tech evangelists a moment of pause.Fast forward to 2026, when faith in social media – and technology more broadly – is at Mariana Trench lows, and a sequel to Fincher’s drama has arrived in cinemas, this time both written and directed by the first film’s writer, Aaron Sorkin. The Social Reckoning whizzes the action forward to the tail end of the 2010s, by which time Facebook has grown into a near-trillion-dollar monolith. It follows real-life data engineer Frances Haugen (played by Mikey Madison), whose concerns over the radicalising qualities of Facebook’s algorithm prompt her to leak confidential files to investigative journalist Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), resulting in the release of the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files. Right around the same time as this damaging publication, and also depicted in the film, is the small matter of a riot-slash-insurrection at the Capitol, egged on by the outgoing US president on, among other places, Facebook, prompting his belated ban from the platform by Zuckerberg. Continue reading...