This story is an attempt at creative writing and by no means reality. The views and actions reflected in this piece do not represent my own.
We are sophisticated creatures indeed.
Moving across the world upon our noble steeds.
But even if we've left the wild behind,
traces still lurk in every part of our being.“You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But 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 you’re an a**hole.”
—Erica Albright from The Social Network (2010)
That quote has always been one that’s ripped through my flesh every time I hear it. For while I’m not the intended recipient, I’ve felt the burn of it nonetheless. No movie will ever have more of a lasting impact on my psyche than The Social Network and I strongly believe it’s one of the greatest computer science movies of all time. It’s based on the true story of the founding of Facebook and is a tale of stolen ideas, Silicon Valley culture, and the betrayal of a co-founder who couldn’t keep up with it all. The iconic tagline bears a permanent engraving in my mind.
“You don’t get 500 million friends without making a few enemies”
It’s very clear that the movie was intended to paint Mark Zuckerberg as a villain, who stole, lied, and cheated to get to precisely where he was. Clearly, nobody should look up to this story as inspiring or something they should see themselves in. If anything, that would hint at them having problems —and we wouldn’t want that would we?
But I was obsessed with his character. It felt almost like the view of Satan which Romantics interpret from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton’s Satan was unlike any Satan which came before him as he was given an almost sympathetic cause. He seemed less like the embodiment of evil and misfortune and more like a rebel who wished to have autonomy rather than be subservient to the will of God. The famous quote from Paradise Lost being:
“Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven”
And it was this almost poetic cause which I saw in Zuckerberg. Clearly, he’s the villain of the story, but who wouldn’t do the same in his position? After all, Saverin clearly couldn’t keep up with the company; he just wasn’t fast enough for Zuckerberg’s liking. Saverin wanted to monetize when obviously growth still needed to be done. This was Silicon Valley after all, not your father’s retirement fund. If you can’t gamble a bit, you never had a chance of success in this world. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Good Evening, Mr. Rockefeller
For where the actions of men have fallen short of grace,
there lurks few consequences for those who run the race.
It takes us all to hold those to atone.
But at least history shall keep their actions in stone.Watching The Social Network made me embody the true mentality of a capitalist, one Zuckerberg followed just as Rockefeller did before him. You have to do anything to get what you want—whether that be the railroad rebates of Standard Oil or the buy-or-bury tactics of Meta. Do you really want something if you’re not willing to do anything for it? I gave the robber baron mindset a warm embrace and began to ponder what my enterprise might be. After all, I was just a high school freshman who hardly had an idea of how the world worked.
Then, it hit me. At launch, Facebook was exclusively for Harvard students—a decision gave them some initial credibility while also allowing for a smaller area to test ideas. Harvard certainly boasted a large student population but it’s definitely smaller than the whole world. It made perfect sense to set my sights on a little target before expanding to everyone else.
But what would my idea be? I thought back to earlier in the movie where Zuckerberg built a “hot or not” style app called Facemash. It would show two Harvard women on screen and allow people to pick one over the other in order to rank them. The app went viral on the campus extremely quickly before it was taken down and he was summoned before the administrative board.
I still remember hearing his witty answers to all their questions—a bit of hubris that like John Milton’s Satan, made him all the more sympathetic. His near-defiance of the admin board almost led to his expulsion, yet he walked away with only six months of academic probation.
While in no way did I support the idea behind Facemash, I couldn’t deny that its execution was rather brilliant. The app went viral within hours of its launch—so much so that it crashed the college networks (at least in the movie). Not to mention, an app which relied on the human feelings of attraction was interesting to me. What if I could make something based off a similar principle? The sacred nature of attraction—something so biologically innate and intimate—made it all the more fascinating to me.
I finally had an idea and my fate was set in stone.
Romanticizing Romance
Toiling labor finally brought alive:
A product of years taken from his life.
Yet forsaken boundaries leading to strife,
would later be his own demise.The irony of building a dating app to commercialize romance is that it seems like the very thing that Romantics would be against. After all, Romantic literature—say Frankenstein by Mary Shelley—typically portrayed the negatives of human innovation.
