In the early 1980s, a new culture of computer hackers were learning to test pre-internet communication limits. The term hacking even became mainstream around this same time with the movie, War Games.
Flash forward almost 30 years and the story of Mark Zuckerberg and FaceBook is nearly the same–and The Social Network is this generation’s War Games.
Back in the day, kids with an Apple ][ and a 1200 baud modem were experimenting with a new world called telecommunication. In fact, I was one of those hacker kids–and there were lots of us–all across the US and I’m sure beyond.
We phreaked, pioneered wardialing, and broke laws that didn’t even exist. And that’s just getting started! But we also created, programmed, innovated, and did what now happens naturally in many facets of technology.
In comparison, The Social Network highlighted many of those same attributes–pushing limits, putting pieces of code together like poetry, and building a website out of a dorm room that is now used by 500 million active users.
So regardless of how you feel about the story of FaceBook, what rang true with me was not so much how successful Mark and company have become (which is great!), but more importantly the power of disruption, a quality found in both War Games and The Social Network movies, which both past and present generations can learn from.