Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » movies http://chieforganizer.org Founder of ACORN, Chief Organizer at ACORN International, Author of Citizen Wealth, Global Grassroots and The Battle for the 9th Ward. Thu, 24 May 2012 15:27:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Sean Parker & Mark Zuckerberg in Social Network http://chieforganizer.org/2010/10/25/sean-parker-mark-zuckerberg-in-social-network/ http://chieforganizer.org/2010/10/25/sean-parker-mark-zuckerberg-in-social-network/#comments Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:15:24 +0000 dine http://chieforganizer.org/?p=3858

Sean Parker

New Orleans I was totally fried after being on the road for 27 out of 31 days in Vietnam, India, and Canada.  I had shin splits and a pulled muscle on my right leg that made soft chairs and plane seats constantly painful.  I had nothing that could be called a sleep schedule [...]]]>

Sean Parker

Sean Parker

New Orleans I was totally fried after being on the road for 27 out of 31 days in Vietnam, India, and Canada.  I had shin splits and a pulled muscle on my right leg that made soft chairs and plane seats constantly painful.  I had nothing that could be called a sleep schedule anymore.  If I was a whiner, I would be wailing.  Then in a Sunday coup de gras Drew Brees threw 4 interceptions and the Cleveland Browns humiliated the Saints with a 3rd string quarterback who looked like he had just been released from class earlier in the day at some Texas high school.  So, it was off to the movies to salvage the day with Social Nework, the well touted film about the founding of Facebook.  The usher promised me the movie would be better than the Saints game, so I was down.

He was right.  This is an award winner and, what do I know, but a classic about the roles that ego, money, competition, friendship, sex, and a lot of other BIG themes play out in the founding of enterprises.  This is not creation myth, but creation reality, warts and all.  Oh, and yeah, it’s fiction.  Right?

Ostensibly this is the story of Mark Zuckerberg, the brilliant, driven, and ruthless primary creator of Facebook, the hugely popular and successful social networking site.  Turns out, according to the movie, he was brilliant, driven, and ruthless.  Quelle shock! Even the most casual reader of the papers over recent years knew he had been sued repeatedly for a rip-and-run on some of the ideas behind Facebook and had paid pretty pennies to settle with some Harvard students and an ex-partner.  The terms of the student settlement came out at $65 Million in a dispute between the lawyers over fees.  Eduardo Saverin, one of the co-founders, who was pushed out also settled for an undisclosed sum.  His ownership is now listed at 5% so he either settled in the 9 figures or had stock restored.  Zuckerberg owns about a quarter of the company, which would put his stake valuation between 8 and 10 billion.  There are 500,000,000 users.  He’s 26 years old.  In addition to all of his other attributes in the movie he also comes off as calculating, arrogant, and possibly manipulative.  Read Machiavelli or looks around, these are not uncommon byproducts of the founding – and governing – process of many large institutions, corporations, and organizations.  I know a little bit about this and even cringing when Zuckerberg was called an “asshole” in the movie, I would never say that many of the same epithets might not have been fair when hurled at me over 4 decades at ACORN.  The shoes often fit and they are made for walking and not as uncomfortable as you might think.  Zuckerberg off loaded $100 Million to the Newark public school system to offset the movie’s common attraction, but suspect he “is what he is” and, as I used to say, “comes with the shop.”

What almost interested me more was the character of Sean Parker, played by Justin Timberlake.  First, Parker whoever he might be, drew a lucky hand here, because I’m sure he’s not at all like Timberlake, who plays him as a smooth as silk operator, schemer, mentor, tech savant, lady killer, party animal, and at the end of the movie, chicken shit.  Nonetheless his role seemed pivotal to Zuckerberg and, if this is to be believed, essential to the development of Facebook.

The movie is clear that Parker was one of the co-founders of Napster, the ill fated music sharing site that was decimated by record company lawsuits for copyright infringements, yet probably did destroy the existing business model for music though there is no real replacement yet aside from Apple Itunes and artist touring gigs.  It turns out he also is a principal founder of Plaxo, the contact site, which is pretty big though fairly incomprehensible to me, and an investor behind other startups with buzz like chatroulette, which I’ve read about as well (though never tried, because it seems creepy), that at least knocks on the door of what adding video and the internet might mean in a world past Skype.  He also is a partner in the Facebook application, Causes, which has a philanthropic twist and some real value, if I could ever figure out how to really use it as well.  And, as it turns out he was a key dude in making Facebook happen not at the dorm room at Harvard level, but at the crash pad in Palo Alto level where he was also sleeping on the floor in another of the co-founder’s rooms there, Dustin Moscovitz.

A piece in Vanity Fair on Parker, which actually quotes sources, which is refreshing, places his real role as a mentor and foil for Zuckerberg, as having shared the experience of getting pushed out at Napster and Plaxo, and in raising the first angel investment in Facebook from PayPal’s founder, negotiated for Zuckerberg “entrepreneurial control,” which is completely rare.  Since Facebook is still privately held, Zuckerberg gets to appoint a majority of the board seats for the company, effectively controlling the whole shebang with his 24% ownership.  I think that was probably worth giving Parker 4% of the company, which will make him a billionaire without any trouble when Facebook finally goes public, which seems to be relatively soon.

