170. Jerks who thought they were rock stars

I.

A first trailer has appeared for The Social Reckoning, the new film by Aaron Sorkin. More than fifteen years ago he wrote the script for The Social Network, directed by David Fincher. For this (sort of) sequel, Sorkin takes on the direction himself.

The story unfolds at the moment Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen leaks secret documents to The Wall Street Journal. That gave the world a look inside Meta (which was still called Facebook at the time) in 2021. It emerged, for instance, that Facebook knew its algorithms were feeding people increasingly extreme content. And that its policies to combat influence operations and disinformation were simply inadequate. But hey, at least it kept users’ attention.

Jeremy Strong (known from Succession) plays Mark Zuckerberg this time around. He has clearly practised the voice and the emotionless smile of the Meta CEO, by the looks of it. The haircut is also well done. And I am looking forward to the story, which I followed closely as a tech journalist. In 2023 I met Haugen at an event in Amsterdam. I wrote this article about it for NU.nl and blogged about it on my own site.

After the announcement I immediately felt the urge to watch The Social Network again. When that film came out in 2010, Zuckerberg’s network had only been active in the Netherlands for a few years. We had traded in Hyves for it. It was the new hot thing, the way apps could still be back then.

I had completely forgotten that The Social Network portrays the origins of Facebook in a far less flattering light. Aaron Sorkin wrote a film about jerks who thought they were rock stars. At the end, Zuckerberg still comes off reasonably well when a character says to him: “You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.”

I am curious whether Sorkin, fifteen years later, will revisit that line in The Social Reckoning.

II.

Every week I see articles appearing about how young people have been outsourcing their reading and writing to computers since ChatGPT came along. I wrote about it myself back in March. And now once more, because this week it happened again. “My students can’t read,” laments university writing instructor Tyler Jagt earlier this month in an online essay. None of his students managed to get through a twenty-page article.

They would rather have it summarised by a language model. And that way you learn nothing. “Outsourcing tasks to a chatbot doesn’t free up students for more complex work,” writes Jagt. “It deprives them of the opportunity to grow strong enough to do work of any real substance.”

I am not a huge fan of Ryan Holiday, but I do thoroughly agree with what he wrote last month. On his blog he thinks back to an essay he wrote in school. “That essay — which wasn’t very good — did what it has done for generations of young people: it taught me how to use my brain. By writing them I learned to think. And perhaps more importantly: to put those thoughts into words.”

My hackles also always rise when AI is deployed with the promise that it will free up more time for other things. The whole point is not to cut corners on the path to any kind of achievement. Holiday on those essays: “It’s slow, boring and difficult work. It requires discipline and patience. It costs you hours and hours of frustration and confusion. It’s trial and error.”

An AI chatbot can write a perfectly good essay for you. But it won’t make you any better.

PS.

Last year I was completely swept along by the podcast series Op zoek naar Marlotte. It was just such a bizarre story, in which a Zembla journalist searched for a deceased girl who never existed. The makers have now released two new episodes. These reveal that it is more common than you might think for people to fabricate stories that traumatise their victims, but that there is little that can be done about it legally.

Nintendo is releasing a remake of the gaming classic The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I am incredibly excited about this, even though we have only seen a brief teaser. The game will be released later this year for the Switch 2.

A delightful video from Peter McKinnon, writing short diary entries with an old typewriter. (What a collection of typewriters!)

Later this month the final season of The Bear begins. Still a fantastic series, in my opinion. The trailer appeared this week.

Not to make a big deal of it, but have we been reading Robert van Eijden lately? Years ago I laughed my head off at his Boek (256 blz.) and then at Paradijs bij het dashboardlicht. These days Van Eijden still writes columns for Playboy. He also publishes those columns with a slight delay on his website. Like this one, in which he dreams about his own reality series.

You read blog №170, written in the week of 8 to 14 June 2026. Subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll receive it every Sunday, free in your inbox.