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.

IT'S ALL HERE.

I got a Facebook account back in 2009. I only had it for a number of months when I started noticing subtle little things about it that creeped me out. I decided to delete my account and found out that deleting a Facebook account was far from intuitive, and the procedure constantly changes. This creeped me out still further. I eventually deleted it. Then curiosity got the better of me (either that or peer pressure) when, after 6 years had gone by and Facebook was not only still around, but was by then ubiquitous, I signed up again with a new account. The second experience was even creepier and lasted only 4 days. The antisocial aspect of "Social Media" seemed so obvious to me; you could say I became The Man Without A Facebook.

Since 2015, I've been waiting for THIS book. I've even ordered a couple of print editions to give people I know -- to tell them "See! See! You've got to get off Facebook (and all it's other so-called products!"). About only thing keeping this book from achieving perfection is about halfway into chapter 2, McNamee, bless 'em, slipped and began a sentence with the dreaded "That said,". I decided to overlook this otherwise fatal flaw... this time.

A "must read".

Who the F***?

I did not know who roger McNamee was before. I do now. He shares some fascinating experiences from inside and around FB. Very comprehensive enlightening intelligent worthwhile read. A panoramic view of the online world and social media beyond Facebook. This should be mandatory for anyone in congress who is less interested in ego and politics and actually wants to make a difference in the world. Social media is not a bad thing. But bad actors have mastered it beyond our current controls.

must read

if you are still on Facebook, you need to read this book. even if you are not convinced to get off, you will never see it the same again.

Great quotes and real challenge to the norm

All in all I consider this book to be one of the best self-defense tools against the ignorance of the new technologies that surround us. Only comparable in that category to "Trust me, I'm lying", and I hold that book also on really high regard.
In general I didn't like the narration so much. The tone sounds often more lecturing than narrating. However, I really enjoyed listening to the author's story, told by himself. It was really fascinating, engaging and different.
The convenience of the social networks, like many others, has become a dependency. Now we are entering in the abusive relationship part, and we have to open our eyes to that.