Roger McNamee

McNamee has the useful perspective of someone who has been close enough to Facebook's leaders to speak persuasively to what motivates them, and has been distant from them for over a decade, able to see the company (and its ilk) through a wider lens. It's a super interesting discussion of the pernicious effects of social media - for 2018, when it was first published. Read by the author - who does well, although some of his cadences can be a little too soothing . . .

Roger Mcnamee is a traitor to his class! In “Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe” Macnamee plays Benedict Arnold to Mark Zuckerberg’s George Washington.

That alone makes this book entertaining and a little bit disingenuous. Macnamee may think Facebook is a public nuisance, but he’s not about to give back all those millions he made off of facebook stock.

Macnamee feels Google and facebook act like monopolists, pose a severe threat to privacy and democracy, will ultimately show more hinder innovation, and play a major role in subverting the minds of our youth.

He warns us not to give in and not to fill our homes with those smart speakers which are gobbling up everything we say and turning it into diabolical artificial intelligence engines.

I’ve been listening to critics of smartphones and other computer screens for years complain about what they’re doing to our minds. Is facebook with its addictive rolling newsfeeds any more dangerous than the Flintstones were when I was growing up? Maybe. Maybe not.

Macnamee’s cries that Google and Facebook act as monopolists certainly has more credibility, certainly if data is the new proxy for money and power which it does seem to be.

There is a whole new industry of critics complaining about the “surveillance capitalism” of the social media titans like facebook, its subsidiaries, Google and Twitter. And as Edward Snowden taught us, its not just the capitalists who are using the surveillance technology: every government in the world uses the data and the techniques of metadata to predict and prohibit anti-social behaviour.

Maybe all of that surveillance isn’t that bad when we can sniff out terrorist plots, or gun runners, or purveyors of chemical agents.

Macnamee jumps on the bandwagon complaining about Russian interference in US elections. One could equally make the argument that because of America’s influence Russia OUGHT TO try and sway American public thought. And Americans should interfere in Russian elections for that matter. We are all responsible for climate change, no? What happens in a Chinese factory affects what we do in Canada, or Denmark, or Zimbabwe.

Global governance simply has not kept pace with global trade, or communications, or culture. For years I have been advocating the vote for migrant workers in their adopted countries, whether they become official citizens or not.

Complain all you want about Facebook’s global reach, time is not going to run backward and put the genie back in the bottle. Our kids are going to use smartphones. Our tech giants are going in fast forward to build AI.

Filter bubbles were not the invention of social media. Religion had filter bubbles going long before the first micro-chip.

There is no longer any legit sovereignty on this planet. We are too interconnected with our environment, with the fate of millions, with the survival of species.

And todays governments just don’t have the tools or the political will or the priority to democratize social media, show less

According to Business Insider, after Zuckerberg gathered his few thousand users, he called his friends to tell them that if they ever wanted information on anyone at their university, they should just ask. He now had thousands of emails, photos, and addresses. “They simply submitted them”, he said. In his own words, those users were “dumb fucks”.
With such a policy that holds no regard for people's privacy, you can only imagine the catastrophe that Facebook has become.

Very interesting book! Why 2 stars less?
- for me personally it was way too American. “The country this and that”. Also all the long stories why McNamee spoke to which sanator couldn’t bother me anymore after a while.
- for interesting detailed information about for example Cambridge analytica I had to google background information that I had expected to be explained in the book.