David Fincher’s “The Social Network” came out six years after Facebook’s launch, when Silicon Valley still felt shrouded in mystery and magical innovation. These were the days of Steve Jobs parading across the Apple stage with a new iPhone to a crowd that saw him as their bespectacled David Bowie. So Fincher’s 2010 film — which screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has just followed up with “The Social Reckoning” — felt like a notable cultural pivot. In “The Social Network,” Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg is not the wunderkind mover-and-shaker the media made him out to be, but a pusher-and-shover unwilling to compromise his success.

Now it’s 2026, and the zeitgeist is inundated with all the ways in which social media and tech CEOs are disserving us. So Sorkin’s spiritual sequel ends up ineffective and often prosaic. Based on a series of investigative documents on Facebook from The Wall Street Journal in 2021, “The Social Reckoning” explores the company’s contribution to political polarization in the United States through share-driven algorithms that prioritize inflammatory content. It’s a worthy story, but one that Sorkin — and an off-key Jeremy Strong as Zuckerberg — sinks with a heavy-handed and politically grandstanding script. By the time he gets around to clunkily montaging the Facebook-agitated Jan. 6 riots, not even a home-run effort from recent Oscar winner Mikey Madison can save it. This film is more full of hilarity than keen social insight.

“The Social Reckoning” is unremarkable in a vacuum, but joins a vibrant class of recent tech-dramas projecting our post-artificial intelligence anxieties onto the silver screen. “You Can See Everything” — a form-bending documentary from Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim — has been the hottest ticket of the festival season. In the film, Fielder and Oppenheim are chillingly invited by infamous Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes to document her final 34 days of freedom before she is sent to federal prison. And Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI black comedy “Artificial” screened to rapturous crowds at the 64th New York Film Festival ahead of a December theatrical release. Guadagnino’s film has drawn intense scrutiny and intrigue after its original distributors at Amazon dropped the film soon after signing a massive new partnership with OpenAI.

A common thread through this new wave of tech thrillers is an intense focus on the CEO, the Machiavellian overlord defining the curves and anxieties of modern life with a veneered smile at each initial public offering. Perhaps this is a reaction to Fincher’s work on “The Social Network,” which fixated on Zuckerberg’s insecurities to paint a more nuanced picture of the self-inflating ego behind the CEO’s genius. This year, that excavation has taken on an even darker tone as we extoll the specific ways in which profit margins and the need to scale faster have put humanity’s bare necessities on the chopping block.

In “The Social Reckoning,” Zuckerberg rails against the notion that Facebook should fact-check political ads, knowing that this moral greyness will elect officials who pass pro-Facebook regulations. When one character asks if he’d object to running an advertisement in majority-Black voting districts saying that Election Day was moved to a Wednesday, Zuckerberg dodges the question. Similarly, in “Artificial,” Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield) quips that ChatGPT did not invent teen suicides. It feels even more intense in the documentary “You Can See Everything,” as we watch a real-life Holmes bullishly insist that she hasn’t done anything wrong.

Zuckerberg’s duplicity in “The Social Network” is still alarming, but it comes with an undertone of resonant empathy. Jesse Eisenberg’s performance is central to that, injecting the character with spades of awkwardness that contextualize the vampiric way in which he uses people as resources. You empathize with each person he leaves in a body bag behind him, but also with him — at the end of the day, he’s just a kid who had a good idea. This aligns with the feel-good democratization Silicon Valley promoted at the time: If you dedicated yourself to computer science and invented something great, you could end up on top of the world. 

That thinking feels outdated and precious now that tech jobs have dried up and a broader economic anxiety has set in, a direct result of the profit-minded cuts initiated by these CEOs. These new films ditch the attempt to capture the humanity behind these leaders’ ambition, instead casting them as over-the-top caricatures who happily choose to be out of touch with the change they’re affecting on the world. When Altman gleefully screws someone over in “Artificial,” it’s hard to find any motive deeper than his unbridled greed. And when Zuckerberg refuses to take down President Donald Trump’s inflammatory posts on Jan. 6, not even his closest advisors understand why he won’t get over himself and do something to prevent the violence.

These portraits are much less morally complex and interesting than “The Social Network,” but still offer an immediate satisfaction. It’s hard to find the empathy to psychoanalyze why these CEOs are the megalomaniacs they are. Here, the cinematic exercise is much simpler — rather than digging for anything deeper, Guadagnino and Sorkin lavish in harshly, comedically capturing the surface-level malarkey, forcing these figureheads of power into the role of court jester rather than king.

At one point in “The Social Reckoning,” a father whose daughter is being cyberbullied on Instagram stops Madison’s character — Facebook product manager and whistleblower Frances Haugen — and angrily asks her to pull a plug on the company’s parasitic ways. His outburst doesn’t accomplish anything tangible, but it must have felt damn satisfying to him. These new movies scratch that same itch.

Contact Shrish Bulusu at [email protected].