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Roger McNamee

Zucked

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{"strong"=>["This is the dramatic story of how a noted tech venture capitalist, an early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and investor in his company, woke up to the serious damage Facebook was doing to our society and set out to try to stop it."]}
If you had told Roger McNamee three years ago that he would soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from destroying 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 Brexit and 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, Facebook's leaders still 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 travellers who share his concerns, 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, 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. This is a wise, hard-hitting, and urgently necessary account that crystallizes the issue definitively for the rest of us.
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403 printed pages
Publication year
2019
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Quotes

  • Masha Samartsavahas quoted4 years ago
    As I noted in chapter 3, one of the most manipulative reciprocity tricks played by Facebook relates to photo tagging. When users post a photo, Facebook offers an opportunity to tag friends—the message “[Friend] has tagged you in a photo” is an appealing form of validation—which initiates a cycle of reciprocity, with notifications to users who have been tagged and an invitation to tag other people in the photo. Tagging was a game changer for Facebook because photos are one of the main reasons users visit Facebook daily in the first place. Each tagged photo brings with it a huge trove of data and metadata about location, activity, and friends, all of which can be used to target ads more effectively. Thanks to photo tagging, users have built a giant database of photos for Facebook, complete with all the information necessary to monetize it effectively.
  • Masha Samartsavahas quoted4 years ago
    The persuasive technology tricks espoused by Fogg include several related to social psychology: a need for approval, a desire for reciprocity, and a fear of missing out. Everyone wants to feel approved of by others. We want our posts to be liked. We want people to respond to our texts, emails, tags, and shares. The need for social approval is what made Facebook’s Like button so powerful. By controlling how often a user experiences social approval, as evaluated by others, Facebook can get that user to do things that generate billions of dollars in economic value. This makes sense because the currency of Facebook is attention. Users manicure their image in the hope of impressing others, but they soon discover that the best way to get attention is through emotion and conflict. Want attention online? Say something outrageous. This phenomenon first emerged decades ago in online forums such as The WELL, which often devolved into mean-spirited confrontation and has reappeared in every generation of tech platform since then.

    Social approval has a twin: social reciprocity. When we do something for someone else, we expect them to respond in kind. Likewise, when a person does something for us, we feel obligated to reciprocate. When someone “follows” us on Instagram, we feel obligated to “follow” them in return. When we see an “Invitation to Connect” on LinkedIn from a friend, we may feel guilty if we do not reciprocate the gesture and accept it. It feels organic, but it is not. Millions of users reciprocate one another’s Likes and friend requests all day long, not aware that platforms orchestrate all of this behavior upstream, like a puppet master.
  • Masha Samartsavahas quoted4 years ago
    Notifications are another way that platforms exploit the weakest elements of human psychology. Notifications exploit an old sales technique, called the “foot in the door” strategy, that lures the prospect with an action that appears to be low cost but sets in motion a process that leads to bigger costs. Who wouldn’t want to know they have just received an email, text, friend request, or Like? As humans, we are not good at forecasting the true cost of engaging with a foot-in-the-door strategy. Worse yet, we behave as though notifications are personal to us, completely missing that they are automatically generated, often by an algorithm tied to an artificial intelligence that has concluded that the notification is just the thing to provoke an action that will serve the platform’s economic interests.

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