By Roger McNamee
This is the dramatic story of how a noted tech venture
capitalist, an early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and investor in his company,
woke up to the serious damage Facebook was doing to our society and set out to
try to stop it.
If you had told Roger McNamee three years ago that he would
soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from destroying 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 Brexit and 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, Facebook's
leaders still 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 travellers who share his concerns, 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, 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. This is a
wise, hard-hitting, and urgently necessary account that crystallizes the issue
definitively for the rest of us
