How Does The Net Work?

Two intriguing takes on The Social Network:

Armond White fulminates that it turns Mark Zuckerberg, inventor of Facebook, into a hero:

The Social Network glibly accepts Zuckerberg’s selfishness as entertaining and nerd-cool—even when Zuckerberg allegedly betrays his Harvard university colleagues, cheating them out of a fortune....

...To Fincher and Sorkin, Zuckerberg represents a new cultural avatar who (like other snarky Internet avengers) must be worshipped, not held to account. They inflate Zuckerberg’s story as a “creation myth” (as one lawyer calls him), the better to concede victory to a tycoon of new technology rather than apply normal social or professional standards to his hostile relations with people. The Social Network sucks up to successful, wealthy young powerbrokers.

... Power-worship keeps Sorkin from making a What Makes Sammy Run? inquiry or Paddy Chayefsky jeremiad.

Meanwhile, Jesse Walker (a friend) writes that the film betrays Aaron Sorkin's cynicism about the Web.

But with the social network, the new Sorkin-scripted picture about the rise of Facebook, the writer has found something that he can be cynical about: the world of start-ups, geeks, and above all the Internet. The heavily fictionalized film's opening scenes establish the Web as a place of predation, degradation, and privacy violation. [...] After years of op-eds and TV reports expressing older Americans' discomfort with the Web and with a generation that's comfortable living its lives there, the social network compresses all that uneasiness into two hours of intense paranoia. As Sorkin put it to a writer from New York magazine, he is "not a fan of the Internet."

....as a catalog of cultural fears, the social network is as revealing as The Birth of a Nation. Director David Fincher's résumé includes Panic Room, Fight Club, The Game, and se7en, so he certainly knows how to make a paranoid picture; and while the film's core anxieties come from the screenwriter, its rhythm and tone may owe more to the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Between their pounding, foreboding soundtrack and a camera that never goes too long without showing us a sex- and drug-drenched den of sin, the film boils over with the idea that something rotten is eating into the country's established institutions, from Hollywood to Harvard.

So which is it?