My Amazon Review of Roger McNamee's "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe"

Move Fast and Break Things

Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and part-time rock musician who hangs out with Bono, has levelled an indictment against Facebook. As an early investor in Facebook McNamee has seen the company from the inside as it moved fast to become a mega-cap colossus that is now playing a major part in breaking our democracy. He mentored Mark Zuckerberg and helped broker Sheryl Sandberg’s move from Google to Facebook. And as he notes he has not had meaningful contact with them for several years. Perhaps he is not telling us something about his relationships with them.

Simply put Facebook is in the business of manipulating its users through artificial intelligence to spend more and more time on the website thereby generating huge advertising dollars. Facebook then sells its user data to advertisers, some of whom were Russian cutouts seeking to elect Donald Trump.

To McNamee the worst aspect of social media in general and Facebook in particular is that it makes it far too easy for people to silo themselves into groups with similar interests and beliefs. When that happens political polarization occurs where people only hear what they want to hear in a self-reinforcing mechanism. Because Facebook is almost frictionless it easily conveys misinformation that the silo-heads believe to be true. To paraphrase Mark Twain from a much earlier era, “a lie races half way around the world before the truth puts its shoes on.”

Aside from being a venture capitalist and a musician, McNamee is a political junkie of the liberal democratic variety. His use of the term “neo-liberal” is a “tell.” Over the past few years he has spent quite a bit of time with the California congressional delegation, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He also briefed both House and Senate panels ahead of Zuckerberg’s testimony.

McNamee’s solution to the problems is stricter antitrust enforcement. He wails against the Chicago School of antitrust regulation. He would also prefer a subscription model a la Netflix to the current advertising model. Both are good ideas.

Where I would differ with McNamee is his view that the internet was all wonderful until the technological revolution of wider bandwidth, cloud computing and smart phones came along that enabled social media. Perhaps he conveniently forgets that the early internet was built on porn and the secure payment processing system that came with it.

In the interests of full disclosure I do not have a Facebook account, but I do have Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, use Google a lot, and check my smart phone way too often. I too am addicted.

The full Amazon URL appears at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3KOO1E8M4OD9R?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp