Film still from "The Social Network"

For those who’ve been living under a rock, David Fincher directed, Aaron Sorkin penned “The Social Network”, is a pretty big deal. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement. The film, that surrounds two landmark court cases involving Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and the people that he stole from (co-founders and fellow Harvard classmates), is being lauded as “the film of our generation”; The “Me” generation. And to that, The Social Network, to say the least, does not show Facebook in the kindest light. Zuckerberg comes out of the dogfight looking like a cross between Attila The Hun and Patrick Bateman and from all reports, is losing sleep trying to repair his already deeply tarnished image.

But this story started far before celluloid hit the cutting room floor. Zuckerberg’s gaggle of problems began when he saw it fit to sellout (as some would say) the privacy of the near-500 million members of the Facebook community to corporations bidding for information of their habits, behavioral patterns and identities. But to the average Facebook user, Zuckerberg’s offenses went somewhat quietly into the dark.

For the new wave of young coders however, who believed in open-source data sharing, free digital culture and privacy protection; there was blood in the water. The sharks began to circle, and before long, rumor stacked upon rumor, Facebook was facing a litany of criticism from the very community that help build it.

Will the real Mark Zuckerberg please stay up?

This was bad for business.

February 2010, four students enrolled in NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, are fed up with Facebook’s ubiquity and get charged up by a lecture from free-software activist Eben Moglen. Moglen talks of an Internet the way it was “promised to be”; one free of privacy deregulations and sinister database sharing. The students left the lecture with dreams of a revolution on their minds. One where Facebook, was “de-faced” and shown as an option that didn’t give freedom, but in fact encroached upon it. They begin work on a new project that was to change the way the Internet and social networking was perceived. Maxwell Salzberg, 23; Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 20; Daniel Grippi, 21; and Raphael Sofaer, 19 created their baby, Diaspora*.

New York Magazine writes, “Diaspora*—if it worked—would do everything Facebook did. But users would own their data. If they wished, they could run their own servers. There would be no data-mining. No whiplash privacy protocols. And no Mark Zuckerberg.”

Diaspora* will, if it hasn’t already, give the Facebook empire reason to take notice. The future will not in the hands of “big payday chasers” but instead in those who find value from the creation of dialogue and shared knowledge. Utopian? Sure, but it’s what’s going to save the world. Time we start taking these kids a bit more seriously.