The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s sequel to The Social Network, is now in theaters. I, for one, think that making a whole new movie is not the best way to tell the continuing story of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta. Why not do instead what Zuckerberg himself is doing—take the social network we have and just make it worse? Below, please find my script for the revised The Social Network. (Aaron Sorkin, you are welcome to use any of this if you want to make a third movie!)
Sean Parker, from Napster: A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what is?
Mark Zuckerberg: A million dollars—donated to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund?
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Mark Zuckerberg’s ex Erica: You’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because of the pervert glasses.
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The Winklevoss twins are rowing in a tank. We pan out to reveal that Mark Zuckerberg is right behind them, working out just as hard.
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Mark Zuckerberg: Eduardo, I need the code you used for ranking chess players.
Eduardo Saverin, Facebook’s co-founder: Sure.
Mark Zuckerberg: We’re ranking women. And then we’re going to build a whole network around this. And then to keep people on that network we’ve built, we’ll create a black-box algorithm that pushes rage-inducing—sorry, borderline—content onto users’ feeds to drive engagement, even if it fuels the rise of conspiracy theories, misogyny, and violence.
Eduardo Saverin: Can we go back to the ranking-women part?
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Mark Zuckerberg sits at his computer, reloading the screen again and again. Yup, the policies that formerly flagged dehumanizing speech about protected characteristics have been successfully removed in time for Trump’s second term! Also, Erica has not added him as a friend yet.
Erica: Dating you is like dating a StairMaster.
Mark Zuckerberg: Sounds excellent. An experience lots of people will want to have. Actually, that’s an idea. Why shouldn’t everyone you interact with be a robot? I am writing this down.
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(Mark Zuckerberg scribbles on a window) Buy … Vine … then … destroy … it.
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The Justin Timberlake character: A million dollars isn’t cool. You know what is?
Mark Zuckerberg: Floating leglessly in a joyless void.
The Justin Timberlake character: Um.
Mark Zuckerberg: Having a hole in you that nothing can fill, absolutely nothing, no amount of money, no amount of power, no amount of mixed martial arts, so that when the business that has made you billions of dollars but has cost other people their lives and sanity comes under any kind of scrutiny or attempts at regulation, you feel like you’re the victim.
Sean Parker: I was going to say “a billion dollars.”
Mark Zuckerberg: (staring dead-eyed into the camera) A billion dollars won’t fix anything.