The Zuckerbergs of the world are a rare and special breed.  There will always be misfits and malcontents with the drive to change the world, and sometimes the stars and moon will align and they will with skill and luck stumble into that sweet spot to their shock and awe.  I wonder if the Parker’s of the world are not even rarer.  These are the people who recognize the magic and have the moxie to send an email out into the blue offering help and a hand.   Some would think of these folks as footnotes, but they are handmaidens to the future.

I left the movie thinking that for those of us who have “been there and done that,” we need to spend more time now figuring out how to be Sean Parker and find the Mark Zuckerbergs.  I’m not sure that’s how the director, David Fincher, and writer Alan Sorkin, intended the movie to be seen, but that’s my takeaway, and more than worth my little investment in this great movie.

]]> http://chieforganizer.org/2010/10/25/sean-parker-mark-zuckerberg-in-social-network/feed/ 0 Sin Nombre and Gomorrah http://chieforganizer.org/2009/05/13/sin-nombre-and-gomorrah/ http://chieforganizer.org/2009/05/13/sin-nombre-and-gomorrah/#comments Wed, 13 May 2009 15:59:40 +0000 jstuart http://chieforganizer.org/wp/?p=1360 New Orleans We saw two back-to-back powerful movies, Sin Nombre and Gomorrah, both of which spoke profoundly and movingly to our work and why it is so life-and-death to our people.  Sin Nombre was an extra treat because the writer and director, Cary Fukunaga, was in the audience and answered questions at the end [...]]]> New Orleans We saw two back-to-back powerful movies, Sin Nombre and Gomorrah, both of which spoke profoundly and movingly to our work and why it is so life-and-death to our people.  Sin Nombre was an extra treat because the writer and director, Cary Fukunaga, was in the audience and answered questions at the end of the film.

SN is a beautiful movie that dramatically portrays the immigrant trail from Honduras in Central America riding the rails through Mexico to the Texas border crossing at Reynosa.  A deported father is making his way back to his new family in New Jersey and takes the young woman who is now his daughter on the trip.  A gang originally Salvadoran is the other piece of this story since they prey on the traveling immigrants adding an additional level of fear and violence to the constant battle for survival of these economic refugees heading for estades unidos.

Gomorrah leeches out every last bit of romanticism that any may have had about the work of the “mafia” in Italy.  This movie is brutish and almost stark and colorless in the drab and defeating way it portrays life in the huge apartment blocks dominated by poverty, unemployment, crime, and drugs and therefore ruled in its own way by these criminal clans with only the slightest sense of any code.

In both movies it seems almost inescapable to conclude that life for the poor and powerless in these very different countries in Europe and Central America has virtually no value to anyone.  The movies though very different in outlook (there’s actually a “happy” ending of sorts in SN?) also make it hard to conclude that there is much hope that anything anytime or anyway soon is going to be any different.  Both movies are like a staggering punch in the face.

I felt I had to go see Gomorrah since we had agreed to help Professor Ken Reardon and organizers in Sicily with their organizing problem there in any even larger housing development that the mafia has squatted in order to see if there’s an organizational “answer” to the dilemma for the poor and working families caught in this crossfire between government, mob, and the desperate need for housing.  The whole movie was an ice cold shower of reality that forces the plans our plans for anything in Sicily to have to toughen up so that they are more than platitudes and bromides without meaning.

SN is lighter in some ways though the dread of death and violence lies under every scene.  For every light moment in which Mexicans in the countryside toss oranges up to the top of the train to the immigrants, there is the continual danger of the train and toll it takes, as well as the fact that all of these travelers are easily victimized, robbed, raped, and killed without names or numbers as they seek a better, more hopeful life.  One movie may be saying that this is no way to deal with criminals and that no one is really dealing with criminals, while the other says that but also says that the lack of immigration policy is a scourge on all of the countries of the Americas, including the United States.

It is amazing how clueless many still are.  The well meaning New Orleans audience at Canal Place applauded Sin Nombre and its young director with polite enthusiasm.

One well meaning question struck me more than others as staking out the inestimable distance of the gap between these well intentioned viewers and the reality of migrants and the poor around the world.  A woman respectfully asked Fukunaga whether his crew had “planted” all of the garbage strewn everywhere along the train tracks at every place the immigrants huddled to hobo along the route.  He laughed as he answered, that “no,” all of the garbage was part of what was normal in this experience and never part of the task list.

Indeed!  Had the director been making another movie the camera would have easily fallen on the cartoneros or reciclidades who would have been staying in Mexico City or any of these train stops along the way and making a living from this ever growing trash heap.

The question revealed how far the world of even New Orleans, hardly on anyone’s list of the worlds’ cleanest cities from the everyday reality of poverty and peril in the rest of the world.  With Fukunaga we can agree that trash is the least of the problems here, almost past notice and beyond comment.

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