The New York Times Book Review - Tom Bissell
Zucked is…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 story of Facebook has been told many times before, but McNamee does a superb job of contextualizing its rise within the proper technological history…McNamee's book is not merely the cri de coeur of a forsworn tech optimist zinged by moral conscience. It's also a robust and helpful itemization of the ways Facebook could be brought to heel.
Publishers Weekly
01/07/2019
McNamee (The New Normal), founder of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners, provides an informative guide, bolstered by a unique insider’s perspective, to scandals involving Facebook, particularly those involving the 2016 presidential election. He describes going from being an early booster of and investor in the site, as well as Mark Zuckerberg’s advisor—he counseled the Facebook founder in 2006 against selling to a larger company—to conducting his own investigation into Russian intelligence’s use of Facebook and urging American politicians to have Zuckerberg testify on Capitol Hill. He also discusses how Facebook deepens political divides, how tech giants use consumers’ data against them, and how conspiracy theories proliferate online. He makes the case for more stringent regulation of powerful internet companies and for a philosophical shift in Silicon Valley away from impersonal metrics and toward “human-driven technology, an approach not predicated on exploiting the vulnerabilities of human psychology.” The book is a little overlong due to some redundant and all-too-familiar passages on the dangers of social media, as well as some seemingly irrelevant autobiography. However, it succeeds as a comprehensible primer on the political pitfalls of big tech. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
One of the Financial Times' Best Business Books of 2019
“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
“Think of Zucked as the story after Social Network’s credits roll. McNamee, an early Facebook investor and Zuckerberg mentor, weaves together a story of failed leadership, bad actors and algorithms against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election.” —Hollywood Reporter
“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.” —Booklist
“Regardless of where you stand on the issue, you'll want to see why one of Facebook's biggest champions became one of its fiercest critics.” —Business Insider
“A comprehensible primer on the political pitfalls of big tech.” —Publishers Weekly
“Part memoir, part indictment, Zucked chronicles Facebook’s history to demonstrate that its practices of ‘invasive surveillance, careless sharing of private data, and behavior modification in pursuit of unprecedented scale and influence,’ far from being a series of accidental oversights, were in fact foundational to the company’s astronomical success. This historical approach allows McNamee to draw valuable connections between present-day troubles and the company’s philosophical source code.” —Bookforum
“Roger McNamee’s Zucked fully captures the disastrous consequences that occur when people running companies wielding enormous power don't listen deeply to their stakeholders, fail to exercise their ethical responsibilities and don't make trust their number one value.” —Marc Benioff, chariman and co-CEO of Salesforce
“McNamee puts his finger on serious problems in online environments, especially social networking platforms. I consider this book to be a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the societal impact of cyberspace.” —Vint Cerf, internet pioneer
“Roger McNamee is an investor with the nose of an investigator. This unafraid and unapologetic critique is enhanced by McNamee’s personal association with Facebook’s leaders and his long career in the industry. Whether you believe technology is the problem or the solution, one has no choice but to listen. It's only democracy at stake.” —Emily 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
Kirkus Reviews
2018-11-12
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.
