Joining the stream of books critical of the digital industry, Zucked is the reflection of a man personally disappointed. Roger McNamee was, as he reminds us several times, a mentor to Mark Zuckerberg and an investor in Facebook. He sounds hurt that his warnings were ignored about “bad actors” who exploited “Facebook’s architecture and business model to inflict harm on innocent people.” It took a while before McNamee’s techno-utopianism faded to dismay over the downside after billions of users embraced surveillance in the name of convenience.
As McNamee puts it, the smartphone has proven smarter than its users for exploiting “the weakest links in human psychology to create dependence and behavior addiction.” McNamee is right to worry that democracy and even the ability to think are being compromised. Solutions? He urges us to “leave our digital cocoon” and interact with real people, not Alexa, as the techno-web tightens around us. McNamee cites the campaign against smoking as a model for breaking addictive techno-behavior. Can it work? Is McNamee still a man with dreams?
