Zucked

Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe

By: Roger McNamee

Narrated by: Roger McNamee

One of the Financial Times' Best Business Books of 2019

The New York Times best seller about a noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who wakes up to the serious damage Facebook is doing to our society—and sets out to try to stop it.

If you had told Roger McNamee even three years ago that he would soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from destroying our 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 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, even still Facebook's leaders 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 travelers who share his concern 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, just 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. Like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, Roger McNamee happened to be in the right place to witness a crime, and it took him some time to make sense of what he was seeing and what we ought to do about it. The result of that effort is a wise, hard-hitting, and urgently necessary account that crystallizes the issue definitively for the rest of us.

©2019 Roger McNamee (P)2019 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“A candid and highly entertaining explanation of how and why a man who spent decades picking tech winners and cheering his industry on has been carried to the shore of social activism.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A timely reckoning with Facebook’s growth and data-obsessed culture . . . [Zucked] is the first narrative tale of Facebook’s unravelling over the past two years . . . McNamee excels at grounding Facebook in the historical context of the technology industry.”—Financial Times

“[An] excellent new book . . . [McNamee] is one of the social network’s biggest critics. He’s a canny and persuasive one too. In Zucked, McNamee lays out an argument why it and other tech giants have grown into a monstrous threat to democracy. Better still he offers tangible solutions . . . What makes McNamee so credible is his status as a Silicon Valley insider. He also has a knack for distilling often complex or meandering TED Talks and Medium posts about the ills of social media into something comprehensible, not least for those inside the D.C. Beltway . . . McNamee doesn’t just scream fire, though. He also provides a reasonable framework for solving some of the issues . . . For anyone looking for a primer on what’s wrong with social media and what to do about it, the book is well worth the read.”—Reuters

Is Facebook really a threat?

Lots of repetition about how Facebook determines what ads to show you. But no real evidence about how this is a "threat to democracy," which must have been mentioned 30 times. What actually might be a threat is McNamee's call for government regulation of content.

No one is forced to read the ads, or even to use Facebook. On the other hand, he made some good points about how FB and Google are anti-competitive.

The narration was somewhat annoying, using nonstop hyped-up intonation to sell his points. For TV interviews this works, but not in a 12 hour narration.

Still, it's a must-read for junkies of Silicon Valley stories, like me!

Eye-opening and important

An honest chronicle and thoughtful analysis of a critically important topic. In short: Read this book!

Wow!

This is a fascinating book on a very important topic that effects much of the world. It was very well written and Roger did a great job on the narration as well!

Human driven technology is the next big thing

McNamee presents an excellent overview of how and why existing social platforms are harming society. These companies have exploited their users to maintain rapid growth. McNamee makes a compelling case for antitrust law to apply given the implicit value of user data that is being extracted at an exponentially growing rate.

We need new and innovative companies who will serve needs of the users first and build a better bicycle for the mind. We can see a new renaissance of innovation if Silcon Valley takes McNamee’s advice and embraces human driven technology as the next big thing.

It is time we end this game of whack-a-mole, constantly reacting to repeated disasters perpetrated by irresponsible platforms. We need technology that is actively good, that applies real engineering know-how towards empowering users. Let’s learn from the moral failures of the past and build smarter systems with better incentives.

As an entrepreneur I find this book truly inspiring, and McNamee puts a sharp point on the goals towards which I am personally working. I believe we can build better tech that puts people in control instead of algorithms, promotes healthy conversations, and begins to reverse the damage done to our society.

Personal Wealth v. Public Health

I listened to this book over the past couple of months and kept thinking about my expectations of tech and what their role should be. Is the role of Facebook, Amazon, Google and others to help make society as a whole better or to focus on wealth building for their employees and share holders with "the next great thing"? Can both co-exist in an ethical way? This book does a good job of covering the journey of one player in tech - Facebook - and asks the listener (reader) to contemplate their relationship with tech. I have been through a similar journey in tech over the past 25 years as a "cheerleader" and now feel like I am falling more on the activist side as well to help people at least be aware of the potential perils of putting blind faith into tech as the answer to all of the problems we face as humans. I highly recommend the book for anyone wishing to think deeper on the topic of privacy, our rights at citizens, and to reflect openly and honestly about how much of a "bubble" we are in with the information we receive. One constructive criticism I have is that I do believe the Audible book would have been better served by a professional narrator vs. the author. While it's good to hear Roger's voice in the book I think the Epilogue where there are letters and bibliography would have been a good place for this. I think the message would land better for listeners with a professional narrator for the main portion of the book. Thanks again for a great book and causing me to pause, reflect, and think more deeply about a very important set of topics.

Wow

Thanks for writing this. I enjoyed your perspective and level of detail and contextual background for this very important topic.

Some words of warning about Facebook

I recently decided to get off Facebook, due to the events of the 2016 election, Cambridge Analytica, and, more recently, their "friendly fraud" scandal. This book confirmed my worries about the company and social media in general.

While the author takes Zuck and Sandberg to task, he still is somewhat apologetic for their misdeeds, perhaps because he knows them personally.

The book could have been shortened by about 20 percent, but some of the best parts were the addenda at the end. I really liked the bibliographic essay. More authors should do those for audiobooks!

All in all, a solid book.

Scary times, great insight

With the amount of money Roger’s made off Zuck, it sounds a bit like buyers remorse- but he provides a fantastic insight into the treacherous ‘move fast and break things’ mentality swiftly eroding democracy.

This book will change your mind!

Every generation has a few nonfiction books that everyone needs to read to understand the changing world around them. This is one of those books. Roger proposes hypotheses based on his life experience, intellect, and willingness to re-evaluate his own work and the industry that made him successful. He provides the reader with key insights that will change the way you look at tech companirs, the government, our economy, and even your "friends." Roger even reads his book on Audible. This book is well worth the price of admission and will give you things to think about now and for years to come.

Effective Case from an Insightful Insider

McNamee makes the right point: Internet platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have allowed very smart and well-intentioned people to wander into some very dark and dangerous places that threaten Democracy, Free Speech and our way of life.

He spends a lot of time, a lot of time establishing his bonafides by recounting the history of his involvement with the creation and early history of Facebook. The more interesting part of Zucked traces the evolution of his realization of the dangers of Facebook’s impact in the American Political System and the 2016 Election. He does a really good job discussing the close embrace between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, Bannon and the Mercer’s.

Those chapters and the final two are definitely worth reading. What these platforms have done to our understanding of privacy and our concept of Fact is a vital issue of our time and McNamee is leading the way to focusing our attention! A long but worthwhile read.