On the Social Reckoning: Noam Cohen Watches Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook Sequel

“Why would you want the guy who is good at coding to decide what we all do? Why would you want the guy who built the pyramids to actually run Egypt?” — Noam Cohen

The war movie is back in vogue. Only this time it’s Hollywood turning its guns on Silicon Valley. There’s the four-hour Musk doc, an upcoming Sam Altman satire entitled Artificial, Nathan Fielder’s love/hate Elizabeth Holmes picture, and now The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s assault on the Facebook-Zuckerberg complex. The Sorkin movie is, of course, a follow-up to the 2010 biopic, The Social Network, which he wrote. Sorkin both writes and directs the sequel. If he turns it into a trilogy, Sorkin should probably star as Zuck.

Brooklyn-based Noam Cohen, former New York Times tech writer and author of The Know-It-Alls, has seen both Sorkin movies. His critique is that The Social Reckoning is a passive-aggressive legal brief with the wrong defendant. He notes that Zuckerberg is barely in it. The movie’s heroes are a Wall Street Journal journalist and an internal Facebook whistleblower. But the drama, Cohen argues, is about whether anyone can reach a man who built the attention economy, but pays attention to nobody. The problem is that Zuckerberg is played by Jeremy Strong as a robot. So it’s an AI movie without the bots. The only drama in Strong’s Zuck is his absence of drama.

Noam Cohen thinks that Sorkin’s The Social Network got the origin story wrong, which he explains more fully in a recent Harvard Magazine piece. Cohen, who also went to Harvard, argues that Facemash didn’t represent Zuck’s wounded masculinity. Instead, it was a test of how to lure an audience, and those first weeks of TheFacebook were spent tuning the thing for addictiveness. So there’s nothing accidental about the accidental billionaire.

My own take on Sorkin’s two movies is that in the first, Zuck comes across as the randy son of a NY dentist, while in this latest one, he matures into that dentist. The kind who barely talks, pulls out all your teeth, and then charges you a fortune. All for your own good, of course. As if he’s doing you a favor. Just as Hollywood is doing all of us a favor by turning a NY dentist’s son into the Antichrist. Do we really need this kind of altruistic war movie? I think not.

FURTHER READING

•   The Social Reckoning (Sony/Columbia, 9 October 2026), written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg, Mikey Madison as Frances Haugen, Jeremy Allen White as Jeff Horwitz, from Horwitz’s Facebook Files reporting.

•   “How Facebook Escaped Harvard” — Noam Cohen’s Harvard Magazine piece, and the source of the argument he makes here.

•   Cohen is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball (The New Press, 2017).

•   Richard Cooke, The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia (Norton), which Cohen reviewed; his Bloomberg piece is “Wikipedia Taught Us How to Trust AI”.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Noam Cohen wrote about technology for the New York Times for many years and is the author of The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball. He writes for Harvard Magazine, Bloomberg and others, and lives in Brooklyn.

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