| Online social networks -- Political aspects -- United States. |
| Disinformation -- United States. |
| Propaganda -- Technological innovations. |
| United States -- Politics and government |
| Zuckerberg, Mark, 1984- -- Influence. |
| Facebook (Electronic resource) -- Social aspects. |
| Facebook (Online social network) |
| فيس بوك (Electronic resource) |
| Fīs būk (Electronic resource) |
| Фейсбук (Electronic resource) |
| Feĭsbuk (Electronic resource) |
| Naaltsoos biniiʼ (Electronic resource) |
| 페 oVjoSwoQY (Electronic resource) |
| P'eisŭbuk (Electronic resource) |
| פייסבוק (Electronic resource) |
| フェイスブック (Electronic resource) |
| Feisubukku (Electronic resource) |
| Feisu bukku (Electronic resource) |
| Фэйсбук (Electronic resource) |
| Фејсбук (Electronic resource) |
| Fejsbuk (Electronic resource) |
| Communities, Online (Online social networks) |
| Communities, Virtual (Online social networks) |
| Electronic social networks |
| Online communities (Online social networks) |
| Social networking Web sites |
| Virtual communities |
| United States -- Government |
| United States -- History, Political |
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Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The New York Times bestseller about a noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who wakes up to the serious damage Facebook is doing to our society - and sets out to try to stop it.
If you had told Roger McNamee even three years ago that he would soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from destroying our democracy, he would have howled with laughter. He had mentored many tech leaders in his illustrious career as an investor, but few things had made him prouder, or been better for his fund's bottom line, than his early service to Mark Zuckerberg. Still a large shareholder in Facebook, he had every good reason to stay on the bright side. Until he simply couldn't.
ZUCKED is McNamee's intimate reckoning with the catastrophic failure of the head of one of the world's most powerful companies to face up to the damage he is doing. It's a story that begins with a series of rude awakenings. First there is the author's dawning realization that the platform is being manipulated by some very bad actors. Then there is the even more unsettling realization that Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are unable or unwilling to share his concerns, polite as they may be to his face.
And then comes the election of Donald Trump, and the emergence of one horrific piece of news after another about the malign ends to which the Facebook platform has been put. To McNamee's shock, even still Facebook's leaders duck and dissemble, viewing the matter as a public relations problem. Now thoroughly alienated, McNamee digs into the issue, and fortuitously meets up with some fellow travelers who share his concern, and help him sharpen its focus. Soon he and a dream team of Silicon Valley technologists are charging into the fray, to raise consciousness about the existential threat of Facebook, and the persuasion architecture of the attention economy more broadly -- to our public health and to our political order.
Zucked is both an enthralling personal narrative and a masterful explication of the forces that have conspired to place us all on the horns of this dilemma. This is the story of a company and its leadership, but it's also a larger tale of a business sector unmoored from normal constraints, just at a moment of political and cultural crisis, the worst possible time to be given new tools for summoning the darker angels of our nature and whipping them into a frenzy. Like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window , Roger McNamee happened to be in the right place to witness a crime, and it took him some time to make sense of what he was seeing and what we ought to do about it. The result of that effort is a wise, hard-hitting, and urgently necessary account that crystallizes the issue definitively for the rest of us.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McNamee (The New Normal), founder of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners, provides an informative guide, bolstered by a unique insider's perspective, to scandals involving Facebook, particularly those involving the 2016 presidential election. He describes going from being an early booster of and investor in the site, as well as Mark Zuckerberg's advisor-he counseled the Facebook founder in 2006 against selling to a larger company-to conducting his own investigation into Russian intelligence's use of Facebook and urging American politicians to have Zuckerberg testify on Capitol Hill. He also discusses how Facebook deepens political divides, how tech giants use consumers' data against them, and how conspiracy theories proliferate online. He makes the case for more stringent regulation of powerful internet companies and for a philosophical shift in Silicon Valley away from impersonal metrics and toward "human-driven technology, an approach not predicated on exploiting the vulnerabilities of human psychology." The book is a little overlong due to some redundant and all-too-familiar passages on the dangers of social media, as well as some seemingly irrelevant autobiography. However, it succeeds as a comprehensible primer on the political pitfalls of big tech. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
