Hello my little tech heads! 

Yesterday was a grim day for me, as I spent hours in the company of various Silicon Valley psychopaths as they scrambled to amass (and hold onto) power while a few brave people tried (mostly in vain) to stop them. I mean, that is all of us every day to some extent, but in particular I went to see a screening of Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Dilemma, about The Facebook, and then the New York Film Festival premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, about the worst gay guy you ever met working crew on a high school play. Both are grim visions of where we were fairly recently, where we are now, and what hell awaits us. It was a heady, awful, but also intermittently rewarding way to spend an autumn afternoon and evening.

The Social Dilemma is out on Friday, and is marching into theaters laden with some bad buzz. At least in my gossipy little echo chamber, where early word whispered at parties and in screening lines was that Sorkin’s film, in which he takes over the directorial reins from The Social Network’s David Fincher, was a seriously pale imitator of its 2010 predecessor. I heard the word “turkey” more than once. Which isn’t that surprising. (I mean, hearing the word “turkey” used to describe a movie, twice, in 2026 is kind of surprising.) Sorkin’s directorial output has not been that strong; I like Molly’s Game more than a lot of people, but Being the Ricardos stinks and I have forgotten almost everything about the deep-COVID movie The Trial of the Chicago 7. 

But in terms of writing . . . Well, I am a Sorkin fan. Or, maybe not always a fan, but certainly a connoisseur, a collector. There’s nothing quite like his signature brand of monologuing and dated, snobbish cultural references, and haughty prep-school alpha-beta masculinity in its khakis and tucked-in blue Oxfords. He’s often rancid, sometimes great, and (I must admit) almost always entertaining. So I processed the early Reckoning takes with a little skepticism. “Okay, normal people with a healthier sense of self-worth might think it’s dumb. But me? I might like it.”

And it turns out, I kind of do. The Social Reckoning mostly takes place between 2019 and 2021, around the time when whistleblower Frances Haugen, a Facebook data scientist who worked in the now-shuttered division that was supposed to protect users from harm (kind of), reached out to Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz with some troubling information about Facebook’s audience retention (and radicalizing) practices. So we get a juicy recitation of things we already vaguely know: protocols and algorithms and whatnot were put in place to rage-bait users into addiction; Mark Zuckerberg (played here by a showily miscast Jeremy Strong) is an amoral ghoul who cares only about endless scale; social media has either hastened or outright caused our descent into dystopian, post-truth political madness. 

It may all feel a little “yeah, and?” to today’s savvy audience members, but Sorkin makes it compelling for his characters, and thus we care (or, I cared), too. It’s a perfectly serviceable couple of hours at the movies: sturdy and propulsive, with its ideas (mostly) in the right place. While Strong is doing a dopey and useless acting-class exercise as Zuckerberg, Mikey “Anora” Madison does a fine job playing a principled loner who is horrified by the curdling of corporate ideals she once revered, and Jeremy Allen White is perfectly serviceable as the movie’s sounding board and question-asker. I have no idea how much like the real Horwitz he is, but that’s not the point. The point is that he’s the Sorkin stand-in, and White fills that function just fine. That said, White does seem a little pained when he has to snidely deliver an indignant, wholly sexist line about the term “mansplaining.” 

That moment, which my audience gasped and grumbled and groaned at, is one of the spikiest in the film. I grimly found myself wanting more of that. If The Social Reckoning went full Newsroom, “I’ve been speechifying at dinner parties and now the rest of America—particularly you, flighty young ladies I would like to sleep with—needs to hear my axe-grinding about various sociopolitical pet peeves” Sorkin, it would certainly alienate even more people. But it might also be kind of thrilling, an electric bit of pointed, self-righteous bile of which to sit in queasy awe. But Sorkin restrains himself instead, and The Social Reckoning is way less fun for it.