Zucked : waking up to the Facebook catastrophe — by Roger McNamee

I deleted my Facebook profile way back in 2018. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it, but I’d also be lying if I said I slept better at night as I participated in and contributed to the success of a deeply flawed company. McNamee gives me plenty of reasons to feel comfortable with my decision to bail from Facebook.

Here’s the deal: McNamee is a Silicon Valley institution in his own right, a pioneer alongside the wave of hippies who birthed the information technology industry. He was an early investor in Facebook and personal advisor to Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook, along with some other investing decisions, has made McNamee a very wealthy man. And one who is now tormented by what Facebook has become.

As Facebook grew rapidly, the company made a series of missteps when it came to protecting users’ privacy. As Zuckerberg would apologize and promise to do better, McNamee was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt through the first few cycle of that pattern. Until the 2016 elections. With verification of foreign interference in the U.S. election, McNamee went public with his doubts and concerns about the company and its leadership.

In short, McNamee’s concern is that Facebook’s business model (develop massive adoption rates, maximize users’ time spent on the platform and construct filter bubbles for users), flies in the face of what is needed for functional exchange of ideas and thought within democracies (or constitutional republics, if that is your preferred term). As it turns out, falsehoods and conspiracy theories, coupled with rage and incense, lead to far greater user interaction with the Facebook platform (and thus, higher ad revenues) than do logical, rational exchanges of ideas.

Facebook knows this. And yet they structure Facebook users’ personal feeds to enhance content that is incendiary in nature. How do I know that Facebook knows? Because McNamee wrote a letter to Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg outlining Facebook’s culpability in sowing dissent and discord amongst the voting public. And yet Facebook continues to operate largely as they did prior to the 2016 elections.

McNamee offers several solutions to the mess we find ourself in, but the most promising would appear to be the application of antitrust laws. There is plenty of legal acreage to make the argument that Facebook (and Google and Amazon, but that’s another story) are monopolies and should be broken up. As things currently stand, Facebook is able to squash competitors, buy up attractive businesses that then protects Facebook’s core business, all while wreaking havoc on the entrepreneurial system. Quick case in point: Facebook purchased Oculus, a VR development company, for $3 billion dollars. Okay, fine. But what investor is then going to go out and back a small company in that space knowing that the only exit strategy is to be bought by Facebook? There is little to no chance that Facebook will allow a competitor to build a strong business in the VR space.

Overall, four stars out of five. Here’s the link to go find this title in your own local library: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1060183381