An important investor explains how his enthusiasm has turned to shame As the so-called Techlash gains pace and polemics on the downsides of the internet flood the book market, one omission seems to recur time and again. Facebook, Google, Amazon and the rest are too often written about as if their arrival in our lives started a new phase of history, rather than as corporations that have prospered thanks to an economic and cultural environment established in the days when platforms were things used by trains. To truly understand the revolutions in politics, culture and human behaviour these giants have accelerated, you need to start not some time in the last 15 or so years, but in the 1980s. Early in that decade, the first arrival of digital technology in everyday life was marked by the brief microcomputer boom, which was followed by the marketing of more powerful personal computers. Meanwhile, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were embedding the idea that government should keep its interference in industry and the economy to a minimum. In the US, a new way of thinking replaced the bipartisan belief that monopolies should always be resisted: concentrations of economic power were not a problem as long as they led to lower prices for consumers. And at the same time as old-school class politics was overshadowed, the lingering influence of the 60s counterculture gave the wealthy a new means of smoothing over their power and privilege: talking in vague terms about healing the world, and enthusiastically participating in acts of spectacular philanthropy. If there was one period when all this cohered, it was between 1984 to 1985: the time of Band Aid and Live Aid, the launch of both Bill Gates's Microsoft Windows operating system and the Apple Macintosh, and the advent of Reagan's second term as president. And in 1984 Mark Zuckerberg, who would grow up in a country and culture defined by these events and forces, was born; he invented Facebook while he was at Harvard, and made his fortune via an intrusive, seemingly uncontrollable kind of capitalism, sold with the promise of "bringing the world closer together". Roger McNamee is a little longer in the tooth. Aged 62, he is old enough to know that the US beat the depression and won the second world war when "we subordinated the individual to the collective good, and it worked really well". He knows that the anti-state, libertarian mores that define what we now know as Big Tech were born in the 1980s, and that by the early 21st century, "hardly anyone in Silicon Valley knew there had once been a different way of doing things". Laissez-faire ideas, he says, joined with a bombastic arrogance in the minds of the "bros" who flocked to northern California to make their fortune from the mid 1990s onwards. What they did was founded on cutting-edge technology - but in terms of its underlying economic ideas, their business represented recently established nostrums being taken to their logical conclusion. This may suggest the perspective of an outsider, but McNamee does not quite fit that description. As a high-profile investor in tech businesses, he was co-founder of Elevation Partners, a private equity firm established with U2 frontman Paul "Bono" Hewson, the very embodiment of the 80s' uneasy mixture of profit and philanthropy. In 2010, the firm acquired 1% of Facebook for $90m, but McNamee had already put money into the company, become a source of occasional advice for its founder, and been key in the appointment as chief operating officer of Sheryl Sandberg, the former Bill Clinton administration insider who brought business acumen and political connections to Zuckerberg's inner circle. But now McNamee has come to the conclusion that what he helped bring about is a blend of hubris and dysfunction: Zucked is partly the story of his early enthusiasm giving way to mounting alarm at Facebook's failure to match its power with responsibility, and what he has tried to do about it. It is an unevenly told tale. McNamee wants readers to think of him as a player in the events he describes, but the text regularly has a sense of things viewed from too great a distance. That said, he knows enough about Facebook and its contexts to get to the heart of what its presence in our lives means for the world, and is bracingly blunt about the company's threat to the basic tenets of democracy, and his own awakening to its dangers. In early passages about the initial occasions when he met Zuckerberg, he writes of a man then aged 22 appearing "consistently mature and responsible", and "remarkably grown-up for his age". He goes on: "I liked Zuck. I liked his team. I liked Facebook." But by the time of the 2016 presidential election, everything had changed. In a memo to Zuckerberg and Sandberg, McNamee was blunt: "I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed." And he had a keen sense of what had gone wrong, summarised here in the kind of aphoristic phrase for which he clearly has a talent: "Facebook has managed to connect 2.2 billion people and drive them apart at the same time." The account of how this played out is now familiar, and ends with the election and subsequent revelation that 126 million Facebook users were exposed to messages authored in Russia. McNamee deals with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and how it highlighted Facebook's blithe attitude to its users' personal data (though he really should have mentioned the Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr, whose curiosity and resilience ensured that the story broke, and Facebook was called to account). But some of his best material is about the elements of Facebook's organisation and culture