If the tech bubble’s due to collapse, I hope it happens before the bubble is so large it takes all of civilization with it. The current boomlet of films criticizing tech might help teach people skepticism, the most useful mental habit.
Nathan Fielder’s strange and engaging documentary You Can See Everything, on the surface, is about the final days of freedom for Elizabeth Holmes, CEO of the debunked and disgraced healthcare-technology company Theranos, before she headed off to prison in 2023 to begin a years-long sentence for fraud. Theranos got about $1 billion from investors for a device touted as having the revolutionary ability to diagnose a wide array of illnesses from a single drop of blood, though it couldn’t.
On a deeper level, the film’s about whether Holmes might simply be so autistic that, as she still insists, she genuinely doesn’t understand how she defrauded people. Her behavior in the film raises the possibility—perhaps just her latest scam—that every time she told investors her device could examine a blood droplet for diagnostic purposes, she merely meant, like someone touting a new cellphone, that if the separate tech existed for diagnosing each illness in question from a blood droplet, this device would communicate with those other diagnostic systems to tell you what’s up.
It’s a sweeping but almost-plausible defense in an era of lucrative portals, delivery services, shell companies, and other doorways that merely promise to connect you to the good stuff rather than being the good stuff in and of themselves.
Ironically, many years ago, a nerd acquaintance who reminds me of Holmes a bit, impatient with my musing about whether she had autistic tendencies that might be said to morally excuse some of her bad behavior, reminded me how ambiguous most psychological diagnoses are by saying, “It’s not like there’s a blood test for autism.” Maybe if Holmes is fully scientifically vindicated there will be!
On a still deeper level, the film’s about how any investigator, including a documentarian with essentially unlimited access to his subject, can ever really be certain what’s going on right in front of him. Is Fielder now too close to his subject, maybe even smitten with her, to tell her story in a skeptical fashion?
Fielder’s the right man to ask such questions, since he got his start as a magician, has made multiple comedic miniseries about blurring the line between real events and scripted recreations (often in deliberately confusing and even morally unsettling ways), and usually crafts recursive comedic narratives that eventually lead pretty far up their own asses, where he apparently feels most comfortable and where an empathic (less autistic?) viewer is led to feel quite uncomfortable—yet fascinated.
The most Fielderian moment in You Can See Everything may be when he engineers an argument between Elizabeth Holmes’ real-life boyfriend (who may be manipulated by her, a manipulator of her, or simply her deceitful partner in crime) and an actress playing Holmes. At moments like that, Fielder must be as happy as a magician who has convinced you the rabbit must’ve been inside the hat all along, which is itself a bit manipulative and sociopathic.
It’s all very meta. And speaking of Meta…
The big reason Aaron Sorkin’s docudrama sequel The Social Reckoning fails is that it’s a much more convicting indictment of Sorkin than of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Maybe social media makes people happier, maybe it makes them less happy, whatever—but there’s no question Sorkin is a pontificating, grandstanding, oversimplifying drama queen-turned-dramatist. With all the bombast of the “You can’t handle the truth” speech from the end of his play-turned-film A Few Good Men, Sorkin here depicts a Wall Street Journal reporter (Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White) pressing a young, female, nerdy Facebook employee (Frances Haugen, played by Mikey Madison) to give him—and Congress—stolen documents showing Facebook knew how much psychological and political damage the site was doing.
The question of whether users are responsible for their own stupid ideas and habits is barely raised, except to make it look as though Zuckerberg’s flirtation with that sort of libertarian framing is hollow excuse-making. One of many political questions the film could’ve raised if Sorkin weren’t a partisan hack is whether he and his liberal buddies, given the power to censor, would cause even greater harm than unfettered (or even algorithmically-goosed) speech among the grubby masses does.
And the masses here are made to look grubby indeed. The film opens with a screeching, young, pretty, white chick hurling racist insults at two non-white cops during roadside questioning. Later in the film, we’re informed that the white chick was a prominent progressive activist until a few months prior, and then began using Facebook. Who radicalized her and turned her into a racist roadside shrieker, the reporter and Facebook employee characters ask? Sorkin will of course never make a film about the possibility that a privileged white chick lefty activist may only need a couple drinks and the opportunity to mouth off to become an embarrassment to her movement, no online Aryan chat group required.
That awkward, heavy-handed opening is outdone at the film’s end by the Facebook whistleblower character saying during the Jan. 6 riot, “I implore you to act” to members of a congressional panel contemplating Facebook’s influence, though the credits roll abruptly just before someone, on screen or in the audience, might logically ask “What exactly do you (and Sorkin) want Congress to do, and will there be a followup movie about the immense historical horrors caused by government censorship?”
The whistleblower argues in confusing fashion with the Wall Street Journal reporter about sexism at one point in mid-film, which may have been Sorkin’s awkward way of compensating for how much time his camera spends lingering on Mikey Madison’s breasts. Perhaps we need censorship.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey