Zucked. Roger McNamee

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

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

      —Kirkus Reviews

       DEDICATION

       To Ann, who inspires me every day

       EPIGRAPH

      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

       Prologue

      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 СКАЧАТЬ