that created the mess, and the work he has done trying to alert powerful people to the need for action. Once Zuckerberg realised his creation was eating the world, he and his colleagues did what "bros" do, and embraced a mindset known as "growth hacking", whereby what mattered was "increasing user count, time on site, and revenue": unrestrained capitalism, in other words. And as all these things endlessly increased, the company simply sped on. "In the world of growth hacking, users are a metric, not people," McNamee writes. As Facebook expanded, he says, "it is highly unlikely that civic responsibility ever came up." If Facebook looks like a borderline autocracy (Zuckerberg controls around 60% of the company's voting shares, because his stock has a "class B" status that gives him unchallengeable power), that is partly because it is different from comparable companies in one crucial sense: the simplicity of its business model. "The core platform consists of a product and a monetisation scheme," McNamee points out, which "enables Facebook to centralise its decision making. There is a core team of roughly ten people who manage the company, but two people - Zuck and Sheryl Sandberg - are the arbiters of everything." In the final analysis, Zuckerberg "is the undisputed boss", both "rock star and cult leader". It was always going to be a dangerous combination: global reach, a vast influence on events across the world, and a command structure too often reducible to the strengths and weaknesses of one man. McNamee has worked hard to hold Facebook to account. His key ally is Tristan Harris, a former Google insider who is now an expert critic of Big Tech and its apparent ethical vacuum. As the most compelling passages here recount, while anxiety about the company began to spread, the pair lobbied members of Congress, and were not surprised to find that Washington "remained comfortably in the embrace of the major tech platforms" - but did their best to educate them on a subject many US legislators still seem to barely understand. Their efforts led to two hearings in late 2017, attended only by the big tech companies' lawyers. Six months later, Zuckerberg finally went to Capitol Hill to testify over two days, but was initially confronted with some of the moronic questions imaginable ("How do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?" asked Utah's 84 year-old Senator, Orrin Hatch). His second session, in front of the House Of Representatives' Committee on Energy And Commerce, was much better, full of biting criticism. But, as McNamee sighingly acknowledges, his former friend "caught a break": TV news was suddenly consumed by fallout from the FBI raiding the home and office of Donald Trump's attorney Michael Cohen, and Zuckerberg went back to northern California looking remarkably untroubled. Should political will and public alarm eventually combine to finally break Silicon Valley's remarkable power, McNamee knows roughly what ought to happen. He points to giving people control and ownership of their data, and the need to push through years of free-market dogma and convince the US authorities to reinvent anti-monopoly rules, and to take some action. What exactly this might entail remains frustratingly unclear, but he wants his readers to know he has made the ideological leap required. "Normally, I would approach regulation with extreme reluctance, but the ongoing damage to democracy, public health, privacy and competition justifies extraordinary measures," he says. Unwittingly, the way he frames his point speaks volumes about how much we lost in the laissez-faire revolutions of the 1980s: what, after all, is so extraordinary about democratically elected governments taking action against corporations that are out of control?
Kirkus Review
Venture capitalist and technology consultant McNamee (The New Normal: Great Opportunities in a Time of Great Risk, 2014, etc.) turns a hard eye on Facebook, a company in which he invested early.Not long before the 2016 election, writes the author, he got the sense that something wasn't quite right with Facebook's general run of posts. He saw "a surgeof disturbing images, shared by friends, that originated on Facebook Groups ostensibly associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign," all of them containing "deeply misogynistic depictions of Hillary Clinton." This flew in the face of Sanders' conduct, as did Facebook's allowing a slew of "inorganic" propaganda promoting such things as Brexit. All of this led McNamee to the conclusion that social media is a more effective tool for spreading messages of discord, hatred, and fear than harmonyor, as he writes, "Facebook has managed to connect 2.2 billion people and drive them apart at the same time." His warnings to Facebook's executives, including the fellow he calls Zuck, have gone largely ignored, while Facebook has promoted algorithms favoring big-money advertisers that rely on exploiting the private data of its users. Even given this, and even given Facebook's "monopoly power," few users seem quick to shed the service or to acknowledge their addiction to it. More, such internet platforms "pollute the public square by empowering negative voices at the expense of positive ones," turning the free-speech mandate of the internet's pioneers into a forum for bullying and bullhorns. Against all this, McNamee prescribes a diet that includes not buying into the vitriol as well as erasing one's Facebook history and not using Google because of its exploitative data-collection policies, instead using neutral search engines that do not collect dataas well as limiting one's social media time to a few minutes a day, recognizing that these platforms are fine examples of the law of diminishing returns.A well-reasoned and well-argued case against extractive technology. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
