Zucked : waking up to the facebook catastrophe

260 Pages·2019·2.54 MB·English

by  Roger McNamee

Also by Roger McNamee
The New Normal
The Moonalice Legend: Posters and Words, Volumes 1–9

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Copyright © 2019 by Roger McNamee
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“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.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: McNamee, Roger, author.
Title: Zucked : waking up to the facebook catastrophe / Roger McNamee.
Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018048578 (print) | LCCN 2018051479 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525561361 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780525561354 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984877895 (export)
Subjects: LCSH: Facebook (Electronic resource)—Social aspects. | Online social networks—Political
aspects—United States. | Disinformation—United States. | Propaganda—Technological innovations. |
Zuckerberg, Mark, 1984– —Influence. | United States—Politics and government.
Classification: LCC HM743.F33 (ebook) | LCC HM743.F33 M347 2019 (print) | DDC 302.30285—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018048578
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other
contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any
responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any
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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
CONTENTS
Also by Roger McNamee
Title Page
Copyright
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 Future of Society
14 The Future of You
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
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
About the Author
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 understand the threat. Along the way, I will share
what I know about the technology that enables internet platforms like Facebook
to manipulate attention. I will explain how bad actors exploit the design of
Facebook and other platforms to harm and even kill innocent people. How
democracy has been undermined because of design choices and business
decisions by internet platforms that deny responsibility for the consequences of
decisions by internet platforms that deny responsibility for the consequences of
their actions. How the culture of these companies causes employees to be
indifferent to the negative side effects of their success. At this writing, there is
nothing to prevent more of the same.
This is a story about trust. Technology platforms, including Facebook and
Google, are the beneficiaries of trust and goodwill accumulated over fifty years
by earlier generations of technology companies. They have taken advantage of
our trust, using sophisticated techniques to prey on the weakest aspects of human
psychology, to gather and exploit private data, and to craft business models that
do not protect users from harm. Users must now learn to be skeptical about
products they love, to change their online behavior, insist that platforms accept
responsibility for the impact of their choices, and push policy makers to regulate
the platforms to protect the public interest.
This is a story about privilege. It reveals how hypersuccessful people can be
so focused on their own goals that they forget that others also have rights and
privileges. How it is possible for otherwise brilliant people to lose sight of the
fact that their users are entitled to self-determination. How success can breed
overconfidence to the point of resistance to constructive feedback from friends,
much less criticism. How some of the hardest working, most productive people
on earth can be so blind to the consequences of their actions that they are willing
to put democracy at risk to protect their privilege.
This is also a story about power. It describes how even the best of ideas, in
the hands of people with good intentions, can still go terribly wrong. Imagine a
stew of unregulated capitalism, addictive technology, and authoritarian values,
combined with Silicon Valley’s relentlessness and hubris, unleashed on billions
of unsuspecting users. I think the day will come, sooner than I could have
imagined just two years ago, when the world will recognize that the value users
receive from the Facebook-dominated social media/attention economy
revolution masked an unmitigated disaster for our democracy, for public health,
for personal privacy, and for the economy. It did not have to be that way. It will
take a concerted effort to fix it.
When historians finish with this corner of history, I suspect that they will cut
Facebook some slack about the poor choices that Zuck, Sheryl Sandberg, and
their team made as the company grew. I do. Making mistakes is part of life, and
growing a startup to global scale is immensely challenging. Where I fault
Facebook—and where I believe history will, as well—is for the company’s
response to criticism and evidence. They had an opportunity to be the hero in
their own story by taking responsibility for their choices and the catastrophic
outcomes those choices produced. Instead, Zuck and Sheryl chose another path.
This story is still unfolding. I have written this book now to serve as a
warning. My goals are to make readers aware of a crisis, help them understand
how and why it happened, and suggest a path forward. If I achieve only one
thing, I hope it will be to make the reader appreciate that he or she has a role to
play in the solution. I hope every reader will embrace the opportunity.
It is possible that the worst damage from Facebook and the other internet
platforms is behind us, but that is not where the smart money will place its bet.
The most likely case is that the technology and business model of Facebook and
others will continue to undermine democracy, public health, privacy, and
innovation until a countervailing power, in the form of government intervention
or user protest, forces change.
—
TEN DAYS BEFORE the November 2016 election, I had reached out formally to
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, two
people I considered friends, to share my fear that bad actors were exploiting
Facebook’s architecture and business model to inflict harm on innocent people,
and that the company was not living up to its potential as a force for good in
society. In a two-page memo, I had cited a number of instances of harm, none
actually committed by Facebook employees but all enabled by the company’s
algorithms, advertising model, automation, culture, and value system. I also
cited examples of harm to employees and users that resulted from the company’s
culture and priorities. I have included the memo in the appendix.
Zuck created Facebook to bring the world together. What I did not know
when I met him but would eventually discover was that his idealism was
unbuffered by realism or empathy. He seems to have assumed that everyone
would view and use Facebook the way he did, not imagining how easily the
platform could be exploited to cause harm. He did not believe in data privacy
and did everything he could to maximize disclosure and sharing. He operated the
company as if every problem could be solved with more or better code. He
embraced invasive surveillance, careless sharing of private data, and behavior
modification in pursuit of unprecedented scale and influence. Surveillance, the
sharing of user data, and behavioral modification are the foundation of
Facebook’s success. Users are fuel for Facebook’s growth and, in some cases,
the victims of it.
When I reached out to Zuck and Sheryl, all I had was a hypothesis that bad
actors were using Facebook to cause harm. I suspected that the examples I saw
reflected systemic flaws in the platform’s design and the company’s culture. I
did not emphasize the threat to the presidential election, because at that time I