In a celebrated and often insightful essay on intra-generational alienation in the 2010 film The Social Network, Zadie Smith could find only one comforting connection between her ‘Person 1.0’ world (also that of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher) and the hyper-networked one of Mark Zuckerberg’s Generation 2.0. Reflecting on a scene of intensely competitive computer programming, Smith confessed to feeling some pride about this coming group of young people. ‘They’ve spent a decade being berated for not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics’, the thirtysomething novelist remarked, but it ‘turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been doing something else extraordinary. They’ve been making a world.’