With roughly 2.3-billion active monthly users, Facebook easily eclipses Instagram and Twitter as the world's most popular social media platform. As a veteran technology consultant who mentored Facebook founder Mark Zuck Zuckerberg during the company's formative years, McNamee reveals a darker truth lurking in those swelling numbers by highlighting the many crafty ways advertisers and political organizations have used the website to influence public opinion. After recounting his early career in Silicon Valley and providing an inside view of internet company founders and their libertarian philosophy of guilt-free ambition, McNamee traces Facebook's shift from a benign public service to an instrument of powerful outside forces. The bulk of this evidence is exposed in the author's descriptions of the many disturbing fake news and misogynist anti-Hillary posts that appeared to be from Sanders supporters during the 2016 election campaign, which the Mueller investigation has since attributed primarily to Russian intelligence interference. McNamee's work is both a first-rate history of social media and a cautionary manifesto protesting their often overlooked and still growing dangers to human society.--Carl Hays Copyright 2019 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
the dystopia George Orwell conjured up in "1984" wasn't a prediction. It was, instead, a reflection. Newspeak, the Ministry of Truth, the Inner Party, the Outer Party - that novel sampled and remixed a reality that Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism had already made apparent. Scary stuff, certainly, but maybe the more frightening dystopia is the one no one warned you about, the one you wake up one morning to realize you're living inside. Roger McNamee, an esteemed venture capitalist, would appear to agree. "A dystopian technology future overran our lives before we were ready," he writes in "Zucked." Think that sounds like overstatement? Let's examine the evidence. At its peak the planet's fourth most valuable company, and arguably its most influential, is controlled almost entirely by a young man with the charisma of a geometry T.A. The totality of this man's professional life has been running this company, which calls itself "a platform." Company, platform - whatever it is, it provides a curious service wherein billions of people fill it with content: baby photos, birthday wishes, concert promotions, psychotic premonitions of Jewish lizard-men. No one is paid by the company for this labor; on the contrary, users are rewarded by being tracked across the web, even when logged out, and consequently strip-mined by a complicated artificial intelligence trained to sort surveilled information into approximately 29,000 predictive data points, which are then made available to advertisers and other third parties, who now know everything that can be known about a person without trepanning her skull. Amazingly, none of this is secret, despite the company's best efforts to keep it so. Somehow, people still use and love this platform. Hostile foreign intelligence services also love this platform, if only because its users have proved shockingly vulnerable to social manipulation - a dark art the company itself has admitted to dabbling in. In 2014, the company set out to learn whether it could make its users sad and angry on purpose. It learned it could. When this astonishing breach of user trust became public, the company claimed it wasn't a big deal, that many companies did similar things. It was, and they don't. A tech company founded on creating human connection is now ripping American society apart and compromising our civic foundation, though not because it has overtly wicked intent. As McNamee elucidates, our "democracy has been undermined because of design choices." Choices including the platform's pleasurable, frictionless interface, which encourages users to stay and return. It's no stretch to posit that because human neurotransmitters respond to the platform's iconic use of a certain shade of blue, and spark with dopamine upon receiving a "like" or "tag" notification, desperate children are now living in cages and a raving madman occupies the Oval Office. Not even Orwell, after a feast of psilocybin, could have predicted this dystopia. This one's all ours. For any aliens or recently arrived time travelers reading this, the company in question is Facebook, and its young leader Mark Zuckerberg, with whom McNamee has such a long and familiar relationship so as to refer to him throughout by his diminutive, Zuck. In 2006, McNamee writes, he counseled the 22-year-old C.E.O. against selling Facebook to Yahoo for a billion dollars. "I don't want to disappoint everyone," Zuckerberg said. McNamee urged him to look beyond that and "keep Facebook independent." Zuck heeded McNamee's advice, and here we are. McNamee also profited from this mentorship. Along with his venture capital firm, Elevation Partners, the author made a fortune off an early investment in Zuckerberg's company, a subject about which he is now suitably circumspect, given his belief that Facebook, along with Google and other tech giants, today represents "the greatest threat to the global order in my lifetime." A