Roger McNamee - Zucked

“Roger McNamee is truly the most interesting man in the world—legendary investor, virtuoso guitarist, and damn lucid writer. He’s written a terrific book that is both soulful memoir and muckraking exposé of social media. Everyone who spends their day staring into screens needs to read his impassioned tale.”

—Franklin Foer, author of World Without Mind

“A frightening view behind the scenes of how absolute power and panoptic technologies can corrupt our politics and civic commons in this age of increasing-returns monopolies. Complementing Jaron Lanier’s recent warnings with a clear-eyed view of politics, antitrust, and the law, this is essential reading for activists and policymakers as we work to preserve privacy and decency and a civil society in the internet age.”

—Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, creator of the Berkeley Unix operating system

“Zucked is the mesmerizing and often hilarious story of how Facebook went from young darling to adolescent menace, not to mention a serious danger to democracy. With revelations on every page, you won’t know whether to laugh or weep.”

—Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants and The Curse of Bigness

“A well-reasoned and well-argued case against extractive technology.”

— Kirkus Reviews

To Ann, who inspires me every day

Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.

—Melvin Kranzberg’s First Law of Technology

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

—Albert Einstein

Ultimately, what the tech industry really cares about is ushering in the future, but it conflates technological progress with societal progress.

— Jenna Wortham

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

1 The Strangest Meeting Ever

2 Silicon Valley Before Facebook

3 Move Fast and Break Things

4 The Children of Fogg

5 Mr. Harris and Mr. McNamee Go to Washington

6 Congress Gets Serious

7 The Facebook Way

8 Facebook Digs in Its Heels

9 The Pollster

10 Cambridge Analytica Changes Everything

11 Days of Reckoning

12 Success?

13 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

14 What Is to Be Done

15 What Government Can Do

16 What Each of Us Can Do

Epilogue

Appendix 1: Memo to Zuck and Sheryl: Draft Op-Ed for Recode

Appendix 2: George Soros’s Davos Remarks: “The Current Moment in History”

Bibliographic Essay

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master. —CHRISTIAN LOUS LANGE

November 9, 2016

“The Russians used Facebook to tip the election!”

So began my side of a conversation the day after the presidential election. I was speaking with Dan Rose, the head of media partnerships at Facebook. If Rose was taken aback by how furious I was, he hid it well.

Let me back up. I am a longtime tech investor and evangelist. Tech had been my career and my passion, but by 2016, I was backing away from full-time professional investing and contemplating retirement. I had been an early advisor to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg—Zuck, to many colleagues and friends—and an early investor in Facebook. I had been a true believer for a decade. Even at this writing, I still own shares in Facebook. In terms of my own narrow self-interest, I had no reason to bite Facebook’s hand. It would never have occurred to me to be an anti-Facebook activist. I was more like Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window . He is minding his own business, checking out the view from his living room, when he sees what looks like a crime in progress, and then he has to ask himself what he should do. In my case, I had spent a career trying to draw smart conclusions from incomplete information, and one day early in 2016 I started to see things happening on Facebook that did not look right. I started pulling on that thread and uncovered a catastrophe. In the beginning, I assumed that Facebook was a victim and I just wanted to warn my friends. What I learned in the months that followed shocked and disappointed me. I learned that my trust in Facebook had been misplaced.

This book is the story of why I became convinced, in spite of myself, that even though Facebook provided a compelling experience for most of its users, it was terrible for America and needed to change or be changed, and what I have tried to do about it. My hope is that the narrative of my own conversion experience will help others understand the threat. Along the way, I will share what I know about the technology that enables internet platforms like Facebook to manipulate attention. I will explain how bad actors exploit the design of Facebook and other platforms to harm and even kill innocent people. How democracy has been undermined because of design choices and business decisions by internet platforms that deny responsibility for the consequences of their actions. How the culture of these companies causes employees to be indifferent to the negative side effects of their success. At this writing, there is nothing to prevent more of the same.

This is a story about trust. Technology platforms, including Facebook and Google, are the beneficiaries of trust and goodwill accumulated over fifty years by earlier generations of technology companies. They have taken advantage of our trust, using sophisticated techniques to prey on the weakest aspects of human psychology, to gather and exploit private data, and to craft business models that do not protect users from harm. Users must now learn to be skeptical about products they love, to change their online behavior, insist that platforms accept responsibility for the impact of their choices, and push policy makers to regulate the platforms to protect the public interest.

This is a story about privilege. It reveals how hypersuccessful people can be so focused on their own goals that they forget that others also have rights and privileges. How it is possible for otherwise brilliant people to lose sight of the fact that their users are entitled to self-determination. How success can breed overconfidence to the point of resistance to constructive feedback from friends, much less criticism. How some of the hardest working, most productive people on earth can be so blind to the consequences of their actions that they are willing to put democracy at risk to protect their privilege.