Zucked

December 1, 2018
Venture capitalist and technology consultant McNamee (The New Normal: Great Opportunities in a Time of Great Risk, 2014, etc.) turns a hard eye on Facebook, a company in which he invested early.Not long before the 2016 election, writes the author, he got the sense that something wasn't quite right with Facebook's general run of posts. He saw "a surge...of disturbing images, shared by friends, that originated on Facebook Groups ostensibly associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign," all of them containing "deeply misogynistic depictions of Hillary Clinton." This flew in the face of Sanders' conduct, as did Facebook's allowing a slew of "inorganic" propaganda promoting such things as Brexit. All of this led McNamee to the conclusion that social media is a more effective tool for spreading messages of discord, hatred, and fear than harmony--or, as he writes, "Facebook has managed to connect 2.2 billion people and drive them apart at the same time." His warnings to Facebook's executives, including the fellow he calls Zuck, have gone largely ignored, while Facebook has promoted algorithms favoring big-money advertisers that rely on exploiting the private data of its users. Even given this, and even given Facebook's "monopoly power," few users seem quick to shed the service or to acknowledge their addiction to it. More, such internet platforms "pollute the public square by empowering negative voices at the expense of positive ones," turning the free-speech mandate of the internet's pioneers into a forum for bullying and bullhorns. Against all this, McNamee prescribes a diet that includes not buying into the vitriol as well as erasing one's Facebook history and not using Google because of its exploitative data-collection policies, instead using neutral search engines that do not collect data--as well as limiting one's social media time to a few minutes a day, recognizing that these platforms are fine examples of the law of diminishing returns.A well-reasoned and well-argued case against extractive technology.

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January 1, 2019
With roughly 2.3-billion active monthly users, Facebook easily eclipses Instagram and Twitter as the world's most popular social media platform. As a veteran technology consultant who mentored Facebook founder Mark Zuck Zuckerberg during the company's formative years, McNamee reveals a darker truth lurking in those swelling numbers by highlighting the many crafty ways advertisers and political organizations have used the website to influence public opinion. After recounting his early career in Silicon Valley and providing an inside view of internet company founders and their libertarian philosophy of guilt-free ambition, McNamee traces Facebook's shift from a benign public service to an instrument of powerful outside forces. The bulk of this evidence is exposed in the author's descriptions of the many disturbing fake news and misogynist anti-Hillary posts that appeared to be from Sanders supporters during the 2016 election campaign, which the Mueller investigation has since attributed primarily to Russian intelligence interference. McNamee's work is both a first-rate history of social media and a cautionary manifesto protesting their often overlooked and still growing dangers to human society.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2018

A Silicon Valley investor for more than three decades who once proudly mentored Mark Zuckerberg, McNamee now sees Facebook as a looming threat to society, easily manipulated to bad ends--as today's headlines suggest. Here McNamee chronicles his about-face and relates his concerns regarding Zuckerberg's empire to the business world at large.

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