Zucked : waking up to the Facebook catastrophe Roger McNamee

Includes bibliographical references (pages [313]-320) and index.

"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 no longer could. Zucked is McNamee's insider 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 has empowered some very bad actors. Then, even more unsettling, he finds that Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are politely unwilling to share his concerns. And then comes the election of Donald Trump and a parade of horrific news about Facebook's role in the 201 election. To McNamee's shock, Facebook's leaders continue to duck and dissemble, viewing the matter as a public relations problem. Now thoroughly alienated, McNamee digs into the issue. 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, more broadly, the persuasion architecture of the attention economy--to our public health and to our political order. Zucked is both an enthralling personal narrative and a larger tale of an unmoored business sector inadvertently creating a political and cultural crisis with new tools that summon the darker angels of our nature. 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."--Dust jacket.