Aaron Sorkin opens up for W Magazine – drugs, women, work, isolation…and nerds.
[note]A clip from The Social Network after the jump.[/note]
The solo nature of Sorkin’s drug taking somehow mirrors Zuckerberg’s trancelike state at the computer: They would seem to share a kind of brilliant isolation. Even now that he is sober, there’s something solitary about Sorkin. “I don’t feel like a nerd,” he explained, “but I think I understand them. Sometimes I literally don’t know what to do with my hands. I know what I used to do, and I don’t know what to do now. At parties I stay where the crowd is. I don’t want to get into trouble off by myself.”
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Sorkin’s research unearthed the very first words on what became Facebook—an angry blog post that Zuckerberg allegedly wrote after being dumped by a girl. That blog morphed into a Zuckerberg-invented computer program called Facemash, in which photos of Harvard women were posted online, and compared and contrasted based on their looks. It was a classic misfit’s revenge: If he couldn’t get the girl, he would trash the girl. “I think there’s a subset of nerds who are not the cuddly kinds of nerds we made movies about in the Eighties,” Sorkin said. “These nerds don’t understand why attractive women are still dating the quarterback and not them, why women don’t get that they’re the ones running the universe right now. There’s an arrogance that has alchemized into real nastiness.”