In Frankenstein, we hear the story of Victor Frankenstein: a scientist who created a monster fashioned from the remains of corpses and had to deal with the consequences. And yes, Frankenstein is the name of the scientist rather than the monster as Halloween propaganda would like you to believe.
I felt much like Victor when I began work on the project; however, I remained blissfully unaware that my creation would begin to mirror his in far more ways than in its development.
But never mind that, for I had an idea to build. Before I could get to building, however, I needed to refine my idea down to exactly what features I wished to develop.
The primary idea was simple: the app would operate like Tinder in which you could swipe left or right based on your preference for a given profile. If you accepted a profile, that person would then be available to chat with—thereafter, the progression would be entirely up to you. A very basic take on the concept of a dating app.
Beyond just the core functionality however, I also needed to address the administrative aspects—such as how I would prevent people who aren’t students in my school from using the service. Zuckerberg initially made Facebook exclusive by requiring harvard.edu email addresses for users. I felt a bit doubtful however that my school would have been quite so gracious as to allow their students to sign up for a dating app using their school email.
So rather, I decided to think a bit outside the box. What if I could still make
use of the student emails? What if the students emailed me? With that line of thinking,
I came up with my brilliant scheme to verify students without the school catching
me: On sign up, I would give a student a special set of code words for verification
(an example might be “apple banana coffee monkey zoo”). Now all they would need
to do is simply email this phrase from their school email to my school email address
to which I set up a mail client to act as a silent sentinel, constantly scanning
my inbox for these incoming phrases. Upon receiving the correct phrase, it would
finally grant entry on the website.
With the verification problem solved, I laid the foundation of what would be necessary to proceed. Now, I had to work on implementing the remaining features.
I was able to quickly implement a bare-bones prototype—one which I will spare you the details of. At this point in time, I knew I had progressed far as I had completed nearly every necessary step for the project. Crucially however, I ignored the most vital and elusive component of my enterprise: the algorithm—the brain for my creature.
Algorithmic Adventure
The final touch needed inside,
For this great beast to come alive.
Yet should I take this final stride?
Or stop it now should havoc arise.By this point, I had been consistently working the project for about two weeks—a lifetime compared to the smaller ventures I whipped up over weekends. I was about through with all the little housekeeping items needed for the project and finally ready to take on the biggest challenge of the development. I began to grow obsessed with the project and found that refining every aspect of it started to eat into much of my time. I often daydreamed about being the leader of organized crime—the dating don if you will.
I vividly remember one scene I played out in my head. I was sitting in class as any good mob boss would, smoking an expensive cuban cigar the thickness of my finger. This magical cigar and its smoke were completely invisible to the class as its existence was purely for projecting gravitas. On my wrist was a handcrafted watch beautifully decorated in white gold and diamonds—a piece worth over double your father’s retirement fund.
As I puffed on my cigar—paying little attention to the math lesson that was being taught—the school public announcement system crackled with a request for my presence in the administrator’s office. I sighed and ashed the remains of my cigar onto the desk, blackening the wood. I got up from my seat and walked to the office as calm and collected as could be. As I was getting there, my mind was racing with all the different possibilities of why I was being called there. Not that I was worried—merely curious. I stepped into the administration building and went up to the front desk. The woman behind the desk worked in silence, her expression lacking even a trace of joy. I went in front of her desk, my tall figure overshadowing her.
“I was called to the principal’s office?”, I asked, yet I knew the answer.
“Right this way,” she replied in a monotone voice. She rose from her chair and began walking briskly through the hallway towards one of the rooms, as if she were late for an appointment. As she walked past one of the doors, she stopped abruptly and knocked on it before proceeding to open it.
“Sir, I have someone for you.”
“Let him in.”, I heard in a cold and calculated voice. Inside, I was greeted with a short stubby man who looked at me in disgust. “Take a seat,” he grunted as I pulled out a chair. “To what do I owe the pleasure of speaking with you?” I smirked, leaning back in confidence.
