Initiating Tech Week
Tech Week, for the uninitiated, is “tech’s largest decentralized conference.” This week it’s in San Francisco, and next week it goes to Los Angeles, having already descended on New York. A hype video for “tech’s largest decentralized conference” invites you to “close deals, raise money, and land customers.”
As an emissary for the start-up known as the Oakland Review of Books, I could be looking to close deals, raise money, and land customers (although, we like to call them readers). But that would be crazy, considering, you know, everything. Instead I’m showing up to events as vaguely as possible, even though I had to put my LinkedIn into every Partiful RSVP. I kept waiting to get rejected from any of them, considering I have zero tech bonafides. It doesn’t appear a lot of vetting is happening.
The uninitiated includes me: I only learned how to pronounce Marc Andreessen’s name earlier this year. But when Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg showed up to Donald Trump’s inauguration, I felt an earthquake within me, the veil lifted from my eyes, and after five years in the Bay, I started letting tech in. Actually comprehending where I live and grounding myself in its reality would require knowing the enemy. Especially since, after years of “doom loop” discourse, San Francisco is back in national headlines for asserting a triumphant economy, underwritten almost exclusively by AI. I have felt the Bay overall become more alive in the past year, and I have to accept that fragile reality as the downstream effect of an overheated market for the most idiotic technology ever to exist. When Marx talked about contradictions in capital, he was referring to the phenomenon where "restaurants and bars feel busy and fun” and “good god, the erosion of social capacity is accelerating” happen at the same time. Oh, and the bubble of it all.
On the road to hell, on Monday, I found myself at the Marina Theater for a screening of The Social Network, presented by Zingroll, the self-described YouTube/Spotify for AI Movies. The Partiful had over 300 RSVPs, but since I still need reminding that tech is actually all marketing, I assumed I’d need to get in line early. Instead, the only people out front when I arrived were two young women wearing t-shirts that said “Free Zingroll Subscription: netflix.com/unsubscribe.” About ten people milled about, crunching on free popcorn. A guy who looked to be about 23 years old and was wearing sweatpants asked me if I was here for the screening. I later realized this was the Zingroll founder.
15 minutes after the start time, this 23-year old told us we were starting late because there was a “jam” happening downtown. Also, someone had spread “misinformation” about the start time. 20 or so of us headed into the theater, and to pass the time before this mysterious mass of additional guests arrived, we watched Zingroll trailers on the screen. Or, to be more precise, we watched someone open Zingroll trailers from a Mac desktop: a racecar driver against-all-odds movie, a WWII movie (called World War II), and a violent-prep-school-thriller-mystery movie. Partly, it made me think about the power of genre and trope. Mostly I just cringed, experiencing profound levels of stress whenever the uncanny images evoked the slightest flicker of recognition. After each one, the founder asked the audience to scream if they liked the quality. “For real,” he urged the crowd. A handful of whoops responded, but I hesitate to attribute those to anything but the social awkwardness of trying to lend legitimacy to such apparent slop. I had flashbacks to watching my film school peers’ early short films in undergrad, which were much better.
I asked the young and friendly mechanical engineer who sat next to me whether he had heard of Zingroll before this event. He said no; I said, me neither. “That’s the point of the event, though, right?” he said. When he asked why I was there, I told him I’m a writer and that The Social Network is my favorite movie. He asked if I did any science journalism and sparked up a discussion on homelessness in San Francisco. To his other side sat an autonomous vehicle company worker in his late-20s, who chimed in, describing the poor conditions of shelter options in San Francisco and how unhoused people aren’t allowed to bring their belongings with them, which leaves them vulnerable to losing everything they own. When I anticipated this ethnography-lite week of blogging, I imagined that I would be traveling into another universe at Tech Week, getting access to the society-within-the-society of the Bay and some satisfying respite from the abstraction of said society’s effect on my life. Instead, I felt a remarkable level of familiarity. There would be no demystification, at least for tonight.
Around this point, the founder accepted his fate, and the small crowd, and opened an .Mp4 of The Social Network on his desktop. Rooney Mara and Jesse Eisenberg’s faces filled the room, and I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders. At the first two notes of Trent Reznor’s score, my chest tightened. As the credits played over the nighttime movie-Harvard, my thoughts went into hysterics: please, please, please don’t kill the movies. No part of my conscious thoughts had taken the Zingroll trailers seriously, but I still internalized some threat of what they represent. Luckily, I was watching one of the film industry’s greatest 21st century products, so I tried to let the anxieties of 2025 fade away into what was on the screen in front of me (the anxieties of 2010).
It didn’t last. Pretty soon, typo-ridden ads flashed on the screen every twenty minutes, as VorbVPN, Clickfunnels, Wishup, Spockjet, and GetResponse hawked their wares on what I gathered was the torrent file. I was initially relieved when I saw him hit play on the file: at least we weren’t going to be trying to stream something live. But that might have been preferable. I didn’t have high expectations for this, but flashbacks to illegal downloading in high school was a certain type of low. For better or for worse, though, the ads forced me to watch the movie with more distance. Sorkin’s sympathy for Mark Zuckerberg hit me more, this time around, along with the inevitability-of-the-present narrative that the dueling-lawsuit structure produces.
I don’t rewatch movies very often, but this one I’ve seen a lot. When I tried explaining why, recently, I didn’t have a very good reason. The best I could come up with was that it came out when I was 16, when Facebook had a very strong influence on my life. Every year since, it seems to take on new prescience and meaning. (That, and my general love for Fincher). After seeing it for the first time in a couple years last night, I’ve decided it also stems from this feeling that, for all the “it’s actually about friendship” and “it’s a modern-day Citizen Kane,” it’s a movie that contextualizes the stakes of a powerful force in my day-to-day life and put back in front of me. Facebook came from someone, and somewhere. That novelty has long since worn off, Meta is eons from the “Facebook” of The Social Network, and I spend very little time on social media in the present, but whatever trajectory the film set out to capture is still charting its way through history.
After the movie ended, the night felt like an anti-marketing campaign. One way to reinforce how ugly AI videos are is by playing them before and after a movie that talented people made (even if they couldn’t manage to buy a clean copy of it). The Zingroll founder took the mic in front of the theater and thanked us all for coming, stumbled over his words as he told us that the world would not be the same six months from now, presumably because we would be spending all of our waking hours bingeing AI videos that never end. The mechanical engineer had scurried out quickly, so I asked the autonomous vehicle worker and his friend if they would watch AI videos if there was no way to tell they were AI. The friend said yes, and she explained that she was at the event because she’s friends with the founder. The autonomous vehicle worker said no. “I’m anti-AI,” he said. Why did he come, then? “My friend didn’t want to come alone.”—Annie Lloyd
