Zucked: How Users Got Used and What We Can Do About It
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.
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First published in the US by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 2019
This UK edition published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
FIRST EDITION
© Roger McNamee 2019
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Cover photograph © Mack15/Getty Images (thumb icon), Shutterstock.com (globe)
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
Roger McNamee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
“The Current Moment in History,” remarks by George Soros delivered at the World Economic Forum meeting, Davos, Switzerland, January 25, 2018. Reprinted by permission of George Soros.
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Source ISBN: 9780008318994
Ebook Edition © February 2019 ISBN: 9780008319021
Version 2019-01-17
“Roger McNamee’s Zucked fully captures the disastrous consequences that occur when people running companies wielding enormous power don’t listen deeply to their stakeholders, fail to exercise their ethical responsibilities, and don’t make trust their number one value.”
—Marc Benioff, chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce
“McNamee puts his finger on serious problems in online environments, especially social networking platforms. I consider this book to be a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the societal impact of cyberspace.”
—Vint Cerf, internet pioneer
“Roger McNamee is an investor with the nose of an investigator. This unafraid and unapologetic critique is enhanced by McNamee’s personal association with Facebook’s leaders and his long career in the industry. Whether you believe technology is the problem or the solution, one has no choice but to listen. It’s only democracy at stake.”
—Emily Chang, author of Brotopia
“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
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