“I know what you’ve been up to” he trembled in what seemed like rage and disbelief, “I’ve heard about this dating app and I know you’re the ringleader behind it.” I laughed at his accusation, as if he had just told me the best joke in the world. “That’s a good one.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out a cigar—a strategic show of power to let our little school administrator understand my hand at play. He stared at me in shock, having expected a confession or even a beg for mercy; instead he saw his rehearsed confrontation put to shame.
I sparked the cigar as he watched in stunned silence. “T-This isn’t over,” he stumbled over his words as if he were speaking English for the first time in his life. Before he could stammer another empty threat, I exhaled a cloud of smoke in his face from my cigar—leaving him coughing as the smoke of ambition enveloped the room. I got up from my chair and walked out with the cigar resting firmly in my mouth—as a gravestone would be in a cemetery.
It was fantasies like this that fueled my ambition—narratives I reenacted in my head as if I were a director, resting my fate in prose and cinema. After all, how else was I to remain motivated while slaving away tirelessly at the algorithm?
I found during the process that my knowledge needed to pull off this feat was severely lacking. I had a clear idea in my head, yet I found myself unable to render that vision in code.
Deus Ex Machina
Such craft could never be from man alone,
for the scent reeks of the divine unknown.
As sharp as a knife sharpened from whetstone,
how it came to fruition remains to be shown.With my fantasies etched into my head, I embarked on the journey to acquire the skills needed for building my masterpiece. At this point, I hardly had a solid understanding of computer science as I barely had any projects under my belt. To make a leap from simple websites to a fully fledged dating app algorithm would require a miracle job—divine intervention, even.
I remember the moment the algorithmic breakthrough came to me like it was yesterday. It was a Saturday and I spent nearly the entire day on researching data structures and algorithms—changing my focus for only the bare minimum needed to sustain myself. I went to bed Sunday at 2 a.m. having immersed myself in my study for so long. It was difficult to sleep that night as my dreams engaged in algorithmic fantasies, leaving me tossing and turning thinking about how I would bring my creation to life.
At exactly 5:06 a.m., I shot out of bed with my Eureka moment, shivering with ambition. The feat of quantifying the nature of romance itself was within my reach and I climbed closer and closer. Every bit of research had come down to this moment: I finally figured out the missing part the algorithm.
A perfect algorithm would create precise pairs of people engineered to last. However, perfection would mean losing valuable users with every scroll—effectively bleeding my enterprise to death. A bad algorithm would have opposite results: it would fail to keep people interested at all. I needed a concoction right in the middle which would work just enough to give them hope yet not enough to truly help them find love.
I needed to hijack their dopamine reward system to keep them swiping—dangling the prospects of romance just close enough to captivate them, yet right out of reach. I needed to grow intimately familiar with the science of addiction.
Just like slot machines, users don’t get what they want each time. After all, what good machine gave jackpots every time? That would be boring and financial suicide. In reality, a good slot machine doesn’t give payouts predictably and rather keeps users hooked from the mystery of what the result could be of each pull.
And of course these idiots had it coming. Who in their right mind would want to use a dating app for high school students? To make it better, I figured I needed some more user data. Do you really want something if you’re not willing to do anything for it?
My epiphany gave me the chilling realization that I couldn’t rely on just data from swipes. I needed to go far deeper. I went back to bed and again woke up at 1:54 p.m, ambition coursing through my veins.
Making the already daunting task of an algorithm harder, I decided to add an Instagram scraper to the app. The idea is that it would find people’s Instagram profiles and map out social circles using the statistics of followers, following, comments, etc. Is it creepy to scrape all of this without people’s knowledge or not even needing them to provide their Instagram details? Perhaps. But I couldn’t care less. These farm animals don’t deserve privacy anyways.
It’s better to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing than to be led to the slaughterhouse for that matter. I didn’t debate even for a second on what others might consider a moral dilemma. I pushed through on the algorithm for nearly weeks on end, making my weekday routine devolve down to homework and then dating app work.
I slaved away day and night, chained to my computer as each line of code loosened the shackles bit by bit. Finally, at 6 p.m. on a Sunday, the chains shattered— the links scattering brilliantly across the floor of the dark room. I lifted my hands as a free man in utter disbelief: Was there anything I had forgotten? After double—no triple checking that everything was in order, I sighed in relief.