selfidentified "capitalist," McNamee currently advocates breaking up Facebook's data monopoly by force, and heavily regulating its appalling business practices. "Zucked" is thus a candid and highly entertaining explanation of how and why a man who spent decades picking tech winners and cheering his industry on has been carried to the shore of social activism. McNAMEE SAVES HIS MOST COnspICUOUS outrage for Facebook's amoral leadership at the hands of not just Zuckerberg but also his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, whom McNamee recommended Zuck hire before she could take a job at The Washington Post. McNamee describes their grip on the company as "the most centralized decision-making structure I have ever encountered in a large company." Their power dyad is possible only because Facebook's "core platform," as McNamee puts it, is relatively simple: It "consists of a product and a monetization scheme." Non-tech companies with comparable global reach (Coca-Cola, Exxon) must deal with complex real-world infrastructure issues as well as the needs of a highly diverse work force. Large corporations also typically create interrelated eddies of economic activity, whereas Facebook's business model is founded upon sucking the economic activity out of otherwise productive workers. Most troubling of all, a company whose product is used by one-third of the planet has only 30,000 employees. In every imaginable sense, Facebook is a Borg-like drain on the world's economy. It doesn't make you better and likely makes you worse. Unlike Exxon, it can't even get you to Albuquerque. The story of Facebook has been told many times before, but McNamee does a superb job of contextualizing its rise within the proper technological history. Without the advents of the iPhone, cloud data storage and the industry's "lean start-up" model, Facebook may well have wandered down the bleak path of the short-lived early-2000s social media entities Myspace and Friendster. McNamee also takes care to remind the reader of the telltale heart (or lack thereof) beating beneath the floorboards of Facebook headquarters: Its first iteration, Facemash, invited Harvard students to compare photos of female classmates - photos Zuckerberg stole from online student housing directories - for the high cause of determining who was hotter. Yes, the world's fourth most valuable company can trace its origins to the frustrated misogyny of an ur-incel. The moral vacuousness Zuckerberg displayed as a young adult should have told us something about how he and many other young "disrupters" intended to operate. As McNamee writes, "You can imagine how attractive a philosophy that absolves practitioners of responsibility for the impact of their actions on others would be to entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley." The most stirring parts of the book are those in which McNamee makes the angry but measured argument that "social media has enabled personal views that had previously been kept in check by social pressure." The kook we will always have with us, to paraphrase Jesus, but the kooks of yore had to work to maintain their kookery and locate fellow kooks. They had to pick up their kook phone, subscribe to the kook newsletter, drive to the kook convention. Nowadays, all the kook has to do is log in to Facebook, where his feed will be enlivened by the chatter of fellow - and likely more extreme - kooks, toward which Facebook's algorithms helpfully steer him. Zuckerberg et al. probably didn't set out to transform American neoNazism into this generation's punk rock, but the platforms they created have generated "a feedback loop that reinforces and amplifies ideas with a speed and at a scale that are unprecedented." McNamee's book is not merely the cri de coeur of a forsworn tech optimist zinged by moral conscience. It's also a robust and helpful itemization of the ways Facebook could be brought to heel. McNamee clearly believes the company can be made into something more benign, and perhaps even socially beneficial. That may or may not be true, but the damage it has already done is not precisely containable. Considering the high likelihood that Russian activity on Facebook may have tipped the 2016 election to Donald Trump, the damage is already of generational measure. But here's the bizarre quirk of the Facebook dystopia, whose sheer perversity would have likely pleased Orwell: It's all Big and no Brother. Our time and lives are the company's only currency. Without our continued attention, Facebook quite literally has nothing, and its empire could be brought down with a feather. Now, blow. TOM BISSELL is the author, most recently, of "Apostle."
Table of Contents
| Prologue | p. 1 |
| 1 The Strangest Meeting Ever | p. 13 |
| 2 Silicon Valley Before Facebook | p. 31 |
| 3 Move Fast and Break Things | p. 53 |
| 4 The Children of Fogg | p. 81 |
| 5 Mr. Harris and Mr. McNamee Go to Washington | p. 111 |
| 6 Congress Gets Serious | p. 121 |
| 7 The Facebook Way | p. 135 |
| 8 Facebook Digs in Its Heels | p. 151 |
| 9 The Pollster | p. 165 |
| 10 Cambridge Analytica Changes Everything | p. 177 |
| 11 Days of Reckoning | p. 199 |
| 12 Success? | p. 213 |
| 13 The Future of Society | p. 241 |
| 14 The Future of You | p. 267 |
| Epilogue | p. 277 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 289 |
| Appendix 1 Memo to Zuck and Sheryl: Draft Op-Ed for Recode | p. 297 |
| Appendix 2 George Soros's Davos Remarks: "The Current Moment in History" | p. 301 |
| Bibliographic Essay | p. 313 |
| Index | p. 321 |