New Book: How Roger McNamee Woke Up To Facebook's Existential Threat To Our Society And Set Out To Try To Stop It
Roger McNamee's new book Zucked: The Education Of An Unlikely Activist is the story of how he, a noted tech
venture capitalist and 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.
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Roger McNamee photographed recently at the Haight Street Art Center |
Roger McNamee's new book, Zucked: The Education Of An Unlikely Activist is now available on the Penguin Random House website for pre-order. It will be published in hardcover and Kindle on 5 February, 2019, and from the synopsis below, looks to be a 352 page-turner!
The backstory to the book
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.
This book is Roger's’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 Roger’s shock, even still
Facebook’s leaders duck and dissemble, viewing the matter as a public relations
problem. Now thoroughly alienated, Roger 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.
This book 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.
About the author
Roger McNamee began his career in 1982 at T. Rowe Price
Associates, where he managed the top performing Science & Technology Fund
and co-managed their New Horizons Fund. In 1991, he launched Integral Capital
Partners, the first crossover fund (combining later stage venture capital with
public market investments), in partnership with Kleiner Perkins Caufield &
Byers and Morgan Stanley & Co. In 1999, Roger co-founded Silver Lake
Partners, the first private equity fund focused on technology businesses. In
2004, Roger and his partners launched Elevation Partners, an investment
partnership focused on the intersection of media/entertainment content and
consumer technology.
Also known as the "Wizard of Sand Road," Roger performs up to 100 concerts a year in the bands
Moonalice and Doobie Decibel System, in which he plays bass and guitar.
Moonalice pioneered the use of social media in music, inventing such
applications as Twittercast concerts, Moonalice Radio on Twitter and Facebook, live
Moontunes video streams of concerts, and the Moonalice Couch Tour. The band’s
website enables fans to listen to any song or show and to watch every concert
on a computer or smartphone without an app. Moonalice is renowned for the
quality of poster art associated with the band. The Moonalice series exceeds
1,000 posters after ten years. Moonalice’s single “It’s 420 Somewhere” has been
downloaded more than 4.6 million times.
A voracious reader of both fiction and non-fiction, Roger is the author of The New Normal, published in 2004 by
the Portfolio imprint of Penguin Books, and The Moonalice Legend: Posters andWords, Volumes 1-7. He has served as a technical adviser for seasons two, three
and four of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” series.
In philanthropy, Roger is a co-founder of the Haight StreetArt Center that is changing the name of the game for poster artists, and the Center for Counterculture Studies. He also serves on the
board of directors for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum. Roger is a past
member of boards of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, Bryn Mawr
College, The GRAMMY Foundation, and the operating business of the National
Geographic Society. He was also responsible for raising the money that created
the Wikimedia Foundation.
Roger holds a B. A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. for
the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
Roger holds a U.S. patent related to MoonTunes and the live
broadcast of video to mobile devices.
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