Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
Published by Penguin Random House Audio
4.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
The 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 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.
Related to Zucked
Related audiobooks
Big Tech Tyrants: How Silicon Valley's Stealth Practices Addict Teens, Silence Speech and Steal Your Privacy Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Chaos Monkeys Revised Edition: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Hit a Curveball: Confront and Overcome the Unexpected in Business Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsYou Only Have to Be Right Once: The Unprecedented Rise of the Instant Tech Billionaires Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The New Articulate Executive: Look, Act and Sound Like a Leader Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Metaversed Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5No Point B: Rules for Leading Change in the New Hyper-Connected, Radically Conscious Economy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Tyranny of Big Tech Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Burn Book: A Tech Love Story Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Zombie Banks: How Broken Banks and Debtor Nations Are Crippling the Global Economy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSummary of Max Fisher's The Chaos Machine Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMessage Not Received: Why Business Communication Is Broken and How to Fix It Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGeek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Time Trap 4th Edition: The Classic Book on Time Management Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Digital Revolution: Unveiling the Impact of Social Media on Our World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStep into the Metaverse: How the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion-Dollar Social Economy Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Nothing But Net: 10 Timeless Stock-Picking Lessons from One of Wall Street's Top Tech Analysts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fearless and Free: How Smart Women Pivot--and Relaunch Their Careers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Harder Than I Thought: Adventures of a 21st Century CEO Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsInvesting With Impact: Why Finance is a Force for Good Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Rebel Leadership: How to Thrive in Uncertain Times Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Technology & Engineering For You
Elon Musk Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World from Cybercrime Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Design of Everyday Things Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-made World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Future of Geography: How the Competition in Space Will Change Our World Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Smart Phone Dumb Phone: Free Yourself from Digital Addiction Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The End of the River Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies that Delivered the Opioid Epidemic Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Path Between the Seas Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Reviews for Zucked
14 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is the siren call to action. McNamee details in exquisite detail all of the transgressions and pitfalls of social media (Facebook in particular) and the connected lifestyle in exquisite detail. Everyone should read this book to appreciate how they are being used by tech companies and to understand how their rights are being violated.