Ebook Zucked Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe Audible Audio Edition Roger McNamee Penguin Audio Books
Download As PDF : Zucked Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe Audible Audio Edition Roger McNamee Penguin Audio Books
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.Â
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.Â
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.
Ebook Zucked Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe Audible Audio Edition Roger McNamee Penguin Audio Books
"I've been working in Silicon Valley for 30 years. I'm very cautious to listen to the rich elites like McNamee. McNamee makes a fortune on the shoulders of young, immature, arrogant kids like Zuckerberg. So should we now pat him on the back for acknowledging things went wrong. Facebook is Zuckerberg's first job. Zuckerberg had no industry experience prior. Zuckerberg became a billionaire at 23. Zuckerberg was known as essentially screwing over those who helped get him there. All of those things, and more, should have been cause for concern for the ethical future of any Facebook. Instead, however, investors on Sand Hill road just kissed his feet for a chance to make millions. And now we're supposed to buy their book about how Facebook and social media is bad and is destroying Democradcy? Where was McNamee 12 years ago when books like the Cult of the Amateur came out and laid out many cases for why social media wasn't great? I'll tell you where he was: getting sickly rich off of it. As such a guru and mentor to Zuckerberg, why didn't he drive the company the right direction? My guess, Zuck simply wouldn't listen and that hurt McNamee's ego and so now he's getting revenge by writing this book. Meanwhile, if McNamee had gotten out among the elder rank and file even 12 or 15 years ago you would have gleaned a lot more about the evils of social networking. In other words, the rich elites are out of touch and, as such, are surprised at what many much wiser industry alums had already predicted. Maybe McNamee should eat lunch with a veteran technical worker instead of his investor buddies once in a while."
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Zucked Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe Audible Audio Edition Roger McNamee Penguin Audio Books Reviews :
Zucked Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe Audible Audio Edition Roger McNamee Penguin Audio Books Reviews
- This is a comprehensive and disturbing overview of the pervasive harm caused by Facebook. Google and are mentioned in passing. Most of it deals with Facebook. After reading this, one is very well informed about the extensive methods and psychological tools used to create Facebook addiction, as well as, more generally, tools used for mass persuasion.
Unfortunately, the author's innate progressivism permeates. Throughout the book, the author repeatedly refers to 'hate speech', extremist views, and 'conspiracy theories'. As an example of the latter, he brings up Alex Jones and the site Infowars – but ignores or is ignorant of - the fact that much of Jones' content dealt with true examples of law enforcement abuses – exactly what Black Lives Matter (who he enthuses over repeatedly) was supposedly organized to fight. He calls for people with divergent views to 'talk' to each other – but progressives have demonized disagreement as 'hate speech' or 'gay bashing (same sex marriage), or 'denier ism (climate change), 'white privilege (financial success, ironically except for Zuckerberg, Bozos, etc). This worldview overlay dilutes the very real hazards of technology only an aggressive government regulatory response is his answer. Except for DuckDuckGo, which is a browser that doesn't track users, no private sector solutions are mentioned. Chapter 14, “What About Youâ€, is short on concrete steps individuals can take right now to protect themselves, and long on calls for 'public pressure' to force external action.
The author regurgitates every current progressive trope and buzzword Trump as the devil incarnate whom the Russians got elected, hate speech, conspiracy theories, government regulation as the only solution, inadequate public school spending responsible for disengaged adult citizens, the Democratic party as America's saviors, George Soros as a savior, and so on. Yet there's no mention of the progressive philosophies that underpin Facebook – collectivism and a belief in a higher-ordered visionary ruling elite. The capture of American education by tech companies which began in the 80's, is mentioned in passing.
Absent is any free market solution, except for generalized calls to encourage competition. Nor any solution other than government agencies tasked with micromanaging online content, what constitutes acceptable speech, and encouraging opposing views. He even calls for a click box labeled 'opposing views' for users to click on! Who would develop content for this is ignored. It is hard to imagine an NPR or MSNBC viewer seeking 'opposing' views. If they did so now, there wouldn't be the 'filter bubble' problem he repeatedly refers to. Why the assumption that 'hate' speech – which is dog-whistle speak for what the left opposes – must be censored? The author should be advocating for more openness, not less. Let all ideas be tested in the marketplace of ideas, as was basically the case for the past 200 years.
This book does an excellent job of laying out the problems caused by Facebook, but what could have been a wide-ranging examination of what is probably the biggest challenge to modern life is narrowed by the author's narrow worldview. By all means read it – but recognize the progressive proselytizing. - The first chapter almost discouraged me from reading more because of the author’s name dropping and shameless self-promotion of his band.
But I’m glad I kept reading. The book’s substance grows with each chapter, crescendoing into a convincing alarm for the survival of democracy.
The only post-Chapter-1 annoyances were the author’s admission after hundreds of pages that he still uses Facebook (probably for his band) and the perfunctory disclaimer so common among fellow Ivy Leaguers that Zuckerberg and other Facebook employees who repeatedly lied and violated user trust since the company’s inception “aren’t bad people,†just good people confused by narrow-minded business forces.
It’s time to redefine bad people as people who do bad things, even if that includes folk from the white and other-toned Ivy League chumocracy.
Zuckerberg repeatedly demonstrated sociopathy or psychopathy since his days at Harvard, and probably well before — qualities great for shareholder value. The author describes Zuck’s known transgressions in detail over and over. It shows how VC people turn a blind eye to unscrupulous behavior and assume good can come from evil then act surprised when a lizard matures into a dragon. To quote, Zuck, “Dumb f—s.†- I've been working in Silicon Valley for 30 years. I'm very cautious to listen to the rich elites like McNamee. McNamee makes a fortune on the shoulders of young, immature, arrogant kids like Zuckerberg. So should we now pat him on the back for acknowledging things went wrong. Facebook is Zuckerberg's first job. Zuckerberg had no industry experience prior. Zuckerberg became a billionaire at 23. Zuckerberg was known as essentially screwing over those who helped get him there. All of those things, and more, should have been cause for concern for the ethical future of any Facebook. Instead, however, investors on Sand Hill road just kissed his feet for a chance to make millions. And now we're supposed to buy their book about how Facebook and social media is bad and is destroying Democradcy? Where was McNamee 12 years ago when books like the Cult of the Amateur came out and laid out many cases for why social media wasn't great? I'll tell you where he was getting sickly rich off of it. As such a guru and mentor to Zuckerberg, why didn't he drive the company the right direction? My guess, Zuck simply wouldn't listen and that hurt McNamee's ego and so now he's getting revenge by writing this book. Meanwhile, if McNamee had gotten out among the elder rank and file even 12 or 15 years ago you would have gleaned a lot more about the evils of social networking. In other words, the rich elites are out of touch and, as such, are surprised at what many much wiser industry alums had already predicted. Maybe McNamee should eat lunch with a veteran technical worker instead of his investor buddies once in a while.