My hideous progeny was finally alive. I could finally rest. I leaned back in my chair and sparked my cigar—tainting the pure air with the smoke of sin. How could something so wrong feel so right?
Finale
I stared at the finished demo in utter awe. All that was left was to open the gates to the public. I went to school the next day, excited to unveil my creation to the world. My fantasies were nearly in reach.
I started by telling people about the app wherever I could, pitching it as if I were speaking among investors. I spoke my heart out about how I wanted to revolutionize the process of finding love in the school—a tale which couldn’t be further from the truth. But, I needed to lead the sheep to the slaughterhouse somehow.
I had expected reactions of admiration—excitement even. I thought I had a brilliant product in front of me which no one in the right mind could refuse. Yet, that wasn’t the case. The board of investors in front of me laughed hysterically at my life’s work. My calm persona of confidence tinged in arrogance shattered as I was met with a reaction I had never anticipated. It had not been bad enough that the few I showcased my masterpiece to had made a cruel joke of it. Many more came as the story of my failure disseminated amongst the student body.
I swallowed the bitter taste of rejection in spite, holding back tears. The product of my life which was meant to change everything only did so for the worse. I couldn’t bear showing my face anywhere again. The bell rang for lunch and rather than heading straight to my regular table, I headed for the building.
Who thought making a dating app for high school students was a good idea? I headed for the stairs, intending to make my way to the roof. I made my way to the top floor and scanned each of the doors, finally finding one labeled in bold grave letters with, “Roof” The black door was locked so I kicked on it hard, mustering strength I would never need to utilize again. The door gave way and I trudged up the final flight of stairs, each footstep laced with regrets. I reached the crown of the building and gazed down the edge, seeing my peers, who were probably—no definitely talking about me. I lifted my left foot and placed it upon the edge—shaking slightly as I did so. I took a deep breath before repeating this action with my right foot.
I peered down one last time, taking in my surroundings as a camera would on its last photograph. I muttered under my breath, “Goodbye, world,” before I closed my eyes and took the leap of faith onto the cold, hard earth.
[[g-man]] Good evening, Mr. [name].
[Subject] What's going on? Shouldn't I be dead?
[[g-man]] I'm afraid I'm not at... liberty to elaborate. However, I do believe that you're... well aware of your actions leading up to our interaction, Mr. [name].
[Subject] ... I don't know what you're referring to.
[[g-man]] Lying to me is not... in your best interest, Mr. [name] for I wish not to act... against your interests. Quite on the... contrary. Before I give you... my offer, I must ask you a few questions.
[Subject] What do you want?
[[g-man]] What led you to create [dating app], Mr. [name]?
[Subject] I wanted to be a king and to claim my seat among the heavens. It wasn't for the money nor the power but rather...
[[g-man]] Rather what, Mr. [name]?
[Subject] I couldn't describe it even if I wanted to. It forwent all reasoning and logic and appealed to the deepest most animalistic desires of mine.
[[g-man]] Were you aware of the... consequences might have arisen from the... creation of [dating app], Mr. [name]?
[Subject] I certainly wasn't unaware. I knew in the back of my mind that my creation could come with dire repercussions. Yet I never was able to truly envision it. All I could think about was the twisted fantasy in my head.
[[g-man]] Were your actions worthwhile, Mr. [name]?
[Subject] Most certainly not. They've caused nothing but unimaginable suffering and I regret everything I've done.
[[g-man]] I understand, Mr. [name]. Now I'd like to bid you an offer before we... part ways. I would like to offer you the opportunity to have your record... expunged. Every last trace of your incident shall... disappear, as if it were data being overwritten with zeroes. You shall be able to return back to your... mortal life and enjoy the presence of those... ignorant to your actions. In exchange for my... generosity, you will work under my employment contract as a... contractor.
[Subject] I.. cannot accept this. I'm sorry. I cannot live subservient to another. I wish to be alive on my own terms. Living otherwise is a fate worse than death.
[[g-man]] No regrets, Mr. [name].